Create Value, Not Just Create Apps

         For the lecture of this week, we have met a lot of entrepreneurs (or guys just needing some technical assistance), who came with various project topics from sports, home communication to E-commerce and English education. Besides a lot of projects I was interested in, what I realized to be worth sharing is how we should consider when we build apps. Just in purpose of creating a cool app or creating value for users or even yourself by the app.

         As what the situation showed in the pitching session, web apps have been widely accepted and used in many real life areas. Therefore, apps are not long the “toys” for developers to play with but an industrial style to bring values for people’s lives, business production efficiency, etc. In this case, caring more about the product positioning and user experience of the app are much more important and necessary than before. Only after users can gain values from your app can it be called as a real “app”. That is also why our lecture Colin emphasized once and once again that before you started creating your app, thought carefully on the your whole workflow including the purpose of your app, your target users and the best design plan fitting them.

         Furthermore, as we know, the age that any app you build will probably be popular has gone. That is when apps tended to be quite a few about users were just of high interest about this kind of mobile experience. However, now there are about 800 thousand apps in Apple app store. Intensive competition forces us to think more about the usability and user experience of app, which is user-centralized. So in this case, to create value becomes a new standard principle to judge the success of an app. For example, Flipboard turns out to be quite a successful app. Not only its excellent user interface design, but also its integration of social networking and News media create sufficient value for users to give much more convenience for users to read news and posts. That is a significant point for the success of Flipboard, which is sustainable.

         All in all, apps now have been categorized detailedly to fulfill the needs of different areas. In this case the value goal is sort of easier to settle down we developer has a clear idea about what they want to create. But application homogenization makes it much harder to stand out from the “sea” of apps. Here the one that thinks more about how to create value for users will probably win finally. Therefore, hope in following web development, we can think more about that instead of blindly playing inside ours own colorful word while ignoring the actual value brought to users.