marco make a convincing case about the “two” app stores; but this section really struck me:
The primary screenshots of each game also show a clear difference for people who did select either app for more information:
Skee-Ball is immediately recognizable, well-known, and obvious. But Ramp Champ looks likely to lose out on nearly every impulse purchase from people who don’t want to spend much time looking into it — which is nearly every buyer for App Store A.
It’s really remarkable just how terrible most screenshots are. You’ve got four or five slots to focus attention on what’s best in your application, and that’s assuming a buyer is willing to look at more than one or even two. But even major developers tend to waste them all on views that either aren’t instructive, or repeatedly bash the same point into the ground without really illuminating overall functionality. Bento, to name but one, uses three of five screens to show us that:
- different kinds of libraries are possible
- you can use something akin to coverflow to choose between them
–[AND]–
And this from a $5 app created by FileMaker, a subsidiary of a company called Apple. Nothing in there to imply that you can sort, sync, and customize databases between your phone and computer. Not that those are important features, apparently. Why not show us a to-do list, a shopping list sorted by need, a library inventory, and tasting notes complete with pictures and a calculation field for scores? Anything, really, would be better than what they do show: Hey! We have some different stationery pads in here.
And it’s not just Apple/FileMaker. Most apps, it seems, suffer from the “does this even do what I think it will?” syndrome with regard to screen-shots. Presumably, the creators hope you’ll just roll the dice on a sub-$X purchase such that the most basic visual information is all that’s required. The fact that most people won’t, at least not the people in the “B” app store, those with exceedingly specific ideas about what this app “needs to do,” figures into Marco’s overall equation mightily. It lands those apps with lousy descriptions or poor screen-shots directly in the “A” store, where I think it’s pretty well established: nobody cares what you’re doing unless it’s cheap and/or very popular for some reason.
Worth noting that Tumblr’s app: excellent selection of screen shots that detail exactly what it is you can do with it in informative little usage scenarios. And it’s a free app.
Lemkin 