Can we develop an app that exploits a person’s fear of losing something? The emotion associated with losses is enormous. In fact, it is twice as great as the emotion of gaining something of the same value. Earlier, we delved into Regime of Competence, and how non-gaming apps, particularly productivity apps, could be teamed with [...]
What makes you stay up all night playing a game, attempting the same level over and over, until, finally at 3am, you succeed in butchering all the pigs in one try? You know the feeling when you yelp in delight, rousing half the neighborhood from their sleep, and sending dogs barking in frenzy. And then [...]
Every pretty gal knows this dirty trick. She wants to stand out and be the center of attention at a party tonight. So she asks her not-so-fine-looking friends of hers along. These friends innocently tag along, thinking Good Looking Gal really enjoys their company. In reality they are being used as a decoy. If Good [...]
When confronted with making a tough decision, our befuddled brains turn us into passive decision makers. And if there happens to be a default option for us to take, we will almost always pick the default. The path of least resistance. Figure 1. Organ donation consent percentage shoots up when the default option is to [...]
Variable Ratio Reinforcement (VRR) is what makes gamblers and gamers behave like a neurotically obsessed person. Take a slot machine. It is programmed to pay out money every 20 spins, for instance, on average. It might happen on the 5th pull, the 26th pull and 29th pull. But the average is every 20 pulls. Can [...]
The Android app, Easy Contact Sync, is a contact backup tool that allows you to back up your phone contacts to its SD card and a range of cloud-based storage. This app has a Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) in-app purchase as shown in the following series of images (courtesy of Paradise Android): Figure 1: In-app purchase dialog [...]
Your app description page is not an app description page at all. It’s an app marketing page and you, the developer, are the salesman trying to get people to download your app. Since you can’t market to your potential users in person, pitching the value of your app in the app description page is the [...]
A good idea is like a virus. It likes to spread and it’s terribly contagious. Put a good idea into an app and watch it proliferate with minimal marketing effort. On the contrary, if you don’t see your just-launched app being downloaded much, it means the idea behind your app has not propagated. This is [...]
“I can’t live without my phone.” Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, we can’t live without our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Candy Crush Saga. Ah, mobile apps. They are everywhere and they permeate every single facet of our lives. From shaking us up at dawn, to revealing where the best cup of [...]
The Facebook timeline cover is the most ignored piece of real estate offering free social media marketing to app developers. If you look at many app developers’ FB covers, what do you see? Pictures of them with their girlfriends. Images of their favorite video games or operating system logos. Drawings of their beloved anime characters. [...]