Types of app
The brief
Write a 250-300 word post noting your progress so far. Identify one challenge and / or an obstacle and one SMART action to resolve the issue.
My experience in week five
The source material over this week is focused on the different types of application and about the importance and relevance of market research. I found both areas to be very useful.
Different types of application
Though I already knew what types of application I want to create, I wasn’t perhaps aware of the exact terms by which they are identified. Knowing the common name for these categories will enable me to perform more focused market research and competitor analysis on my ideas. To clarify at this point and to tighten my description of the types of app I’m interested in creating that were first mentioned in this post, I can establish that I am most interested in creating Serious Games and Gamification applications with potential ties into eHealth / mHealth.
One issue that was highlighted this week while reading about Serious Games is that the Apple App Store acceptance criteria for this type of application is particularly rigid. Being that Serious Games are one of my favoured application types and iOS is the favourite of my two preferred target platforms, I need to have a thorough understanding of the criteria and be mindful of this when developing my ideas; I have created a one hour long diary entry next week to digest this criteria.
Market research
The source material related to market research over this week stands to affirm my already clear understanding of the importance of performing market validation on my application ideas before developing them. Though I was aware of a lot of the content and I have already been practicing most of the techniques raised, the material has helped me to refine my research into a more structured approach and has raised my awareness of a few new tips and techniques.
Based on the steps outlined in this video and on further research, I’ve created a basic process of validation that I will apply to all of my app ideas to decide whether they are worthy of exploration past the ideation stage:
- Who is the market: This is about identifying the market for an application type known as the market potential or the Total Addressable Market (TAM). A good place to start with this is to derive the number of users who are using the same type of application as my idea by looking at download statistics or checking related search terms on the Adwords Keyword Planner.
- How is the market segmented: This is about identifying the segments within a market. There are various ways to segment a market; for Business-to-business (B2B) products it’s common to segment into different types of business or country, for Business-to-consumer (B2C) products it’s typical to segment into demographic, lifestyle, behavioural or any other segment. For this I need to look at the entire market and derive how it could be segmented.
- Which market segments are most relevant to my application idea: This is about reviewing each of the segments identified above and judging which of the segmented user types are most likely to use my application.
- What are the demographic and technographic characteristics of the users in these segments: This is about identifying the demographic (age, race, religion, gender, family size, ethnicity, income, and education) and technographic (ownership, use patterns, and attitude toward information, communication and entertainment technology) characteristics of the users identified in each relevant segment to understand who my target market are and their needs.
- How are the needs of these segments currently being met: This refers to researching competitor applications to inform whether there are existing solutions the same or similar to my idea and how well these are satisfying the needs of each segmented user type. This can be achieved by reviewing all the respective app market places for the platforms I want to support; Apple’s App Store and Google Play in order to identify the same or similar apps as my idea and use analysis tools such as AppTrace to highlight the performance of these apps within the marketplace. Services such as Crunchbase can be used to see whether these apps raised funding and how much. LinkedIn can be used to gauge the size of an app by it’s number of employees. Finally by adopting competitor testing I can assess the competitor products through the eyes of the end user and identify whether there are issues that my app could improve.
I’ve created the following SMART action to perform the above process of validation for each of the stronger application ideas that I devise in my weekly ideation sessions mentioned in this post:
- Making it Specific: The goal is to validate the strongest idea from each ideation session
- Making it Measurable: I want to validate all six of the stronger ideas presented by the ideation sessions
- Making it Attainable: I want to spread this over six individual one hour long sessions and will schedule these sessions at the same time each week
- Making it Relevant: The session will be used to validate ideas before they are considered for development of both of my applications on the course
- Making it Time-Based: I want to achieve this in six weeks time
Note: From reading this week about various research techniques I realise that the above process only scratches the surface of the techniques available, and though this is ample in identifying whether an idea is worth taking to development, there is a requirement to research further alongside development and maintain a consistent feedback loop throughout the application release cycle to ensure that the end result is viable to a wider audience.
As well as constructing the above market validation process for my application ideas, I identified the power of market research in aiding ideation and I realised that reviewing trends can help to inspire new ideas. As a result of this I’ve now included checking apps in the top charts and top categories that interest me to see what problems other people’s app ideas are solving to my checklist of techniques to drive ideas in the weekly ideation sessions I’ve already mentioned.
Summary
In this post I’ve clarified the common names for the types of application that I am interested in creating. I’ve demonstrated my understanding of the importance of market research in creating successful applications, and acknowledged that research is not just required to validate an idea but should be performed throughout development to ever improve the application. Finally I’ve taken everything I’ve learned over the week and combined it with my prior research techniques to outline a process to test my application ideas for market viability that has then been used as the basis for a SMART action to ensure all of my application ideas are validated.