Focus on user experience
Our designer friends will say ‘duh, of course’ to this tip – but it’s not as obvious as it may seem. Notice it’s user experience rather than user interface. Hiring the best designer in the world to generate your app’s screens would be great – but having pixel-perfect design is not the solution. That would be the equivalent of jamming perfectly painted puzzle pieces together and hoping they fit. The same sentiment goes for perfect engineering; if you have the best and most clever code in the app store, it doesn’t necessarily translate into users.
Your app’s success is defined not only by your idea but also by how the user feels while they are using your app. Do the views flow well together? What is the user’s reaction when this button is pressed? How long does this action take? How can we speed it up? Where can we reduce the work required by the user? Can we use a gesture instead of adding a button? All of these tiny things can make the difference between good and bad user experience. It’s the attention to detail that helps apps stand above the rest.Take Instagram as an example. In a group of hundreds (if not thousands) of photo sharing apps, this is the one that shot to the top – doing so through pleasant interactions, smooth integration with social networks and a very fast user experience. Even though its feature set was not as useful as some of its competitors, it had fewer filters, it didn’t advertise, etc. users loved it. This was no fluke.