Mother London | SFTW | The Designing Apps Issue

The Designing Apps Issue

19.04.2012

Guest
Editor

By mills of ustwo™, the UI/UX studio

ustwo™ have made their name as one of London’s leading UI/UX studios in recent years. In this issue, their head-honcho or their CHIEF WONKA™ as he’s otherwise known, mills, shares some of their experiences on what’s worked and even what hasn’t, in a mini-guide to developing apps. We learn all about Succailure™, how we should focus on products not gimmicks, and that you’ll never know where collaboration will lead. Get your app on!

Products not gimmicks

Luckily for all of us, mobiles are capable of doing so much more than they once were; we’ve come a long way from the preloaded calculator and snake game.The modern day combination of processing power, uninterrupted Internet connection and awareness of context means apps have now become a means of extending a brand’s role into a customer’s day-to-day life. Apps are now what websites were back in 2000: everyone wants a slice. They’re the must-have accessory,and one which brands are prepared to spend tens of thousands on just to have a “presence” in the mobile world.

But for every well thought-through app idea, there are at least a dozen gimmicks with a tenuous link back to the brand. Carling’s iPint was probably the most famous of the latter and is credited for kicking off the gimmicky branded-app trend. Here at ustwo™, we’ve had lots of requests for these since, and we’ve even created our very own too. Mouth Off™ went viral and was one of our most successful gimmicks. We even ended up making special Ben 10 versions of it with The Cartoon Network.

Yet we all know that one or two hit wonders aren’t the future of apps.The focus should instead be upon taking a user-centric approach to apps; on making sure they offer genuine utility to all, rather than deliver short-lived relevance purely as an extension of a marketing campaign. The end goal should always be “stickiness” – or in other words, the metric that measures how frequently users return to the app.
A word or two of advice: if you’re thinking of developing or commissioning an app, work closely with the businesses and the customers you want to reach, and make sure you use these devices as a platform to build products on — products capable of truly engaging customers for much longer than a minute-long giggle.

Embrace Succailure™

Mark my words… selling a 69p app direct to consumers is in many ways more challenging than selling to the clients on your books. Conceiving and creating a successful app and then bringing it to life and into the users’ hands isn’t easy. The process has cost us financially but rather than wallow in past losses, we’ve taken a neologic view and coined a term for the art of failing successfully – Succailure™.

To give you an indication of what’s at stake in the app world, for a studio like ours to design, build and market our latest game Whale Trail for iOS and Android has cost us £250,000. A great sum invested with no guarantee we’ll ever see that money back. It’s been five months since launch and we’ve made about £85,000 so far, failing to recoup costs. Unfortunately, this is not the first time our hopes of creating a successful app have failed to deliver their promised return on investment.

But, over the last three years, with each and every app we’ve launched, we’ve developed our own skill base, our brand and our business as a whole. App development is not only about the creation of intellectual property that could one day make significant returns, but also a very unique way of marketing a company.

So if you are going to step into the app game, it’s about time you embraced Succailure™.

Style over substance

When we first started developing apps we set ourselves a simple task; ‘to create something cool and addictive that showcases quick thinking’. We also set ourselves the goal of producing an app and sending it to Apple in a two-day period.The outcome was .™ - the world’s first 48-hour gaming app concept. A beautiful looking game that simply uses iPhone’s accelerometer; players need to balance a ball collecting blue circles, all the while avoiding the dangerous looking triangle, otherwise the ball disappears and it’s game over. The more circles you collect the better. It’s simple but addictive.

We decided to keep our marketing just as simple. A month before launch we ran a 'Have you seen the .™?' campaign via a Flickr group. We also seeded two high-end teaser videos, which were about mood, setting the story and building a brand around the lonely .™ character.

Then on D-Day we made sure we made a big impact, spreading the word through our press contacts, with loads of fresh images of the app in action and making sure we drove everyone to our viral vids. We then tweeted, blogged and attempted to hit as many contacts as possible. We also ran a number of banner ads on various iPhone review sites - allowing readers to play an online Flash version of the game on the banner ad itself.

But - and this is a big but - we hadn't factored in one seemingly small detail. As a search term on the App Store .™ was impossible to find. We had created the world's first non-searchable app.

.™ became exclusively elusive - a unique selling point that we still shout about today. We’ve since made ..™ (Dot2), …™ (Dot3) and …..™ (Dot5), and the series has been downloaded a total of 400,000 times.

Proof that just sometimes style over substance can indeed prevail.

The journey is the reward

Granimator™ was developed in early 2010 and released in April of that year to coincide with the UK launch of the iPad. It enables iPad users to create wallpapers they can share via social media and the online gallery at www.granimator.com.

Our vision was to showcase the best creative talent on a platform developed purely to inspire and enable creativity in new users. Our goal was simply to create something unique and creative; at no point at the beginning of this process did we ever imagine the journey it would take us on.

Now two years on, Granimator™ has grown beyond belief, surpassing all of our expectations. With almost 100 artist packs, it’ll never be mainstream, but for those who know and love it, it’s an exceptional creative platform offering a huge volume of quality content for free.

We’ve worked with some of the world’s best; from our idols to our favourite brands and music artists. Granimator™ has been used in exhibition spaces by the V&A and onedotzero; we’ve even collaborated with Creative Review, IdN, It’s Nice That and GASBOOK to co-curate their own sets of packs.
Along the way, Granimator™ has showcased not only the most renowned artists and studios, but also up-and-coming student designers. It’s taken us around the world on an incredible journey.

You could say Granimator™ taught us that success isn’t always hundreds and thousands of downloads, it’s the journey you go on. It also taught us one of the most important lessons of all; if you believe in your app, just get it out there, however simple or however niche it might be

Until you put it out into the world, you’ll never know where it might take you, nor be able to anticipate the potential value it could bring.

Multi-discipline authors

In September 2011, we launched an iPad reading app called PAPERCUT. It was our attempt to augment what books couldn’t do through utilising what tablets could. PAPERCUT struck a chord with the industry and we soon reached number one in the UK iPad book charts.
PAPERCUT offers an immersive user experience bringing readers deeper into a story. All good so far. But we faced a big problem with it; the user experience wasn’t cost effective to produce.
Traditionally, the authorship of a book resides with the writer and editor, but with PAPERCUT, this expanded to include developers, designers, videographers and sound designers—all of which led to each title being increasingly labour-intensive.

Our app looked increasingly like a concept that should have remained just that. But in the spirit of Succailure™, we would say that it’s only by putting these products out there that industry-wide knowledge, experience and lessons can be gained and shared.

In spite of all this, we don’t believe all is lost for this new form of publishing. We’ll no doubt see a new generation of authors emerge and herald the new ear of publishing. Authors who are as well-versed in video and audio design as they are in constructing a story.
Combining this new generation of multi-skilled creatives with tools like Apple’s iBook Author, we’ll see new authors telling stories that are as rich and immersive as what we hoped for with PAPERCUT. There might just lie the publishing world’s future commercial and cultural success.

About the Author

mills co-founded ustwo™ back in 2004 with business partner sinx. The aim was to build a studio where like-minded creatives could share unique ideas and bring them to life. As ustwo's CHIEF WONKA™, mills literally lives and breathes mobile as the self proclaimed King of Succailure™. He has launched creative apps which have sold globally in their hundreds. If you’re interested in the truth then follow @millsustwo. If not, follow him anyway.

Credits

All images courtesy of ustwo™ studio