2. One of 100,000
Can you hear the dull buzz? It’s the din of 100,000 iPhone apps. Grand prize winner Intuapp’s Gap app broke from the crowd by turning up the music, Westerman says, “and had a good visual design that reflected the Gap brand.” Gap’s television commercials and stores are filled with music, and so Intuapp’s Gap app greets users with streaming music, giving you the feeling that you’re in the store. The app also makes it easy to browse clothes and play fun games, including a guess-the-price game for clothes. A new coupon regularly pops up. “It’s important for developers to remember that you have to make sure someone is going to come back to the app multiple times,” Westerman says.
guidelines but close enough that you didn’t have to sit there and try to figure it out.”
4. Make it about me
Consider the People’s Choice award winner, Infosys’ GAP4Me app, which provides a virtual dressing room. It uses a conventional UI feature of the iPod album cover flow. Instead of albums, though, users can easily slide through 30 or 40 shirts. Best part about the app is that you can cut and paste clothes onto a picture of yourself (or anyone else) stored in the iPhone. You can try on different outfits, put clothes in a “trial pile,” and, later, select clothes to a cart and head to checkout. “It’s a fun way of interacting with the clothes,” Westerman says. “It really touches on that basic human need of what this stuff looks like for me. It’s great to look at clothes online, but one of the things people always struggle with around e-commerce is figuring out how this particular product is relevant to me and my body or my lifestyle.”
5. What’s my reward?
3. Don’t go overboard
When creating an iPhone app, developers face a tough dilemma: how far to stray from Apple’s user-interface guidelines. If you follow the UI guidelines precisely, you’ll end up with an app that every iPhone owner will know how to use although it will be a very generic app—a death knell in the crowded App Store. If you take the other extreme and move too far from the UI guidelines, then users will struggle with understanding how the app works. Westerman says many apps in the Gap contest fell on both sides. “We saw a lot of conformity with the UI, while others were so far afield from the UI conventions,” he says. “The apps that really did well [in the contest] were the ones that weren’t exactly based on the
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Another important element in a good retail iPhone app is a reward, usually in the form of a special discount, to give users for interacting with the app. A good rule of thumb: the greater the interaction, the greater the reward. Second-place Mobiteris’ Dance Off app, for instance, asks a lot of its users. Gap television commercials are well-known for energetic people dancing and jumping around in Gap clothes. The message is that Gap is fun. Dance Off plays off of these commercials by letting users make videos of themselves dancing to similar music. The Dance Off app lets users find the nearest Gap store to try on clothes at the store. The app enables the iPhone to shoot a video of the user in Gap clothing dancing to music, which can later be downloaded to Facebook. The app contains the best video of the week. “By seeing other people’s videos, it also gives you a reason to go back to the app,” Westerman says. After you post a video, the app immediately gives you a coupon for effectively creating a little commercial for the Gap.