Google Play
Sustainable Product Growth
Summary
Google Play has a long and successful history of supporting and celebrating the Android developer community. 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 individual apps to engage and retain users. Human attention has progressively become commoditised and as a result it has become fragmented between a multitude of experiences. Google wants to help developers build valuable, sustained relationships between apps and users - prioritising long-term engagement strategies over short-term often dubious tactics. We were challenged to create a practical toolkit with clear and actionable recommendations to help developers unlock sustainable growth and retain their users for the long run.
My role
I was the Lead Researcher on the project, working together with a Technology Director, a Product Manager and a Founding Partner. My responsibilities included designing and facilitating stakeholder workshops, designing conceptual stimuli for testing, planning, organising and moderating global customer research including user interviews and diary studies.
The Approach
1. Immersion and desk research
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.
2. 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.
3. Concept testing with users
The next step was to devise a large-scale fieldwork plan that would allow us to explore the most relevant details of phone use in three key app developer markets - the US, UK and South Korea. 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 six major app categories - Health & Wellbeing, Education, Dating, Entertainment, Social Media and Games.
4. The Developer’s Toolkit
We gathered fascinating real-world insights from across the globe - on everything from why people delete apps to what is the right tone of voice for notifications. 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.
The Outcomes
The Developer’s Toolkit for Sustainable Growth has been translated into interactive, actionable lessons and launched on the Google Play Academy for App Success.
Playtime
The highlights of this project were presented at Google Playtime - the flagship event that brings together selected app and games 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 EMEA, South Korea and APAC.
“Apps that Fit: designing around people’s lives to unlock sustainable growth” is available to watch here.
