Providing a great user experience is key to building a successful digital shopfront and I argued before that this may be a significant factor in driving customers to purchase and download from the App Store.

The acquisition of Chomp by Apple sounds like great news for app developers; in the meantime I would like to highlight some of the factors undermining the Genius user experience, hoping as usual that the big guns in California will actually take notice.

While personalized recommendations are a no-brainer nowadays, it would appear that Genius hasn’t been blessed by anything but evil faeries since it’s inception; consumers hoping to dig up great apps beyond the top 200s may be entering murky waters.

Beyond the top 200s?

I own something like 500 apps, most of which are paid games. While I play/test countless titles, I am rather candid in doing so – prioritizing the type of games I like; getting mainstream stuff for the sake of it isn’t my cup of tea.

Last week I checked my favorite top 200s – but I got most of what I wanted from there already; given a kind of stratification process, it so happens that the top 200s aren’t moving very fast. While this isn’t good news for app developers shipping new stuff, it doesn’t constitute in and of itself a reason for Apple to tweak their algorithms and I’m here to talk about something else.

In passing I also note that the top grossing, which used to be handy when looking out for premium games ($3 and above) is now well choked with freemium games. I am, however digressing.

Cold Genius

So I decided to have another look at Genius.

Around 50% of Genius  recommendations are immediately irrelevant to what I like (mind, 500 downloads and counting should be a good start to evaluate recommendations).

Digging up gems using Genius is a convoluted process:

1. There are no more than 4-5 pages to browse.
2. The selection will include any previously downloaded app not currently installed on-device (which is weird, and counter-productive too since one may end up messing recommendations by rejecting apps that are liked, but no longer needed).
3. In order to get additional recommendations, one has to depress “not interested” under each and every unwanted app. However rejected apps do not disappear right away. Instead the only way to make them go away is to reload the page.
4. Rejecting a game from the main category doesn’t tell Genius to remove the same game from ‘games’. This is something I learned the stupid way as I was out for a mix of games and other interesting apps and tended to switch between categories.

After playing the reject-and-reload game for 60 minutes or so, I had finally narrowed my selection down to a dozen of interesting apps. Downloaded 2 or 3 right away , postponed buying a few of the more interesting (and more expensive) games I’d found.

Unlike most sections of the app store, Genius doesn’t support scrolling by swiping. If you want to see the next page, you need to press rather tiny arrow buttons. On iPad, you can scroll by swiping – pointlessly revealing the bottom of pages with a viewable area 5% taller than the screen in landscape mode. Awkward and somewhat disappointing coming from the master of Ux design.

At this point I’m guessing many shoppers give up. They head over to Appolicious or whatever app they use to discover other apps.

25 billion downloads (no services?)

The bummer, however, was a time bomb that didn’t explode for another week, at which point I decided to purchase one of the more expensive titles I had discovered.

I open my iPad, head back to Genius, then…

You guessed. Genius had been hard at work while I left it alone. After a week my recommendations had returned to primal chaos, sending to heavenly hell whatever app I had patiently selected. Gone, nothing, nada.

With more than a hundred games coming out everyday, logic would have it that every player can find games that will suit their taste – even after taking out the krapps.

In the meantime, the one feature that should delight app gourmets turns out to be the fifth wheel of my shopping cart.

Since I don’t use a bookmarking site and my bookmarks are crammed to the point of being unusable, I thought I’d drop a couple of links to Appolicious here.

According to them, smart-phones are stealing the (portable) gaming business. And while their market share is growing, the mobile gaming market itself is shrinking as the $1 craze pushes developers to sell games cheaper than chocolate.

As revenue decreases, the UX may be going downhill as well, thanks to the free-mium model. Flytrap?

I read criticism suggesting that the iPhone storefront needed to change given the large amount of apps in-store. I disagree. I think the iPhone storefront gives ‘stepped opportunities to progress an app’s visibility’ (1). In other words, it feels like apps get a fair chance to get noticed on the iPhone, especially combined with the iTunes storefront. The iPad storefront tells a different story.

You’ve made an iPad app. What does it take to gain visibility in the iPad storefront?

in iTunes, the iPad store is structured in the same way as the iPhone store – there is a button to switch between iPhone/iPad apps, right at the top when entering the iTunes app store.

on-device, the situation is different. The iPad has its own storefront. First off, the most obvious thing you might notice is that your app is… …not visible anywhere once it moved out of new releases. Yes, even if it’s moderately successful. This article explains why.

1. Storefront structure

Like the iPhone storefront the iPad store is divided into three categories:

1. Featured apps. This seems to combine hand-picked products with high ranking products from the charts. I’m not covering this in detail here, as the mechanics behind featured apps are (from a marketers’ point of view) obscure.
2. Charts. Yes. That’s just the best selling apps.
3. Categories. We’ll come to that

Somewhat unfortunately, however, the similarity ends here.

2. Browsing by categories

If you pick a category, and you have a ‘moderately successful’ product, you’ll most likely try to select a sub-category (well, guess that’s what moderately successful means, right?). Alas, the iPad store has no sub-categories.

Here’s something even more interesting (or desperate). This is how the games category is organized:

• Spotlight: 17 apps – 17 screenshots, beautifully showcased.
• New and noteworthy: 48 apps
• Mini showcase: 6 apps – 6 icons, clearly visible but somehow demoted towards the bottom of the screen.
• What’s hot: 47 apps

What’s missing? There is no way that buyers can access the charts from this section! All of this is editorial stuff. I’d like to test the overlap between ‘editorial stuff’ and ‘best selling games’. But I’ll need to be doing it another time.

3. Browsing the charts

At first glance, it would appear that we can’t browse charts by category. It actually takes luck or perseverance to discover a small, gray on gray ‘categories’ button at the top left of the screen. Now, this is interesting. We have two category buttons in the layout, and one of these buttons allows browsing charts by category, but it’s not overly visible, so I’d safely assume that a reasonable percentage of iPad users will never notice it(!). Summarized…

• (Maybe depending on bandwidth) a user can view either the top 20,40 or 60 products (I say ‘depending on bandwidth’ because it’s down to my luck how many times I can press the [more] button).
• Users can get charts by categories (enter charts, then top left for categories) but this isn’t all too obvious.

Conclusion

Expect having a hard time with the iPad storefront, here’s an example:

• Antistar ranked #3 in RPG/Adventure (both!) on iPad (Japan). This only lasted for a couple of days, but I’m not boasting, just illustrating a point :)
• At this time, the RPG/Adventure sections of the iPad store (in iTunes, not on-device!) featured the product in ‘What’s hot’ and even ‘New and Noteworthy’.
• The game was hardly visible on-device. You’d have had to open the charts, find the categories button, and press ‘more’ a couple of times to find the product somewhere at the bottom of the top games list. Not featured in games. No sub-categories to have a look into, nada!

Given the storefront allows nothing like a stepped progression, and the iPad market is at least 10-15 times smaller than the iPhone market at the time of this writing, I raise my hat to the courageous developers that make dedicated apps for the iPad. The device is nothing like an iPhone in terms of weight, size and on-screen real estate, so the iPad needs dedicated UI design. Even with moderate competition (~30k apps) newcomers may have a hard time getting their apps noticed.

(1) No. I’m not just saying that because I was featured in top-something recently. I was, but I’m not now – ‘hardly anywhere not, to the least’. I’m not saying the iPhone market is ‘easy’ either. I don’t really think it should be anyway. The market is hard enough that it takes luck or hard work to get apps in the charts, and that’s a sign we have a healthy app market!