Research, Part 1 – “Let’s get some apps!”

My idea was to have a virtual dunking booth where you could put someone you know—or maybe someone you are glad not to know—in the booth and dunk them. Wouldn’t you feel better if you could dunk someone who is really driving you crazy? Of course, a real dunking booth would be best, but wouldn’t it make you feel pretty good to dunk the person over and over while sitting right in your own home or desk or café (or while looking at them and they don’t why you are laughing maniacally)?

I tapped my family to brainstorm about how this could work as an iPhone app. We decided the first thing to do was to take Dad’s old iPhone and try lots of apps.

Because it was an ‘old’ phone, I was able to set up an iTunes account without signing up for phone service (phew). We scanned the app store via the various “top” lists and “favorites” lists. We did searches on many different terms to see what was there that might be like what we wanted to do—or might just be interesting to each of us. Initially, we focused our search on the “entertainment” category where we assumed our app belonged. We quickly expanded our search to look at games and other categories for research and for fun. I am sure we barely scratched the surface despite having read through several 100s of descriptions and downloading many of those. From this effort we found a lot of junk, but there were also some great apps. The things we all discovered through this research, even when an app didn’t directly relate to our own app idea, taught us how to use the phone and how other people had imagined ways to use it. This was invaluable.

In case it is of interest, here are some of our favorites from that early research: We all liked iChalky. I enjoyed Peggle and Bookworm (hours of sleep lost…) as well as Fluid and Spawn. The kids (ages 3-10 at the time) loved Jellycar and Trace and Toobz. My husband gravitated to Scrabble and some news apps. Suddenly, everyone was saying “where is MY iPhone?” We got a little distracted by the fun of it all.

It WAS fun, even for me. I am not much of a technophile, so it was enlightening to learn first-hand what everybody was so excited about and to feel it myself. The interface was so different than anything I knew about. When I began, the concept of playing games on a device or reading or making art on it was absolutely alien to me. I was thinking to myself “how can I effectively develop an app for a platform and an audience that I know nothing about and for which I have no burning yen?” As we worked our way across the sea of apps, this changed, significantly—necessarily.