Should There Be an App for That?

With the Tablet wars heating up and smartphone sales skyrocketing, at some point, the thought is bound to cross your mind: Is it time to create an app?

The lure of being with your customers everywhere they go and being readily accessible with the tap of a finger is certainly hard to resist. With over 350,000 iOS apps in Apple’s App Store and over 200,0000 apps in Google’s Android Market, it’s clear that many companies have eagerly climbed aboard the app development bandwagon.

Thanks to a proliferation of DIY app templates, entry barriers in the app marketplace are not as steep as they once were.

But you can’t simply judge the merits of creating an app as you would any other marketing tactic. Instead, it would help if you looked at your potential app as a product in and of itself.

You wouldn’t put time and money into developing a product without a reasonable confidence that a market exists. The same goes for an app. You can build it. You can get it into the app store. But if it’s not something people want, your efforts will be for naught.

Your app must meet these eight basic criteria, or else it’s not worth the investment:

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1. It must be designed around business growth objectives.

To justify the necessary investment, your app must promote your business’s growth, whether by making it easier for your customers to buy from you or keeping your brand at the forefront of their awareness.

Plenty of big names have created vanity apps that don’t serve a business growth function, but that’s not a luxury the average company can afford. For example, Mercedes offers an iPad game called SLS AMG HD that allows users to test their driving skills through tunnel challenges.

Sure, it’s a slick-looking gimmick. But is it doing anything to improve the company’s bottom line? Does anyone inclined to buy a Mercedes need an iPad racing game to tip them over the edge?

An app in and of itself is not a marketing campaign. If your goal is to boost your brand’s visibility, creating an app is a very indirect and costly means to reach your desired end.

Remember that you’ll compete with hundreds of thousands of other apps to be discovered by smartphone users. Your chances of creating something so new, different, and out-of-the-box that it will go viral and jump to the top of the download charts are slim to none.

Moreover, even the number of downloads your app gets is no guarantee of your customers’ ongoing exposure. According to a recent study, as many as twenty-six percent of apps are opened only once after download.

With odds like that, if your sole purpose is elevating your brand’s visibility, there is no shortage of other tactics – from SEO to pay-per-click advertising to social media-based PR campaigns – that will likely deliver a better ROI.

2. Its utility must be customer-driven.

No matter what, your app development process shouldn’t be an exercise in ego-stroking. Forget what you think is cool or cutting-edge, and look at your app through your customers’ eyes.

For your app to be successful, it needs to offer something people want, whether in the form of utility, convenience, content, or all of the above.

For the most part, your customers use their mobile devices for productivity and entertainment.

If you want to create an app that entertains, be prepared to bring the big guns because you’re competing in a space with the heavy hitters, from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to a slew of professional game developers.

The productivity space is easier to enter, but conquering it is still no easy feat. A useful productivity-oriented app must make it easy for your customers to accomplish the types of tasks they commonly perform while on the go.

If your app is content-driven, it must be encyclopedia-worthy to warrant a spot on your customer’s mobile device’s reference shelf. It must be comprehensive and updated frequently, and its interface must be ultra-searchable and scannable.

Whole Foods offers a great content-based app. Users can search its extensive library of recipes by keyword, input ingredients they have on hand to get suggestions and create shopping lists on the fly. Search results are classified by dietary preference, such as gluten-free or low-fat.

This type of utility aligns squarely with Whole Foods’ target market. Undoubtedly, their app is the go-to resource for many health-conscious, time-strapped working parents who leave the office with no idea what they will make for dinner when they get home.

3. It must offer an optimal balance of usefulness and simplicity.

Your app should not attempt to be all things to all potential users, or it will fail.

Likewise, it also shouldn’t simply be a mirror of your website’s features. If that’s your plan, you’ll be better served by optimizing your site for mobile browsers.

Generally speaking, the more features you try to cram into an app, the less intuitive it becomes.

And as hard as it may be to imagine, app users are even less patient and more fickle than Web surfers. If your app is difficult to figure out or frustrating, they’ll wipe you from their phone with a second thought. Therefore, it’s critical that your app’s purpose is clearly defined and that its functionality is streamlined.

The FedEx Mobile for iPhone app perfectly exemplifies this balance of utility and simplicity. FedEx is a massive global corporation that offers a broad array of services to a highly diverse customer base.

Its app, however, is limited to four main functions: obtaining a quote, creating a shipping label, tracking a package, and finding a location – exactly the type of time-sensitive features you need at the ready when you’re trying to get that all-important document out in tonight’s shipment or awaiting an important delivery.

4. It must be mobility-oriented.

Some tasks people like to do on their phones, and some do not.

Any task that involves too many steps and is not urgent is not going to be something your customers would choose to do on their phone rather than just waiting until they are in front of their computer screen again.

5. It must take advantage of the mobile device‘s unique features.

Mobile devices have several built-in features that even many laptops don’t necessarily have, such as GPS, the ability to deliver push notifications, a camera, and a video camera. Suppose you don’t plan to tie your app’s utility to any of these functions. In that case, it’s hard to justify creating a dedicated mobile app rather than just enhancing your site to provide an optimal experience for mobile users.

Amazon’s Price Check is a great example of an app that uses the phone’s camera function to allow users to scan barcodes and compare prices on the go.

GPS is a little more tricky to use wisely. Many branded apps – from Gap’s StyleMixer to USPS Mobile – use GPS to allow users to find their closest brick-and-mortar location. It’s a nice convenience for users already plugged into the app as an auxiliary feature. Still, this type of function is not enough to justify an app’s existence in and of itself, as plenty of other mapping and searching apps can deliver the same information with broader utility.

Also, it would help if you weighed the pros and cons of integrating push notifications carefully. If you can provide legitimate value to your customers with timely alerts. But if you cross the line into intrusiveness, you just ask to be deleted.