Creativity
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 eight
The source material this week was focused on creativity. At first glance I thought the subject would not benefit my current concern which is consumed with fleshing out the viability and monetisation strategy for my Escape Room application. However on consuming the What is Creativity video on Canvas, I was pleasantly surprised by how relevant and useful this content was in steering me toward a more considered solution.
In particular the introduction to the term ‘stickiness’, the term used to define something about an application that encourages a user to stay longer or return, and how this can be driven by what Professor Tanya Krzywinska refers to as ‘Soap Opera Tactics’ being the way you can build stickiness into your app and use creative processes in order to achieve this, followed by the expansion of hook tactics and hook structures that are built into an application to keep an audience interested and willing to subscribe over time was insightful.
Though designing and implementing hooks to keep users interested or draw users back to an application is not new to me, my experience for quite some time has been more tech and management focused so I’ve not been directly involved with devising the strategy for a while and in the case of my own applications I must admit that I’ve not considered the hook strategy in anywhere near as much depth as is required. This could be yet another reason why historically my apps have not achieved the success I’d hoped for. I’ve learned this week that to remedy this my hooks should be driven by a much deeper understanding of the apps intended audience and that the hook strategy is tightly coupled with the monetisation strategy and that the two should in fact be designed together.
- Definition of ‘stickiness’ taken from the TechTarget definition of stickiness.
Tying this to my project
Prior to reading this weeks content, I had decided that my monetisation strategy for the Escape Room application should be based on having a paywall and that the wall is applied at point of adding a room. So users can find and play rooms for free but businesses must subscribe to add their rooms to the app. As a value proposition this works as I would only need to subscribe 1% of the rooms in the UK and US alone (roughly 20,550 rooms) and charge them a very affordable business cost, almost negligible (say less than £1.00 / month) which would be viable as a business.
Note: The subscription cost above needs more evaluation. This will be considered in more depth once I have gauged the interest in the application from escape room businesses and sought information via my audience research outlined in this post.
This strategy also works well from a marketing point of view because the businesses are pushing the application onto the players to improve their experience. However, this approach rests heavily on one very important factor and this is that the accompanying experience offered to the player by having the app installed must greatly enhance the current analogue experience otherwise the rooms will not be prepared to pay for the subscription.
This is where understanding the audience and creating stickiness with hooks will really bring benefit and (hopefully) drive subscriptions. This AppPartner article titled The secret to mobile app stickiness presents some basic ways to achieve stickiness and dictates from the outset that it requires a deep understanding of the end user and the way they interact with the app. As I touched on above, the SMART action in this post will help me to understand the audience and as a follow up to this I’ve created the following SMART action to derive my strategy to identify the features and hooks to achieve stickiness:
- Making it Specific: The goal is to identify features and hooks to achieve stickiness within my Escape Room application
- Making it Measurable: From my audience research I want to identify one or more compelling drivers for players to use the application and devise one or more features and / or hooks to support each driver
- Making it Attainable: I want to achieve this over one week
- Making it Relevant: The features and hooks will be applied to the Escape Room application
- Making it Time-Based: I will spread this task over three sessions held on consecutive days, the first will be to identify the drivers, the second to brainstorm features and hooks and the third to refine these after gestation
Summary
In the above post I’ve talked briefly about my past experience with using hooks to create stickiness but identified that my approach thus far within my own apps has not been well enough considered. I’ve then gone on to read more about stickiness and better understand ways in which to achieve this within my applications. Finally I’ve created a SMART action to hone my strategy for achieving stickiness in my Escape Room application that will be conducted after I’ve completed the previous action to better understand my audience.