How We Created the #27 iPad App in One Week- concept, design, and execution.
spreadsong.com
spreadsong.com
More proof that polish and UX is vitally important for iPhone and iPad apps. The average user doesn't care how you wrote the program - they care how it feels to use.
For UX and visual inspiration for good-looking iPhone and iPad apps:
Does anyone know what the differentiator for this app is (over iBooks)?
With iBooks you have the same content, but it's hidden behind the paid books, and there aren't any good ways of discovering new things to read.
If anyone else has other iPad numbers, I think it would be interesting to extrapolate these numbers and see what the top apps are earning.
The covers look pretty and the way you can browse categories is nice, but I wish you would focus on real functionality like "search by title", or "search by author", instead of just making it look pretty. It's a freakin' book app after all... 99% of the user's time is going to be spent reading, not staring at pretty covers.
This seems like an 80/20 rule. Why spend 80% of your time designing the interface that users will only use 20% of their time?
Search is important! That's why it's going to be in the first update. However, it's not core to the app. We can draw out 90% of peoples' searches in collections, categories, and authors. I know we have 90% coverage, because I have the stats from our iPhone app. We get blasted with a bunch of one stars from people who want search. We get a lot of five stars from people who like browsing normally. We ship an update, we get a lot of five stars from everyone.
The reason we spent 80% of the time designing the browsing interface interface is because it isn't the 20% interface. It is the 80% interface. Most people don't spend lots of time searching, they search a couple times for things they specifically want, then they browse the rest of the time.
This might not be the case for you- but, in the first version, I don't care if you like it. I don't care in the first version if anyone specifically likes it. I care that we build an app that satisfies 80% of people based on known priorities and known stats, and then and only then do we start building the features that everyone else wants.
In this case, that included search.
Also for iPad and iPhone apps sometimes interface is more important than functionality. The majority of users want apps that look pretty.
In fact I haven't rated your app yet. What I usually do is wait a week or two until the first update before reviewing/rating.
Of course, not all customers know or even care how the software development lifecycle works.
If you emailed our support email I'd apologize for not having book deletion, and that we know how dumb it is to not have it, but we wanted to be careful in our first update without iPads to test on. Here, I'll explain the actual reasoning behind not having stuff.
Definitely check out the app in another week or so, though, we'll be rocking through the problems in the app in short order. We already have the code written in our iPhone app, it's just a matter of creating the interfaces.
The iPad store has so much stuff in it that I don't now how you would get noticed. Once you are in the leader board, it's a different story, but getting there is hard. Did they get a link on some high profile website? Or is it just that "free books" is a pretty good title (even though it really costs $2).
There isn't really any lesson to be drawn from this aside from the short-term benefit of being first to market in a category. And even if you find that lesson valuable, it's already too late to apply it.
http://spreadsong.com/icon_driven_development_on_the_app_sto...
By already having the content ready to go we had a pretty huge opportunity to be up there with Amazon and Apple, and, if we can't convert, we can always toggle over to paid.