Five Qualities of a Great iPhone App – Macworld UK

Build the best iPhone App

1. Give ‘Em a Reason

Many apps that didn’t get chosen made the mistake of being too narrowly focused, says Bill Westerman, principal and CTO of Create with Context, a design and research firm, and one of the judges in the Gap contest. They might have had shopping functionality or coupons or a store locator, but not a good combination of these features.

The bottom line is that they relied too heavily on consumer loyalty to the brand to draw people into an iPhone app, which leads to the question: For some retailers, should there even be an app for that? Other brands have shown success. “Some brands can leverage an iPhone app well,” says Krishna Subramanian, founder of Mobclix. “This year eBay made over $400 million off their iPhone app, and the app hasn’t even been out the entire year.”

Brand loyalty alone rarely drives people to download an iPhone app that clutters their screen and uses up memory. As you’ll see, the winning apps didn’t just peddle Gap products; rather, they provided a range of fun features and activities, from games to music videos to a virtual dressing room. The Gap brand almost seemed secondary.

2. One of 100,000

Can you hear the dull buzz? It’s the din of 100,000 iPhone apps. Grand prize winner Intuapp’s Gap app broke from the crowd by turning up the music, Westerman says, “and had a good visual design that reflected the Gap brand.”

Gap’s television commercials and stores are filled with music, and so Intuapp’s Gap app greets users with streaming music, giving you the feeling that you’re in the store. The app also makes it easy to browse clothes and play fun games, including a guess-the-price game for clothes. A new coupon regularly pops up.

“It’s important for developers to remember that you have to make sure someone is going to come back to the app multiple times,” Westerman says.

NEXT: Don’t go overboard

3. Don’t Go Overboard

When creating an iPhone app, developers face a tough dilemma: how far to stray from Apple’s user-interface guidelines.

If you follow the UI guidelines precisely, you’ll end up with an app that every iPhone owner will know how to use although it will be a very generic app–a death knell in the crowded App Store. If you take the other extreme and move too far from the UI guidelines, then users will struggle with understanding how the app works.

Westerman says many apps in the Gap contest fell on both sides. “We saw a lot of conformity with the UI, while others were so far afield from the UI conventions,” he says. “The apps that really did well [in the contest] were the ones that weren’t exactly based on the guidelines but close enough that you didn’t have to sit there and try to figure it out.”

4. Make It About Me

Consider the People’s Choice award winner, Infosys’ GAP4Me app, which provides a virtual dressing room. It uses a conventional UI feature of the iPod album cover flow. Instead of albums, though, users can easily slide through 30 or 40 shirts.

Best part about the app is that you can cut and paste clothes onto a picture of yourself (or anyone else) stored in the iPhone. You can try on different outfits, put clothes in a “trial pile,” and, later, select clothes to a cart and head to checkout.

“It’s a fun way of interacting with the clothes,” Westerman says. “It really touches on that basic human need of what this stuff looks like for me. It’s great to look at clothes online, but one of the things people always struggle with around e-commerce is figuring out how this particular product is relevant to me and my body or my lifestyle.”

NEXT: What’s My Reward

A new screen for the iPhone

5. What’s My Reward?

via macworld.co.uk

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