A toolkit for developers, written by developers
The Challenge
Google Play has a long and successful history of supporting and celebrating the Android developer community. Over the past years, their guidance, tools and best practices have helped and inspired developers around the world to launch category-defining mobile apps.
However, as the app market matures, it is becoming increasingly complex for developers to engage and retain users. As a result the average user’s attention is fragmenting between competing experiences. Google Play wants to help developers build valuable, sustained relationships between an app and its users - prioritising long-term, value-building engagement strategies over short-term tactics - ultimately leading to sustainable business revenue growth.
Although the topic of sustainable growth is a priority for Google Play, the knowledge that they had gathered over the years was fragmented and not all areas of interest were explored with the same level of depth. Moreover, it lacked the scale to reach the broad ecosystem of developers. We were challenged to create a practical toolkit with clear and actionable recommendations to help developers unlock sustainable growth.
Our approach
We use both qualitative and quantitative user research to inform every digital product that we build – and we’ve honed these techniques over the past 12 years to uncover informative insights quickly.
Within days we reviewed Google’s extensive research in this area and digested top learnings from prominent industry sources. Supplemented by initial meetings with partners in Google’s development forums and our own networks, we had, by the third week of the project, a clear view of the landscape. To prioritise effectively we identified the areas where we had enough knowledge as well as where the biggest gaps in terms of actionable insights were.
We devised a large-scale, efficient fieldwork plan that would allow us to explore the most relevant details of phone use in 2019 in the US, Europe and Asia. To uncover what really makes an app ‘stick’ (or not) on a user’s phone, we set out to answer the question of sustainable growth from the user’s perspective - testing over 40 evolving sketch provocations across five major app categories - Health & Wellbeing, Education, Dating, Entertainment and Social Media.
We gathered fascinating real-world insights from across the globe - on everything from why people delete apps to what tone of voice works for notifications. We paired this with our own experience as app developers to codify the findings into a fully actionable toolkit. A toolkit for developers, written by developers.
The Results
The Developer’s Toolkit for Sustainable Growth has been translated into interactive, actionable lessons and launched on the Google Play Academy for App Success.
In addition, the highlights and recommendations of this project have been shared at Google Playtime - the flagship event that brings together selected top app and games partners to discuss the latest features and best practices on innovation and business growth. Isaac Pinnock and Micha Nicheva, members of the project team from Made by Many have spoken at three Google Playtime events in EMEA, Korea and Singapore.
“Apps that Fit: designing around people’s lives to unlock sustainable growth” is available to watch here.
