So you've got an idea of what you want your app to do, and you've got a pretty good sense of how and why people will use your app on the go when they're multitasking, local, or bored. You're off to a good start. But chances are, someone's already got an app that does something at least vaguely similar to what you've got in mind. How will your app be different? What will make your app stand out from the rest?
With a new angle, even upstart newcomers can get a toehold in territory already staked out by established apps. Consider the category of "check-in" apps that let you share your current location with friends. Loopt was among the first iPhone apps to do this, providing an efficient system for plotting your pals on a map, making it easy to meet up with them wherever they might roam. As more apps joined the category, the best of these fresh faces added a new spin that made check-ins more fun. Foursquare added a point system to the formula, turning the activity into an urban game where everyone in the city is a player: check in more than anyone else at your favorite watering hole, and you become its mayor, a competitive incentive for exploring your own city. As you saw earlier in this chapter, Gowalla tweaked the recipe by letting you collect virtual objects, pick up icons, and add "stamps" to the app's passport as you roam your city. Instead of scoring points, Gowalla focuses on serendipity and the surprisingly addictive discovery of unexpected objects when you go to a new spot.
Figure 2-17. From left, Loopt, Foursquare, and Gowalla all offer similar functionality, but each offers its own spin, providing three very different experiences and incentives for sharing your location with friends.
All three of these apps focus on the same activity—announcing your location—but all offer distinctly different rewards for doing it. These different approaches—efficiency, competition, and discovery—give these apps distinct personalities which in turn suggest different audiences and use cases. Despite surface similarity, the three apps are unique.
What makes your app special? Some possibilities: a unique set of rewards or incentives; a tight focus on a specific audience; niche content that no one else can provide; a new way to visualize or present information; technology that simply works better; a big network of other users to play with; a solution for saving money over other apps; or a website or real-world component that enhances what you do or see in the app.
All of the advantages in that list are, in a sense, "skills." If you do any of those things better or differently from others, you have a hook. But it also helps to think about apps like we think about human beings. It's not just skills that make us want to spend time with certain people. There's also the slippery but irresistible matter of charisma. Personality and looks matter, too (sometimes more than we care to admit), and the same goes for apps. Much of this book emphasizes efficiency, focus, and substance, but there's no doubt that style matters. Even if your app does exactly the same job as everyone else, you make an impact if it does that job with a flourish.
Just go carefully. Like people, apps with oversized personalities are as likely to distract and disgruntle as they are to seduce. Overdoing it with animations and sound effects will irritate users who don't want to be bothered. If you choose to make your app's graphical style one of its main differentiators, be sure that the style isn't so noisy that it drowns out your app's actual info and features. Adjust the style and design to suit the content and audience, and be careful not to become so smitten with your app's good looks that you begin to confuse form with function. Great design isn't just about aesthetics.
Figure 2-18. Tapbots is an iPhone development shop whose apps push hard on personality. The company's apps do tasks that are mundane to the point of blandness—a weight log, a unit-conversion calculator, and a clipboard manager—but their clever interfaces are frankly adorable. Shown here from left to right, Weightbot, Convertbot, and Pastebot all feature retro-robotic designs complete with whooshing hydraulic sounds that make it, yes, fun to convert miles to kilometers. Design and whimsy are features, too.