Our app had been a testing ground for features, leading to bloat and a messy user experience.
Prune away what is not used, enhance the experience for the flows that are loved.
So many ways to discover apps in Aptoide, yet our users were mostly searching. After mapping the experience of our flows, the design team quickly understood why. Feature bloat and a complex information architecture, no follow up to feature to see if they were engaging or not, etc.
This was our vision, a reworked look and feel, more white space, bolder typography and a card based layout. Richer more diverse content. Incrementally we started working towards this vision letting our user research determine the roadmap. Did we make it? Read on to find out!
First we made the arcitecture easier, reducing 8 main views to 4 (now 5 but that's an experiment). We also chose to place the navigation in a bottom bar, which fits better with the bigger phones of today and also with our apps new slimmer information architecture.
Our most used feature was the search, so naturally we wanted to build a great search experience. First of all we wanted to make the search a portal for exploration, putting trending searches a touch away.
One idea behind Aptoide was the integration of a social component in the app discovery process. This had been confined to one feature, the app timeline, but for the next version of Aptoide we wanted to sprinkle the social aspect over the whole experience.
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It's always important to adapt. For us building the next version of Aptoide some of the pain points we wanted to fix had to step aside as Aptoide launched their own cryptocurrency, AppCoins. Integrating AppCoins into the Aptoide app store was a major dealbreaker for the business side and a potential game changer for our users. So at the end of 2018 many of our efforts revolved around this integration strategy. One example is seen here in how a user can donate AppCoins to a indie developer they want to support.
Overall most of the work done is not seen here. Most of our time was spent understanding our users needs and emotions. For more on that, please contact me, always happy to talk about empathy and user behavior.
The results are in! (some of them). This is still a work in progress but what we have been able to achieve so far is giving good results. The KPIs that are important to us are all improving.