I think every new product that is launched is a learning moment. And with mobile being such a great focus of many businesses (and disrupting many others), I want to take this moment to focus on one of my biggest tenets – the rule of new products: At some point in the build-out, the product will become overly familiar and you will forget that when it launches it will be ‘new’ to your customers.
If you can’t wait for the solution to the issue I’m raising here about Quip’s iPhone app, see bold at the bottom. Also, my apologies for a much longer than normal post – a lot of ground to cover here.
Quip is a new product that is mobilizing document creation. It has well-known founders and, this week, a lot of press (see Techcrunch.com and The New York Times). With Microsoft still not in the game and Apple’s Pages app not yet a standard (though I use it and I think it is quite good), it seems a good time to hit the market with a document product that is (wait for it) mobile first.
Being both a ‘gadget gal’ and someone who has a great interest in new products, I quickly signed-up. I happened to be at my laptop at the time. Realizing the ‘buzz’, and the intended use case, was about mobile (specifically the iPhone) I then downloaded and logged in to the app on my iPhone (followed by my iPad).
Even though Quip says you can be a single user (for whom it is free), the iPhone experience, at the home screen level, skews toward collaboration amongst team members (who pay) vs. single use. I’d like to point out that while it may be built for teams (which is where the monetary value is), most of the first users of this app will be single users (even if they will ultimately be part of a team using this).
And most of those individual users will want to create a document first (even if the end game is to share it with others). Which is why it is truly amazing that there is no way to create a new doc from the home screen! The only + sign (which I was looking for because we’ve learned that means ‘add’) is clearly in a comment bubble
– but it was there (and the + sign was a familiar clue) so I clicked it sending me to a screen to create a message. To whom? For what reason at this stage of the experience? I don’t have those answers.
The advice I have is that when you are requiring customers to change their behavior, give them something familiar to latch on to early in the experience so they feel they are making progress (and from the business side, they don’t abandon in frustration). That is what the +circle button is but it isn’t where a user can get to it quickly and intuitively.
Another piece of advice, assume for many months after your app is released, maybe more than a year, all you will be focusing on is acquiring and onboarding new customers. Any returning customers will already be on board and will ignore ‘newbie’ hints. It’s why hints/clues can be grayed out so they aren’t annoying.
It took me a lot of poking, holding the poke in hopes of some divine interactivity release, swiping left and right, and then, by accident, swiping the screen down to get to where the actual ‘+’ I was looking for.
The idea of swiping down isn’t yet a convention – using it requires giving hints (see solutions one paragraph away).
Leads me to one final piece of advice for anyone building apps for mobile, we are still in the beginning of understanding how people truly adapt to and use mobile apps. Plenty of us are still influenced by software applications and web interfaces (and we still use them daily, swapping amongst our screens in rapid succession). I see this with a few mobile-only startups I mentor. They are creating interactivity that they think are conventions and they aren’t. They expect users to ‘get’ what they have designed because despite the months of designing and tweaking they’ve been through to get it ‘right’, they expect users to realize immediately how it works.
The crazy thing is the solution(s) is simple and there are three of them to choose from to make the home-screen-to-create-document-path better:
1) Fastest solution: Under where the list of folders end (there are 4 in the original list they provide) insert a small grayed-out arrow pointing down with ‘swipe down to create document’. Maybe you are a purist and think it should say ‘Desktop’ because that is where the actual swipe gets you – no one is looking for a desktop, they are looking to create a document.
OR
2) Streamline solution: Combine what is on the home screen and the Desktop and have that be the home screen. It removes a step (aka swipe) and all you have to do is add a pull down search to top of the Desktop and add to the bottom nav the + comment bubble and the contacts buttons. Pull down search is getting to be a convention; bottom navs are a convention.
OR
3) Impatient customer solution: On the home screen next to the + in the comment bubble put the + circle button, take the user to the document and along the top (where now there is no nav) have a nav that has a point left arrow and the words ‘back to files and folders’.
The first one is the better option because it is an easy fix, it encourages the behavior Quip wants, and once the user has a couple of their own docs or folders it can disappear. All the options should be tested with targeted customers.
This is in no way a negative review of Quip. For a first version they have stayed true to the principle of starting small, delivering on their value proposition through the bulk of the experience, and focusing on simplification of a product that is usually overwrought with features. The only thing, in my opinion, that needs improvement to secure customer adoption is to make the ‘getting started’ part easy and intuitive. It’s something everyone can learn from in this community of new product pioneers.