http://www.doubleencore.com/2013/06/3-ways-to-improve-the-app-discovery-process/

Three Ways to Improve App Discovery

Written by: Jason Ary on June 18

Discovery has been a long-standing problem for consumers and the media industry, and we’ve recently seen the problem migrate into mobile.

From TV to music, OnDemand to mobile apps, consumers are being presented with more and more options, yet seem to have greater and greater difficulties finding good content and products to consume.

Today there are more channels than ever on TV, but it seems like it can be impossible to find anything good on. There’s an abundance of good music and talented groups, but if you rely on mainstream radio or Billboard, you’ll only hear the same 10 songs over and over and over. Mobile has followed a very similar path. While there are literally hundreds of thousands of apps to chose from, just a handful generate a majority of the total app downloads. As of late 2012, just 750 of the 750,000+ apps available on Google and Apple weregenerating over 50% of ALL app downloads. In mobile, it’s not the 1% that’s getting all the love, it’s the .1%. Discovery is now an issue affecting literally 99.9% of the mobile app industry.

As the iTunes App Store quickly grew from a few hundred apps to a few hundred thousand, the discovery issue became pretty apparent.  As the number of apps exploded, the App Store was slow to offer more robust search functionality to introduce users to all these new apps. Users who often gravitated to the ‘Top Charts’ or the ‘New and Noteworthy’ sections of the App Store to find new apps didn’t find an expanded selection or more granular search abilities, instead they just had to spend more time searching to stumble on the apps that mattered. Users flocked to these areas to find suitable apps, but fewer and fewer apps were making it into these high-visibility areas.

With the app landscape the size it is today, and iOS 7 on the horizon, I feel now is a great time for Apple to take a step-back, re-evaluate how they’e used their App Store in the past, and invest in making it a more suitable app discovery portal.  Below are three ways I feel Apple can take this to the next level:

1. Enhanced and Deeply Curated Selections – I think many users find plenty of value in areas currently curated today, like the ‘New and Noteworthy’ section of iOS. The only problem with these areas are the lists are too short…..I’d like to see more options, and those options broken down on a more granular level. Give me a ‘Top BBQ and grilling apps’ curated list over Memorial Day or a ‘Fantasy Football HQ’ list of top apps to prepare me for my Fantasy Football draft. There are enough apps out there that we need more granular recommendations, and don’t just give me 2 or 3 recommendations, there are hundreds of thousands of apps out there, show me what’s REALLY available to download and use.

2. Social and digital integration – Consumers traditionally hate sharing information until there’s some incentive for doing so. Getting more personalized and valuable recommendations on what apps to download might provide enough to incentive to make this a mass-accepted tactic. For example, through a Facebook single sign-in process, the app store could learn a lot about me and what I like based on what I have in my profile, providing a detailed and personalized list of app recommendations based specifically off my interests. Furthermore, if you posted an upcoming trip to your Timeline, the app store could actually make recommendations on a currency convertor app or other travel-related apps to download, providing me recommendations on what I’m doing in the future, not just what I’ve done in the past.

3. A more visual approach to search – Well over 30% of American households now own a tablet. Smartphone ownership is nearing 60%, with a large chunk of new sales going to the large-screen ‘phablet’ line of devices. As more people move to touchscreens, and big ones at that, app stores need to embrace the increased screen real estate they have to work with.

The first place to start is to give more prominence to app screenshots. Allow app screenshots to go full-screen, and give them greater prominence in the app store description.

Second, it’s time to look at embedding app demo videos (and even demos themselves) directly into the app description page. Mobile and video go together very well, and the limited screen size of a tablet or smartphone when compared to a TV makes it harder to convey the look and feel of an application in just a few screenshots. It’s time to evolve and bring videos and demos to the app store and app description pages, it will do a much better job conveying the look, feel and opportunity of the app than a few static screenshots.

It will be interesting to see what Apple does with iOS 7 to address this ongoing problem of discovery. How do you think Apple might approach or re-adjust using the iTunes App Store as a discovery vehicle?  Make sure you let us know in the comments below.