The Importance of Not Being Useless

Who should define what makes a great event app? You, your developer or your attendees? Marco Arment, founder of Instapaper and a former lead developer for Tumblr, wrote a script in 2010 to analyze US App Store customer reviews for the top 100 apps from every category. The script analyzed the most commonly used words in five-star reviews and in one-star reviews. The top words by rating, with descending frequency for five star reviews were:

awesome, worth, thanks, amazing, simple, perfect, price, everything, ever, must, iPod, before, found, store, never, recommend, done, take, always, touch

The top words for one-star reviews were:

waste, money, crashes, tried, useless, nothing, paid, open, deleted, downloaded, didn’t, says, stupid, anything, actually, account, bought, apple, already

Arment concludes: “It’s promising to see simple in the top-positive list, which says a lot about user expectations on the platform…One word is especially telling of a prevalent attitude I’ve seen for a while: useless. More than any other adjective, reviewers condemn apps they don’t like as useless.”

While Arment might think it’s a little unfair to characterize an app that at least does something as useless, an app really is useless if the user can’t figure it how to use it.

It’s useless if it doesn’t do what the user expects it to do.

And it’s totally useless if the app is mobile-Web and there’s no stable, speedy internet connection.

If the basics aren’t there, then the app is useless, no matter how wonderful it is. What the developer thinks doesn’t matter. Maybe even what the event producer thinks doesn’t matter. The opinion that matters most is that of the user—the meeting attendee who got on a plane, stuffed everything into a overhead compartment, ate a bad sandwich in the cab ride to the hotel, and showed up at your meeting expecting your app to list the sessions and point the way to a restroom. Features than may be minor to a developer are not minor at all to a user who is looking to an event app for help finding a restroom in a large venue or shuttle bus.

We all have expectations of the apps we downloads onto the expensive, beautifully designed  phones we own and use all the time. And we want those expectations met. Understanding users expectations and delivering on them is the best way to make the attendees happy—and to enhance their experience with your event and your brand. (Think a bad experience with your brand doesn’t matter? Read this. We’ll be posting on this topic in more detail in the future).