Sustainable Product Growth

Google Play has a rich history of aiding Android developers in creating successful products. As the app market evolves, sustaining meaningful user engagement becomes increasingly challenging.

We developed a toolkit to help developers create apps that not only attract users but also retain them, fostering a loyal user base that contributes to long-term success.

Role:

Design Strategy Lead

Responsibilities:

Designing and facilitating international multi-lingual stakeholder workshops, designing conceptual stimuli for testing, planning, organising and moderating global customer research, including user interviews and diary studies.

Team:

• Design Strategy Lead

• Product Manager

• Technology Director

• Design Partner

Approach

Absorb what was already known

The first step was understanding the current landscape at the cross section of product development, the attention economy, and digital wellbeing. We had access to Google’s extensive previous research as well as other prominent industry sources as our starting point.

DISCOVERY

Taking the Developer perspective

We attended Google’s global Sustainable Growth Forums where we deep dived into the challenges of building and retaining a user base. We met app and game developers from around the world and, to expand our learnings, we organised interviews with companies ranging from startups to established market leaders.

IMMERSION

Testing concepts with users

We devised a large-scale fieldwork plan to explore the most relevant details of phone use in three key app developer markets. We travelled to the US, UK and South Korea to uncover what really makes an app ‘stick’ (or not) on a user’s phone. In the process, we tested over 40 evolving sketch provocations across six major app categories - Health & Wellbeing, Education, Dating, Entertainment, Social Media and Games.

PROTOTYPING & TESTING

The Developer’s Toolkit

We gathered fascinating real-world insights from across the globe - on everything from why people delete apps to what the right tone of voice for notifications is. Pairing this with our own experience as app developers, we began to codify the findings into a fully actionable toolkit for developers, written by developers.

SYNTHESIS

The Course

The Developer’s Toolkit for Sustainable Growth has been translated into interactive, actionable lessons and launched on the Google Play Academy for App Success.

SHARING

Playtime

We presented learnings of this project at Google Playtime - the flagship event that brings together selected app and game developers to discuss the latest features and best practices on innovation and business growth. We shared the outcomes of our work at three Google Playtime events in Amsterdam, South Korea and Singapore.

SHARING