Suzanne Ginsburg’s ‘Designing the iPhone User Experience‘ is another worthy read. Its 277 pages cover iPhone apps from the point of view of a UI specialist and includes tons of good advice about market research by, prototyping, testing, how to approach the overall app design, UI design, and branding. On my first look through I feared it was another manual of ‘how the pros do it’ that would not suit the resources of my own two person company, but on closer inspection that’s not the case at all. When the author does explain bigger budget approaches she also explains low budget ‘guerilla’ methods. There are tips and anecdotes throughout the book drawn from Susanne’s experience working on iPhone app design and UI testing. (Suzanne is an acomplished user experience consultant in Silicon Valley.)

One piece of advice about listening to designers… They have a lot to say about things you should do, and stuff you should put into you app. All those ‘shoulds’ are scary to an indie software developer short on time and money and focused mainly on writing code. Think of all the ‘shoulds’ as a menu of stuff you can consider, and then spend your time and money where it makes sense for you. Remember though, end users don’t care one bit how costly or time consuming an app is, they only care how delightful, fun, and useful the app is, and your app is going to be competing against apps that have had a lot of careful design put into them.

For those of you who can’t get enough I’d like to recommend a couple more design books, though they are not iPhone books. ‘The Design of Everyday Things‘by D Norman is an industrial design classic. As the iPone is a device you hold and touch, the app design direction of physical / real world metaphor has proved very successful for a number of apps, and Norman’s book is probably the best design guidance you will find for that kind of app.

‘Don’t Make Me Think‘ is a concise and accessible book on web usability design, it has some great lessons that iPhone designers can use too that might be a little easier to learn when seen in the context of the more familiar web.

Finally a quick mention of ‘Design Basics Index‘ by Jim Krause, which is a useful intro and reference for graphic design concepts that’s helpful to those of us without training in graphic design.

More book recommendations: iOS Programming, Games & Unity, Marketing & Business.

Top 100 lists.

Apple tracks the popularity of apps and ranks them in lists of top 100 apps. These are the ‘Top Paid’ and ‘Top Free’ lists you see when you browse the app store. The exact method is known only to Apple, but it seems that Apple measures app popularity by unit downloads over the last day, perhaps using a weighted method where downloads from previous days have a decaying influence on ranking. There are many ways that customers can find apps, eg searching iTunes, Google search, app review websites, word or mouth, ads in other apps, etc, but it’s clear that browsing the top 100 lists in the app store is very important app discovery method. Several developers have reported greatly increased sales when an app is in a top 100 list, and greatly reduced sales when their app slips off the bottom of a top 100 list. The two most important top 100 lists are top 100 paid apps and top 100 free apps, and then there are top 100 free and top 100 paid lists for each category and subcategory of games. In addition to the top 100 lists there are listings of apps by release date. Every one of these lists is maintained independently for every iTunes country, so an app that’s very popular in one country and in several top 100 lists for that country might be totally missing from the top 100 lists in other countries.

Browsing the App Store on the iPhone or iPod touch

The app store app on the iPhone or iPod touch opens to the last application tab that you were using: Featured, Categories, Top 25, Search, or Updates. On the top 25 tab you can see either the free or paid top 25 apps, selecting free or paid with the toolbar at the top. When if first opens it will default to whichever of free or paid you were looking at last. 5 apps fit on the screen at once, so in fact to begin with you see top 5. Scrolling down through 5 screens worth gets you the whole top 25. At the bottom of the table is a link to ‘Show top 50′, taping this gets 25 more apps added to the table, so you can scroll through the top 50 free or paid. At the end of 50 there’s no link to see more, so on the device you can’t see the entire top 100 overall apps, only the top 50.

Via the Categories tab you can browse the top 100 paid and free lists for each category. Tapping on a particular category opens that categories top paid list as a table. The table has 25 apps listed, and at the bottom is a link ‘Twenty Five More…’. You can use that 3 times to get the table to show the full top 100 list. The toolbar at the top of the table switches between the top paid, top free, and listing apps by release date. Note that the table always opens showing the top paid list when you go into a category, it doesn’t remember if you were last viewing top paid, top free, or by release date. Note that this is different to iTunes on the desktop, which defaults its category view to release date. When viewing by release date, you can keep tapping the ‘Twenty Five More…’ link and get up to 350 apps listed.

Browsing in iTunes on the Desktop

In the App Store page in iTunes, the middle of the screen is full of special areas ‘New and Noteworthy’, ‘What’s Hot’ etc that the iTunes editorial team uses to promote apps it has hand picked. The overall top 10 paid apps is shown in the right column, and underneath that the overall top 10 free apps. (Note how paid gets billing over free, though headline billing is in the hand picked areas in the middle, which can include paid and free). Clicking on one of the top 100 links goes to a page that shows all top on screen.

On the left side of the main app store screen is the list of categories. Clicking on a category goes to thats categories app listing (screen shot below). When this page opens it lists the apps by release date. So here’s why the app release date is important – release date is the default view of an app store category in iTunes on the desktop. It’s possible to manipulate the release date during an app update to get an old app back onto this page. The first 20 apps are show, and you can page through all of them 20 at a time. The app listing can be changed to sort by most popular or by name. Sorting by most popular shows a popularity ranked list for free and paid apps combined. It’s interesting to see which paid apps show up in this list competing with the free apps in that category.

On the left and right side, the top 20 paid and top 20 free apps for this category are shown, and there are links to go to the full top 100 list for each. The top 100 lists show 100 apps, and there is no paging to get to apps 101-200.

Tools to examine Rankings

As a seller of apps, its important to keep an eye on the rankings of your app, your competitors apps, and different apps in order to understand your market. Using iTunes to find apps rankings is laborious, especially because the rankings are different for each country. There are a couple of wonderful tools I use to help. MajicRank will connect to the iTunes servers for you and find the current rankings of any apps you’ve configured in it, and it will do that for every country or just the ‘big 8′ countries. What it doesn’t do is remember your rankings and chart them over time, though the developer is working on this. MajicRank uses the individual category top 100 ranking lists for each country.

Mobclix tracks all apps rankings over time, and over on their website you can get ranking history charts for free. What Mobclix is charting is the free and paid combined popularity that you can see in a category in iTunes USA. So if you use Mobclix and MajicRank together, the rankings won’t match because they show ranking in different lists.

AppSales Mobile is similar to AppViz, but its for your iPhone! AppSales source code is in Google Code right now, download with SVN and pop it on your phone with a debug build. Great distribution model for us developers! It’s a fantastically designed app, squeezing lots of charts onto the phone without anything ever look squeezed. Charts and reports show daily or weekly sales revenue with drill down by product or country. AppSales does have one big drawback, it is oriented around revenue from paid apps. It will show download number for free apps mixed in with the overall report data, but it doesn’t include downloads in the line graphs, they are revenue only. (Back in the day I used to use AppSales for the mac, but it’s no longer being distributed or updated.)

My App Sales is another sales stats checker for your iPhone, but unlike AppSales it reports and charts both free and paid apps. Reports are broken down by day and week, with your account totals and app by app too, showing new downloads, update downloads, refunds, and sales revenue for paid apps. From the reports screen you can drill down to see that data country by country. The app will chart your data by sales revenue or downloads by day or week. My App Sales is the work of Oliver Drobnik, and he’s still maintaining and actively marketing the app.

MajicRank and AppRanking scan iTunes servers and figure out apps ranking in iTunes stores around the world. As well as top 100 free and top 100 paid, the app stores have top 100 free and paid for each app category and game sub category, all of which can be browsed on the app store available on the iPhone and Touch themselves. I was very surprised to learn that Hit Tennis is in the top 100 paid sports games even in many countries including the USA, and its even in the top 100 paid games in a few countries around the world. This is really encouraging, and moves up the next release of Hit Tennis in my priorities. MajicRank is the first of the sales stats tools to record ranking data over time and graph it. Graphing ranking data alongside sales data and your calendar of marketing actions is very powerful for understanding how to tune your marketing plans to make the most from your apps. If you’re not sure about what all the different ranking lists are, read: app store top 100 rankings explained.

Mobclix shows app rankings on their site, with graphs. They are charting top 100 popularity free and paid combined, for the USA app store (so their numbers won’t match MajicRank’s numbers). Go Imangi!

AppStore Clerk is a simple utility that parses daily and weekly download reports and shows you the data in an easy to read table, showing new downloads and updates.

Heartbeat is a fully featured subscription website that features everything in all the tools above mixed with crash reporting, analytics, and a whole lot more. When I sell my millionth app I’ll try it :-).

AppStatz is another online solution to check out, though it’s still in private beta. (thanks @shanev). AppStatz – let me in your beta :-)

Drop me a line and tell me about the tools you use.