How millions of applications are made: Based on products and promotions

Since the launch of APP Store by Qiao bangzhu to build a circular ecosystem, the mobile Internet industry has become increasingly popular, spreading to China, and even affecting the development trend of the entire internet. It can be said that APP Store appeared in the first year of mobile Internet. In the past two years, mobile Internet has become the hottest term in the Internet industry. No matter whether you are an individual developer, a start-up company, or an Internet giant, you have developed mobile Internet products in various ways to find new blue ocean products. Last week, my friends in the industry recommended me to watch the movie "how millions of applications are made" in geek Park, which is quite infected and deeply inspired, at the same time, I will write this article based on the experiences of my predecessors and my own experiences, hoping that you will benefit from watching it.

How are millions of applications made? As for the current stage of mobile Internet products, the emergence of a million-level application comes from the following two aspects:

1. The cornerstone of success-Products

I have always believed in the phrase "product is awesome, promotion is awesome". The birth of a million-level application must be because the application itself is outstanding, and promotion is just a good thing. So how can it be regarded as a good product? In summary, there are six words: positioning, quality, and experience.

1.1 product positioning comes from the company's strategy and user needs

From the perspective of the company's strategy

At present, mobile Internet products can be roughly divided into three types: one is the supplement of the web end. This kind of product is designed to spread its products to the mobile Internet field and is a supplement to the web end. For applications such as Netease news client, mobile QQ client, and mobile phone fanke, their traffic does not exceed the web traffic. Their users come from their original web users. Second, it is a natural web product that is more suitable for mobile Internet. The original development intention of such products also comes from complementing the web end and importing the accumulated local resources of the web end into the Mobile End. However, with the development of mobile Internet products, the APP traffic exceeds the web traffic, and the company began to invest more resources in mobile Internet products, such as the Public Comment client, people naturally like to use their cell phones to search for food and comments, and even use their cell phones to share their moments. Third, pure mobile Internet products. There are too many such products, such as Talk box and rice chat. This strategic difference comes from your understanding of the mobile Internet, that is, mobile phones. On the PC side, people will always sit, and the user environment they face will remain unchanged and have a strong continuity. Therefore, you will see users stay on a website for an hour. However, mobile Internet is different. Mobile phones are naturally closer to people and more interactions with people. At the same time, on the mobile Internet side, the human environment changes dramatically, and the user scenario is short-lived and cannot be sustained.

Product requirements

An application must be developed to solve user problems, but the user requirements that the product expects do not necessarily conform to the real environment. Before development, are you sure the preset user requirements are real requirements? You must find a user scenario for your product, and then find real users to test your product based on the user scenario. However, as far as the engine of mobile Internet products is turned on, the original intention of many product development comes from developers' own needs, such as mobile phone lighting applications, such as pods. It is undeniable that your own needs are a user scenario, but before deciding to develop a product, you still need to do some user demand research to confirm that this requirement is what the user needs.

In addition to functional requirements, non-functional requirements are also very important. Non-functional requirements can be summarized as "light product, fast speed, good content, and low traffic. Sometimes, the birth of a million-level application is not necessarily an innovative product. Another possibility is "micro-innovation", that is, while meeting user needs, it is also a victory to make it easier to use than similar products. The Red Ocean market represents fierce competition, but it also implies a large number of target users. On the contrary, the blue ocean in the mobile Internet industry is not necessarily better, first, the user requirements that your product meets may be unpopular and remote. Second, it will be more difficult to promote than other popular applications, because you need to cultivate your own user habits.

However, in any case, the product positioning depends on the user scenario. If your product cannot play a role in the user scenario, then your product can only be uninstalled.

1.2 product quality comes from technical implementation capabilities

Product quality is the basis for product experience. good quality products do not necessarily bring a good product experience, but a product with poor quality will not bring a good product experience. This is a bit of a detour, but what is the product quality? Different from the visible product experience, product quality refers to the internal programming logic of the product, that is, the bug. At present, most mobile Internet products are still in the initial stage. When many user needs are not fully met, the agile development method is used to launch a mobile application with full bugs, take the lead in the market, and then solve bugs Through quick version change to improve the product experience.

It is true that agile development plays an irreplaceable role in this still unsaturated mobile Internet industry. However, as more and more enterprises devote themselves to the mobile Internet, the first impression of products is very important to users at the speed of launching more than a dozen applications every day, agile development does not mean giving users a product with bugs.

So where does the product quality come from? To put it bluntly, it is the technical implementation capability. Mobile Internet products with more features and more complex processes test developers' technical implementation capabilities. In particular, mobile Internet products only display 3.5 inch of the interfaces in front of users. How to Implement mobile Internet products in such a small screen is a test of developers' abilities and experience. Because mobile Internet is a new industry that has only emerged in recent years, most IOS development engineers or Android engineers have less than five years of development experience, generally, developers have a good experience in mobile Internet product development for one year. Because developers lack development experience, the first version of many mobile Internet products (Public Beta version) often has many serious bugs. Here, I have summarized the two most intolerable bugs, hoping to remind some engineers who have just entered the mobile Internet. You are also welcome to add:

1. The product is automatically disabled without reason, that is, the product stability. This BUG often occurs in mobile apps that require online operations. Many mobile apps do not load application protection mechanisms. When the network is poor, applications cannot report data in a timely manner, when the user performs another operation, it will cause a conflict and will be automatically disabled.

2. Various installation failures occur during application installation. This problem occurs in my APP "friend tour scenery-travel strategy" for Android beta version. Because our APP is a tour guide service, google Maps must be installed simultaneously. Because of mainland China's castrated problem, the licensed machine must crack the ROOT to use google Maps, so we made a version of "friend tour scenery-travel strategy" based on AMAP ". However, during the internal test, we encountered an installation error when using the licensed machine to install the google map version, but did not prompt the user to download the AMAP version. If it is released as a public beta version, there will certainly be many problems. This problem is especially common in Android applications with a large number of versions and models.

3. Wait for your attention.

1.3 product experience comes from clear page layout and excellent interaction design

Page Layout

The layout structure of mobile products must be clear. A clear layout structure is a basic requirement on whether an application is available. The functional layout is layered, allowing new users to quickly grasp the functional layout of the application through low-cost learning, able to complete the tasks in a short time.

In the web page layout design, users usually control the computer by using the mouse, hand control of the Screen Pointer, move to a certain position, click, double-click, drag and other operations to complete the operation. We see the screen and the mouse. Our visual focus is the screen, and the focus of operations is the mouse. Different types of visual focus and Operation Focus. Therefore, we need to consider how to make the page layout more reasonable and beautiful, so that users can reduce more trouble in the operation process, that is, the combination of appearance and operability, make the necessary mouse movement path as short as possible for all operations to be completed by the user.

However, the mobile terminal uses the touch method, and the visual focus and Operation Focus are already the same point, making it easy for users to learn to use such devices, but the two points are the same, the Operation also blocks the focus. Therefore, you must consider the operation characteristics of the touch screen in the page layout to make the layout more reasonable.

(1) consider the touch operation method-taking "A photo software" as an Example

We use circles to represent blocked areas. The green area is a safe area, which means that we psychologically think it can be accurate. The yellow area indicates that we are psychologically uneasy, you cannot determine whether the region in the vertex can be located. For example, the design of a photo software:

If it is a Web page, there is no visual problem. However, because the visual focus is the same as the Operation Focus, it becomes very difficult and tense to click Modify. Besides, there is a delete button next to it. Therefore, from such a simple button placement to the layout of the entire product application page, more reasonable operations need to be considered to facilitate user operations.

(2) Considering the operating features of different platforms -- Taking "QQ mobile phone token 2.0" as an Example

The "Settings" button of the iPhone "mobile phone token" is clear at a glance, that is, click it, and the page is flipped to the back for setting; For the Android version "mobile phone token ", you must make full use of the physical buttons "menu" and "return" to make the Android page more concise:

In this way, we can design product pages and function la s more rationally based on the operating features of different platforms.