Four circles of app

At the end of 2015, I met a startup founder at a conference. We started talking about design, the market, and his app. He was feeling quite proud of his idea, and I was going with the flow. I asked him how often people use his app, to which he said, “oh, we have 50 thousand+ downloads”. I was impressed, but curious as well. So I asked him where exactly it fits. He automatically started talking about the market. That prompted me to ask him how long do you think shelf life is? “Hmmm. No idea, but we do have a good roadmap.”, he said rather confidently.

We parted ways with me saying, “That’s cool, good luck!”

Quite an interesting guy. In mid-2017, they shut down operations. Don’t know why. When I asked him how often people use the app and where it fits, I guess he couldn’t relate to what I was asking.

The smartphone market is growing, and with it, so is the app market in India. According to Statista, as of 2018, India has around 339.95 million smartphones which will reach 442.5 million by 2022. As of January 2017, 2.2 million mobile apps were available to download on App store, and by December 2017, there were 3.5 million apps in the Google Play Store.

As the number of apps is increasing, a lot of companies seems to be striving hard to catch up, but are missing the underlying thought process.

“Every time you see an app, the question should be where it fits”

I have been pondering this for quite a long time — most of the time we end up installing so many apps on our phone, but how many we do we use? How long is the shelf life of those apps? Where does it fit?

I’ve begun to believe, based on my recent research, that there are four circles of apps on our phone and every app fits in one of these. The circle is not folder which we create on the phone, but a virtual one based on usage patterns.

Daily: apps which we use every day. These apps become of more of a need over time.

Weekly: apps which we use weekly.

Monthly: apps which we use periodically. It’s interesting that we don’t uninstall them, but we do visit those apps once or twice in a month. 

Crowd: every app which we install lands into the crowd circle. It’s the starting point for the app to land into the other three eventually. (I would like to exclude banking apps here because those are more of a need, but we generally don’t visit them daily.)

The question then is — how do these apps move from the crowd circle to other three?

Being an experience designer, I meet a lot of clients, and one thing is quite common. If the adoption rate is low, they think that a redesign will solve that problem. My answer to them is it has the potential to but might not solve the problem a 100%. Why? Because the design is incomplete without a good product, data, and tech strategy.

I feel that it’s like this watch where every wheel has a vital role to play.

Product & Design: I don’t think I need to explain the importance of this. We all know the value of good experience :)

Data: I saw somewhere it said, “Consumer engagement begins and ends with personalized communication.” It is the future, and that future is right around the corner.

Tech: We all know the how much we hate the loading spinner :)

One of my favorite examples is Ryanair.com & Swiggy. It’s perfectly balanced. The best part about Ryanair is that on the search results page if you change date/time, it shows you data without taking much time which is precisely the opposite of what we see on other airlines website.

The safest or I would say happiest for any company will be for their app to fall in the daily/weekly circle.

I would like to suggest a small 2 min exercise here.

Just follow these steps:

1. Take your phone.

2. Count how many 3rd party apps you have on your phone.

3. Put them into three circles (daily, weekly and monthly).

4. Sit back and think about 'why' they fit into the respective circles?

Feel free to write ‘why?’ in your comments here :)

Thank You!