There’s an old rule in the world of storytelling that tells us that the “spine” of your narrative is precious and it must be protected at all costs.
Take “Star Wars,” for example. Yes, it’s a space opera epic filled with rebel alliances, evil galactic empires and a whole galaxy of incredible creations – but at its core, the narrative spine is very simple. It’s a story about a farm boy who dreams of a better life and, after a tragedy strikes his extended family, heads off to the stars on an incredible adventure.
That’s it. Every scene in the movie is directly related to that spine, either by reinforcing it or pushing it farther along towards its conclusion. Anything unrelated to that spine is totally absent – which is part of why it’s such an effective movie.
The world of mobile app development has a spine, too. It’s just as simple as the above example and it is also something so precious that it must be protected at all costs.
The user experience.
It’s more than just the concept of whether or not your app actually works. It represents a promise that you’re making to your end users. It’s why they’re there in the first place. It’s also the major contributing factor that will determine whether or not they actually stay around.
The One Question To Ask Yourself As Often As You Can
Absolutely every decision you make during development, from feature implementations to GUI decisions to font selection, needs to feed back into this experience and reinforce it whenever possible.
In an effort to better protect that spine of your experience, try to resist the urge to overthink things. Boil the “promise” of your app down into a single sentence (or at least, as close to that as you can). Pretend that you’re pitching someone your app and come up with a quick description that says what that app is supposed to do and why it’s so important. This, for all intents and purposes, is your spine.
Now, when it comes time to think about a new feature, work on your sound design or make absolutely any other type of decision large or small, ask yourself the following question:
- How does this change support my spine and make it better?
If the answer is “it doesn’t,” then stop whatever you’re working on and go back to the beginning.
When you start making decisions that are too far away from your spine, you start adding features and elements just for the sake of it. They don’t really justify their own existence, as “cool” or as “innovative” as they may be.
In other words, you’re making choices and taking action because you can, not because you should. Within the context of your user experience, that is absolutely never a position you want to be in.
Resist the Instinct to Overthink Everything
This type of mentality, as simple as it may be, will also help you avoid falling into the trap of becoming a “Jack of all trades, master of none.” Nobody wants to put up with a complicated app that technically does 10 important things if it doesn’t actually do any of them particularly well. Sure, your app is “high functioning” and “has a lot to offer” – but you also let things get too complicated for their own good because you allowed yourself to stray too far away from the spine.
There’s a reason why, according to one study, a massive 97% of business customers cite “ease of use” as the single most important quality they look for in mobile apps (ahead of both “security” and “comprehensiveness,” by the way). They don’t want an app that does many things poorly. They want an app that does one thing (or a few things) incredibly well.
They have a problem, your app is the solution. They aren’t interested in you offering half-baked solutions to a dozen other problems they may or may not have.
People just want a simple, quality experience. They don’t need to be “wowed” by an app that reinvents the wheel just because you had the budget to do so. They’re just looking for something straightforward and easy to use that does what you said it was going to do. In essence, they want something that lives up to the promise you made them at the start.
That “promise” is your spine. Grab hold of it and never, ever let it get away.
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