I've spent most of my time at Printful taking care of the Mobile Apps experience and trying to figure out how to shift from a three-years-old design and assumptions to something that really focuses on what the users are expecting from our portable experience.
We start from a strange position: most of our users get their tasks done on a Desktop computer and use the mobile experience just to check our catalog, their orders process or to have a look around their statistics. We do have more features in the app for users to fulfill their tasks, but they weren't engaging with them as we expected.
Something bigger than a job to get done
The first iterations of the app relied purely on "things to do". Checking the user's orders, looking at their statistics, browsing through our catalog, etc. It was a very functional experience.
We realized after some interviews that users where happy with the functionalities. Technicaly, the app offers all they need to. So we needed to understand and discern why is it that users want an app, that they're happy with the functionalities... but they're not engaging with.
User intervews and contextual design
The more feedback we got from our users, the more we understood that having a copy of the functionalities on our website just wasn't going to cut it for engaging, so we started designing small experiences that made sense for mobile, complementary to the experience our users have on our website.
We started designing small experiences that made sense for mobile, complementary to the experience our users have on our website.
Turns out, users were engaging a lot with these small experiences!
Since then, we've been designing exclusive and custom experiences in our mobile platforms that add to their website flows in a way that's meaningful to our users.
While shifting to this custom mobile experience for our users, we decided we need to include them in every step of the way. Thankfully, we've got very active Facebook group of users that are interested in participating in our screenings, tests and interviews and it's thanks to all of them that we've been able to build a better app for them.
