Good, Bad, Ugly

A while ago, several subscribers asked me to do app critiques. I sent out a survey to see if there is interest, and it turned out there is! Thank you if you responded.

I'm going to share a good, a bad and an ugly example I have encountered recently.

Good: We Are Warriors

We Are Warriors is a simple mobile game where you build tiny little armies. You collect resources to progress through different eras of warfare. It's quite simple in visuals and the game mechanics are straight-forward. There are many pay-to-progress paths; and even if you don't pay you can still enjoy a slow but satisfying gameplay. Also, the graphics and sounds are super cute.

The best part of the game is how it handles ads. You can get extra resources if you are willing to watch ads. This is very common practice in mobile casual games, but We Are Warriors do this very respectfully. Many mobile games require you to sit through long ads with deceptive content as soon as you look at your screen. You finished a level? Ad. You unlocked an item? Ad. You clicked on a button that says "Skip ad?" Ad. Rollic is especially terrible in this regard and unfortunately they are not alone.

We Are Warriors strike a good balance between free and pleasant gameplay, ad revenue and in-game purchases. I also felt the same way when I played Mob Control (though their gameplay is just out of control now, I stopped playing a couple of months ago) and Wonder Blast. These are good experiences.

Bad: TOBi

Do you know TOBi? It is the chatbot tacked on to I mean built into the Vodafone app in Turkiye. It was one of the first chatbots on the Turkish telecoms, and it is fair to assume that it was a part of the "omg we need to be the first to ship" wave.

I had extremely low expectations when I first used it years ago because, it's a chatbot:

• It is a lot harder to discover what you can do with a commandline tool aka a chatbot than a graphical user interface where you can use all your visual capabilities to navigate and make sense of the options available to you.
• Tasks that can be done with only a couple of taps take multiple screens and prompts in a chatbot. The flows are more complicated, so you get more errors with a chatbot.
• Most chatbots speak marketingese: an abhorrent language oozing with fake optimism, repulsive happiness, and tone deafness. It assumes that you are so happy to interact with it, but in reality, you are either tricked or forced into this conversation.
• Chatbots just don't work in most cases. I mean from a functional perspective. Because they are tacked on at the last minute without much thinking, they are not integrated well into whatever services they need to execute in the background.

And no surprise, TOBi, like many other chatbots, ticked these boxes quite successfully. So I stopped touching it. Actually I stopped using the Vodafone app altogether because of how terrible it is, but that's for another post.

The only reason to have a chatbot on your app: Marketing Department

The only department that asks for a chatbot feature is the marketing department. Your title might be product something or design something, but if you think that a chatbot is a good solution, you probably belong closer to the marketing team than a product or a design team. TÖBe estafurullah you might even be a C-level who promotes a chatbot...

I have a feeling that the Vodafone marketing department knows that TOBi doesn't work either. Why? Because I get messages every few weeks to remind me to interact with TOBi. Here is what they say, Turkish and Google Translated English side by side to be as unbiased as possible:

Dear TOBi, of course I couldn't forget you. I want to, but you keep reminding me with templated messages that are so thoughtful that even the URL in the message reflects on how desperate the organization is to attract customers to this useless feature in your app.

I can understand how teams want to attract and activate users towards their features. However, this tone deaf approach is exactly what distances them from your brand, not just your feature.

And oh by the way, do you know what you get when you visit the link?

A 404 page 🤗 Give it a try if you don't believe me :)

Ugly

The Vodafone experience is pretty bad but it is not ugly. I say that because I can see ineptitude rather than malice. However, it's a different story with Yapı Kredi.

Yapı Kredi is a popular bank in Turkiye. We have our mortgage (ev kredisi) with them. Our payments are monthly, so I need to log in at least once every month to make my payment. Of course, getting a loan with a more reasonable rate implies having to sign up for bunch of other services from the bank, such as auto-bill pay, life insurance, health insurance, home insurance, insurance insurance, top tier credit card with the highest yearly fee, retirement plans, savings accounts and more. And obviously all of these products are disjoint. You need to sign up for them separately and manage their cycles separately. That means, I need to log in to the app almost every week to see if I have missed anything.

Do you know what that means? IT MEANS THAT I LOVE THE APP BECAUSE I AM LOGGING IN EVERY WEEK!

After each login, I am greeted with a full screen popup that tries to sell me a service. It is quite funny that sometimes it tries to sell me one of the products that have already been shoved through I mean added to my product portfolio.

The full screen popup luckily has three buttons: Take me to the product / remind me / I'm not interested. I give Yapı Kredi credit for including the last option, though I'm almost certain that it just closes the screen and doesn't register the fact that I am actually, deeply, profoundly not interested.

After I dismiss this full screen popup, I see my dashboard. And as soon as the shadow of my thumb falls on the screen, I get another popup and sells me a similar product.

This is what my login experience looks like with Yapı Kredi:

Do those popups increase conversions? Probably. Do people buy the services promoted in those popups? Quite likely. When I am done with my mortgage payment, will I completely detach myself from Yapı Kredi? Almost certain.

So what do designers do...

Designers are the ones that stand in the way of these terrible experiences. They are usually not being listened to, but at least they are the voice of reason and champions of nice, humanly experiences in organizations. When set up right, the design teams create the healthy friction against abusing the customers with experiences that are deteriorating every day.