Image By: tirtmaster

Since the George Zimmerman trial began on June 10, social media has been abuzz with updates and opinions.

The Twitter trend “#ZimmermanTrial” has attracted a myriad of posts from a crowd including The New Yorker magazine, Piers Morgan, and whomever @TeaPartyCat might be.

This social media buzz might not just be buzz.

You might remember the Casey Anthony case a few years back, when pictures spread through social media of the mother partying just days after her daughter’s disappearance… that may have raised eyebrows in the courtroom.

But this time, the social site of choice is Instagram and the unfortunate target is Don West, one of Zimmerman’s defense attorneys. West was off to an poor start during the opening statement… this gem he shared with the jury:

Let me say, I would like to tell you a little joke…

Here’s how it goes: Knock knock. Who’s there? George Zimmerman. George Zimmerman who? All right. Good. You’re on the Jury. ( silence)

Nothing? That’s funny. After what you folks have been through the last two or three weeks.

Talk about an awkward silence. How insensitive can you get? You’re a defense attorney for a high-profile, highly publicized criminal case involving racism and the killing of a boy, and you start with a knock-knock joke? This isn’t a Charlie Brown television special. Come on.

More recently, West found himself under public scrutiny at the fault of his daughter, Molly. She posted this picture of the family eating Chick-Fil-A ice cream, captioned “We beat stupidity celebration cones #zimmerman #defense #dadkilledit.”

#dadkilledit is an appropriate hashtag?  Evan Benn of the Miami Herald gently reminded Molly via Twitter:

Keep in mind: Dad is representing a man charged with murder.

West says he did not know his daughter posted the Instagram. He apologized for Molly’s behavior, although she continues to post “selfies” from the trial. He received many emails threatening both his daughters with rape.

Can we agree it’s inappropriate to take selfies in the courtroom of a controversial case? Even if social media’s accessibility gone has gone too far, shouldn’t it be the responsibility of the posters to monitor their content? Don West’s daughters have caused him entirely too much strife over a “family picture.”

With such a high profile trial we can expect some more social media stumbles ahead.

Let us know your favorites!

Image By: tirtmaster

Since the George Zimmerman trial began on June 10, social media has been abuzz with updates and opinions.

The Twitter trend “#ZimmermanTrial” has attracted a myriad of posts from a crowd including The New Yorker magazine, Piers Morgan, and whomever @TeaPartyCat might be.

This social media buzz might not just be buzz.

You might remember the Casey Anthony case a few years back, when pictures spread through social media of the mother partying just days after her daughter’s disappearance… that may have raised eyebrows in the courtroom.

But this time, the social site of choice is Instagram and the unfortunate target is Don West, one of Zimmerman’s defense attorneys. West was off to an poor start during the opening statement… this gem he shared with the jury:

Let me say, I would like to tell you a little joke…

Here’s how it goes: Knock knock. Who’s there? George Zimmerman. George Zimmerman who? All right. Good. You’re on the Jury. ( silence)

Nothing? That’s funny. After what you folks have been through the last two or three weeks.

Talk about an awkward silence. How insensitive can you get? You’re a defense attorney for a high-profile, highly publicized criminal case involving racism and the killing of a boy, and you start with a knock-knock joke? This isn’t a Charlie Brown television special. Come on.

More recently, West found himself under public scrutiny at the fault of his daughter, Molly. She posted this picture of the family eating Chick-Fil-A ice cream, captioned “We beat stupidity celebration cones #zimmerman #defense #dadkilledit.”

#dadkilledit is an appropriate hashtag?  Evan Benn of the Miami Herald gently reminded Molly via Twitter:

Keep in mind: Dad is representing a man charged with murder.

West says he did not know his daughter posted the Instagram. He apologized for Molly’s behavior, although she continues to post “selfies” from the trial. He received many emails threatening both his daughters with rape.

Can we agree it’s inappropriate to take selfies in the courtroom of a controversial case? Even if social media’s accessibility gone has gone too far, shouldn’t it be the responsibility of the posters to monitor their content? Don West’s daughters have caused him entirely too much strife over a “family picture.”

With such a high profile trial we can expect some more social media stumbles ahead.

Let us know your favorites!

Hyperlinks are the glue that holds the Web together. Without links, the Web would be a very different place, that’s if it would exist at all. Using a simple HTML element — the <a> element –you can create a bond with any other web page on the Internet. Hyperlinks are magical.

Hyperlinks are fundamental to the Web. They are always just there. Maybe that’s why many site owners and web designers don’t pay them the attention they deserve.

The design of the HTML <a> element is crucial in the user’s reading experience; we should take enough time to design them well.

I’m about to share with you some hyperlink design tips that will lead to a better user experience, enhanced web accessibility, and maybe even bring improvements to your search engine rankings.

Hyperlinks Need to Look Like Hyperlinks

All your hyperlinks need to stand out and clearly say to your readers, "Hey I’m a link. You can click on me."

Hyperlinks should appear interactable.

As web designers, we like to innovate and experiment with different navigation techniques, but sticking with certain design conventions is important.

One of the things that need to remain conventional is our hyperlinks.

According to a study in link readability, the regular Web user sees blue-and-underlined text as links.

Blue and underlined is a good standard to stick to, for no other reason than it’s what we Internet users have been acclimatized ourselves to.

Examples of Hyperlink Designs

Below you will see 3 different hyperlink designs. They are from top newspaper websites.

On the surface, these are all good hyperlink designs. They are some shade of blue. They stand out amongst the surrounding body of text.

But why is The New York Times hyperlink design better than the other two examples?

Allow me to explain.

A Simple Way to Test Your Hyperlink Design

Let me show you an easy method of testing if your hyperlinks clearly stand out from its surroundings.

If you blur and remove the color from the design, you will see what stands out if someone was quickly skimming or reading the page or if someone has particular problems with their vision such as low-vision or color blindness. (Read more about color testing tools.)

You can do this by:

Modifying your CSS property values for <a> and <p> elements to blur them and remove their colors

Taking a screenshot and editing it in Photoshop

1. Image > Adjustments > Desaturate
2. And then Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur

Let’s look back to our earlier examples, but this time we are going to view them when they are blurred and in black and white.

Here is The Guardian’s; you can see that the hyperlink is hard to spot:

BBC uses a bold font weight to create emphasis on their hyperlinks, which is marginally better than The Guardian’s hyperlink design because it at least stands out a bit more.

With The NY Times, it’s still possible to work out where the link is.

The Problem with Underlining Links

Now here’s where it gets tricky.

Here is where hyperlink design gets a bit unsimple.

Here is where our convention of underlining links fail.

There is a study that shows that readability decreases when we underline the text in our hyperlinks.

The study says that underlined links have "seriously underestimated effects on the usability of Web pages."

The study reports that our current convention of underlining hyperlinks "can significantly reduce the readability of the text."

The researchers go as far as saying, "alternatives should be carefully considered for the design of future Web browsers."

Essentially, the researchers are saying that our current conventions for hyperlinks — underlined text — should be changed systemically.

The reason why underlined hyperlinks reduces legibility is that certain characters that go below the base line — characters with descenders extending below the underline such as p, g,  j, and q — are getting affected by the text-decoration: underline CSS property value.

Here is the default style of hyperlinks in the Google Chrome web browser (version 28):

What’s the Solution to This Readability Issue?

We can fix this readability issue ourselves. We don’t have to wait for a change in the way web browsers render underlined text by default.

How? We can use the CSS border-bottom property instead of the CSS text-decoration property to underline our hyperlink elements.

Using the border-bottom property can place the underline a few pixels below the affected characters, making the hyperlink easier to read.

Here is the CSS used for the image above:

a {
    	text-decoration: none;
    	padding-bottom: 3px;
    	border-bottom: 1px solid blue;
    }
    

Even more powerful than just fixing a readability issue, we can also control the underline’s style independently from the hyperlink text color, thereby decoupling these two components of a hyperlink.

For example, we can reduce the hyperlink underline’s distinctiveness to make the text more legible, or we can make it more distinctive to make the entire hyperlink design really stand out.

For the purpose of illustration, I changed the underline color just a little bit, making it a lighter shade of blue:

CSS:

a {
    	text-decoration: none;
    	padding-bottom: 1px;
    	border-bottom: 1px solid #8d8df3;
    }
    

Make Hyperlink Text Longer

This next concept I’m going to discuss goes a bit into content strategy territory (which is a big part of web design process).

Some of you might dislike this suggestion because it deals with the content creation process, and some of you might not have control over that part of the web development process.

The basis for this next tip I’m going to share is Fitts’s Law.

The concept of Fitts’s Law is simple. The law states that the larger something is, the easier it is to see and interact with.

That makes sense, especially in the context of touchscreen devices where the size of your elements matter, where the input device (our fingers) is less precise than a mouse pointer.

Using a finger to click on a hyperlink can be a pain; often times you will have to zoom in for small links, adding an additional barrier towards users getting the action they desire (which is to interact with the hyperlink).

But there is only so much we can do with the style of our links.

We can bold them, underline them, change their color.

How about making them bigger by changing their font size?

If we change the <a> element’s font-size property, it affects the reading flow, and can affect the consistency of our line-heights.

Look at how the continuity of the reading experience is disrupted by increasing the font size of hyperlinks:

So we can’t expand them vertically. We will need to expand them horizontally.

User-friendly SEO Benefits

Having longer anchor text is a user-friendly SEO tactic. That is, hyperlinks with longer link titles is better for users according to Fitts’s Law, but it also has the nice side benefit of being better for search engine rankings.

Anchor text should be descriptive and should tell the user and search engines what the page you are linking to is about, according to Google’s Search Engine Starter Guide.

Say you were writing about walls.

Compare the two ways a hyperlink is used in these sentences below:

"I would like to talk about advanced wall-building techniques. Click here to learn how to build a basic wall because what I will talk about is beyond the basics."

Versus:

"I would like to talk about advanced wall-building techniques. You will need to learn how to build a basic wall because what I will talk about is beyond the basics."

Not only is the second version better for our user, but it is additionally better for search engines too because there is more context than the anchor text that just says "here".

Should Hyperlinks be Blue?

According to a study by Google blue links got more clicks than greenish-blue links.

The study I referenced earlier about underlined text readability likewise affirms that Web users immediately recognize links when they are blue and underlined.

However, in my opinion, not all hyperlinks absolutely need to be blue.

The important thing about hyperlink design is that your links are obviously links.

If you can achieve that with a different color other than the conventional blue color, go for it.

Microsoft Development Network (MSDN) supports this concept.

The fundamental guideline about designing hyperlinks "is users must be able to recognize links by visual inspection alone—they shouldn’t have to hover over an object or click it to determine if it is a link," according to their link design pattern guideline. They didn’t say anything about links needing to be blue.

There are some cases where blue-colored links aren’t the best option.

For example, if the background color makes it hard to read blue links, then usability and readability triumphs over the standard blue link convention.

Always do what is best for the user, even if that means breaking conventions.

Summary

Here are the big ideas:

1. Designing hyperlinks should be well-thought-out.
2. Blurring and removing color from the design is a quick way of demonstrating how well your links stand out.
3. Underlined text is a strong and familiar convention. The problem with underlining text, though, is that readability decreases. The solution is to use CSS to remedy the issue.
4. Using longer descriptive anchor text can improve usability (Fitts’s Law), with the added benefit of being better for search engines.
5. The one thing that is important in the design of hyperlinks is this: hyperlinks should obviously look like hyperlinks.

Related Content

• 5 Usability Mistakes You Shouldn’t Make
• Human Behavior Theories That Can be Applied to Web Design
• Making User Interface Elements Difficult to Use By Intent
• Related categories: Usability and User Interface

About the Author

John Macpherson is a freelance web designer and marketer based in the beautiful Aberdeen, Scotland. Web Payload is a design resource he’ll be launching soon, follow them on Twitter @webpayload. His personal ramblings can be found at @johneemac.

The post Designing the Perfect Hyperlink — It’s Not as Simple as You Think appeared first on Six Revisions.

Our anticipation was building. Between defining our language translation app, sketching it out, obsessively designing and iterating, and juggling other projects — all covered in the first part of our case study — we had been working on Languages for close to a year. It was finally go time.

Even the coolest app in the world is doomed to swiftly descend into the abyss of obscurity if no one knows about it. So, part two of our journey is all about marketing. It turns out that you don’t need a huge marketing budget to get into the top 10 in the App Store.

Seriously, Marketing?

I never thought of myself as a marketer. To me, “marketing” sounded like a dirty word. But when I was building my first app, Grades, I actively watched the indie developers who were consistently building hit apps, and sure enough, along with factors such as delightful design and amazing execution, a key factor to consistent success was great marketing.

The cool part is that, as I found out, marketing doesn’t have to be about spam, meaningless buzzwords or sleazy Twitter follower generators, and it certainly doesn’t have to be expensive. If your product is great, marketing can be genuine, fun and free. Ultimately, it becomes a part of everything you do, without your even realizing it.

Marketing Starts From Day 1

We often have the misconception that marketing is what you do once you’ve launched a product. Too many people have come up to me after a talk or after reading one of my articles and said, “We just launched our app and got a few small blogs to write reviews, but those have generated only a few sales. What’s the magic trick that gets an app on The Verge or featured by Apple?”

Sorry, no magic tricks here. Just a lot of hard work, and that takes a long time. The good news is that it’s completely achievable, but you can’t wait until your app is ready to launch to get started.

Do It Yourself

You would think that the ideal situation is to have a boatload of cash and hire a public relations (PR) firm.

Wrong.

You — the designer, the developer, the founder — are the very best person to market the app.

Why?

1. The press love to hear directly from the folks in the trenches.
2. A lot of PR agencies don’t get the nuances of app marketing.
3. Relationships with journalists is the currency of PR. Even if a PR firm landed you some great articles, they would take those relationships with them, leaving you with no long-term benefits. If you do it yourself, you will be cultivating those relationships, making future launches a lot easier.

There are definitely some exceptions. I know some marketers who really understand the space and who deliver results. But in general, doing it yourself is better, especially if you are in this game for the long haul.

Make Friends

Later in this post, we’ll talk about marketing tactics — crafting our pitch, drawing lists of blogs and so forth — but those tactics don’t mean a whole lot unless you understand something very fundamental about grassroots marketing: It’s all about the people.

The problem is that we view big websites like The Verge as monolithic black boxes into which we insert a pitch and hope for the best. But who runs The Verge? Real people with flesh and bones. Who runs the App Store? People. How do you get featured? By winning the hearts of those people.

These days, getting my apps featured isn’t that difficult. Why? Because over the past four years, I have made friends with people at almost every major venue that features apps, including Apple. Now, whenever I release a product, I can direct message a few people on Twitter and send a few emails and, assuming my product is at the caliber that my friends have come to expect from me, be fairly confident that launch day will go pretty well. That’s the power of people-focused marketing.

Remember that just a few years ago, I was an obscure college freshman, starting at ground zero. No apps. No friends. Not even any connections. So, if I can do it, anyone can.

How did I do it?

• List influential people.
  It started by making a list of influential folks in the iOS industry: app designers and developers (David Barnard, Phill Ryu, etc.), technology journalists who cover apps, folks at Apple. Limiting this list to tech journalists would have been a huge mistake. In the app world, the top players know each other, so a connection with one influential app developer could very well lead to a connection with Apple or the press — and the iOS community is chockfull of great people who love to share their experiences. I’ve compiled Twitter lists for top app makers, app journalists, and Apple employees.
• Actively monitor.
  I actively watched what these people were doing, looking for opportunities to connect in tasteful ways. Suppose Phill Ryu had a question on Twitter that I could answer, or Ellis Hamburger wrote an article on The Verge that I really enjoyed — I took those opportunities to engage with folks on their turf. I never spammed them with my apps or my blog — once someone likes you, they’ll naturally check out your stuff.
• Go where they are.
  Everyone is on Twitter, so I made sure that my profile there looked interesting and I got active. I went to conferences such as the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) and South by Southwest and actively got out of my shell to meet the people around me and the people on my lists. Because I was a designer, I also hung out in communities like Dribbble and Forrst to connect with other designers. Finally, I occasionally emailed influential people — I didn’t spam them, but I would say something nice about an article they wrote or ask a close-ended question about something they were interested in (close-ended because you are not likely to hear back on questions that require long answers).
• Do cool stuff.
  If you aren’t building cool apps that are innovative and well designed, then gaining respect in the app community will be tough, and respect is a pillar of friendship. You don’t necessarily need to have apps in the App Store, though. I made a lot of my connections before my first app ever launched. A big reason for that is that I blogged and tweeted about what I was learning from app developers about making successful apps, and I posted very introspective thoughts about developing my first app. That caught people’s attention, and doing that well is a great way to gain respect before you’ve actually “made it” in the industry. This is important, because if you’ve gotten someone’s attention by talking to them at a conference or by engaging them on Twitter, then you need to gain their respect in order for them to take the leap of following you on Twitter (which, as weird as it sounds, can be a big deal in establishing a lasting friendship).
• Cultivate long-term friendships.
  Once I established a connection with someone, I cultivated it by discussing issues on Twitter, in email and at conferences, giving them beta access to my apps, requesting feedback on projects (especially high-profile ones), and saying something nice about them once in a while — I don’t know one human being who doesn’t have at least a smidgen of ego.

This might sound a bit manipulative when broken down like that, but it’s really just about being a friendly, interesting person and going out of your shell a bit to meet the great folks at the top of our industry.

I like how David Barnard put it:

“There are some really cool people in this industry. If all you do is beg for coverage, you’re missing out on getting to know some great folks.”

If you follow this advice, then the advice below will produce great results. If not, I can’t guarantee a whole lot of fruit from the more tactical stuff.

Launch Plan: Concentrated Blast

The App Store is not the Web. On the Web, you can launch softly, get some articles here and there, and build your user base over time.

If you are trying to sell a mass-market app for $0.99, then scattered marketing doesn’t work. To get hundreds of thousands of downloads, you need to make an effort and get the app to “chart,” to blast up the App Store’s sales charts. Once your ranking is high enough, you will experience a snowball effect because the charts are where most people look for apps.

With that in mind, we prepared as much as we could before the launch in order to make the blast as concentrated as possible.

Building Buzz

A couple months before the launch, we started building anticipation. The goal was to collect email addresses, Twitter and Facebook accounts that we could reach come launch day.

Blogging

We started by writing blog posts about the making of Languages. We posted our UX mapping process, progress reports, rants on gestures, among other things. Blogging played a large role in building our brand and credibility with previous apps, but a lesser role for this launch. It was probably still worth it, though, because continuing to build your blog’s readership is always good.

Twitter

I like to use my personal Twitter account (@jerols) most of the time, but we decided to create a @languagesapp Twitter account to make it easy for us and others to refer to the app without having to link to it (“Putting the final touches on @languagesapp”). My followers could then click the Twitter user name to find out more information about it. While it was hard to remember to post consistently to the @languagesapp account, I posted a teaser screenshot once in a while and retweeted it from my personal and company accounts, giving the @languagesapp account more exposure.

With fairly minimal effort, we were able to garner about 500 followers for the account.

Facebook

I’m honestly not a Facebook marketing expert and didn’t spend a lot of time experimenting with it, but I did set up a page and post screenshots and status updates once in a while. It got about 50 likes, half of which were friends. I could have experimented more and gotten a lot more likes, but it didn’t seem like the most effective use of my time.

Dribbble

As a designer, it was only natural to post my UI mockups to Dribbble, a design community in which you can get great feedback and sometimes get viral sharing of your designs. I’m not a Dribbble pro, and my designs have never made it to Dribbble’s famous front page, but I did get some valuable feedback and a few thousands views to boot.

Teaser Website

We always build a teaser website a month or two before launch to collect email addresses of people who would like to know when the app launches. About 200 folks subscribed. Not something to write home about, but every little bit helps. Some of the subscribers were influencers in the industry, which is always good.

Pitching The Press

Two weeks to go. Pitch time. I was fortunate enough to have been able to show an early build to some of my journalist friends at the WWDC, so I already had some really hot doors to knock on.

Warm Calls

Most of the journalists I knew personally already followed me on Twitter, so, in most cases, the best way to initiate the pitch was to send them a direct message on Twitter, teasing them with a screenshot and asking whether they wanted to play with a prerelease build. These guys are super-busy, so I didn’t hear back from all of them, but many of them were on board.

We used TestFlight to send out prerelease builds to the press. Most of them had TestFlight accounts already, so getting a build to them was pretty easy. Later on, once the app was finalized and approved by Apple, we replaced TestFlight with promo codes in our pitches, which are more convenient. (Promo codes are valid after the app is approved by Apple but before it is available to the public.)

After sending out the builds, I sent the journalists personalized thank-you notes, which also communicated the basic pitch and hinted at some advanced features to check out.

Our programming partner, Sonico, also had some great connections. So, they contacted the journalists with whom they had the strongest relationships, and we contacted ours.

Cold Calls

While warm calls are ideal, I’ve had some success with cold calls — i.e. pitching journalists and individuals with whom I don’t already have a strong connection. I created a spreadsheet with all of the websites I wanted to pitch and prioritized them by how influential I perceived them to be. For the really big websites, I identified the best individual journalists to contact and sent them a personalized pitch. For the smaller websites, I generally just wrote to their tips@ email address and only personalized the “Hey, [website’s name] team” greeting.

As expected, we got only a few responses from the cold calls, but it was still worth it.

When Personalization Goes Wrong

I generally personalize the greeting and first sentence of my emails, especially for journalists whom I know. Unfortunately, this time, I had a “brilliant” idea: to refer to the journalist’s website in the middle of the email, to make it even more personal!

Bad idea. I forgot about that reference in one of my pitches and left in the name of a competing website. Talk about embarrassing and unprofessional. From then on, I decided to keep it simple. Don’t include personalized references anywhere but at the beginning of the email, and always double-check before sending! Thankfully, the journalist was a friend and took it well.

The Pitch

Rather than talk about what I think makes for a good pitch, I’ll just show you mine.

Hey [journalist’s name],

[Personalized message to the journalist and introduction to the pitch.]

Launching in a week, Languages is the fastest, most reliable and most affordable offline translation app to hit the App Store. Most translation apps break down when you need them most: traveling without an Internet connection. Languages gives you the peace of mind that you’ll never be stuck without reliable translation. While other offline translators charge $5 to $20 for a single language, Languages packs 12 common language pairs into one app for $0.99.

• Price: $0.99
• Launch Date: Next Thursday, October 25
• Video Demo: http://vimeo.com/51481324
• Website: http://www.languagesapp.com
• Press Kit: http://www.languagesapp.com/LanguagesPressKit.zip
• Promo Code: WJ9HXJNAPL73

Please let me know if you would be interested in doing a review, and I would be happy to provide more information or answer any questions.

Thanks,
Jeremy Olson
Tapity – Founder
704.421.8242
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/@jerols
Website: http://www.tapity.com

It certainly wasn’t perfect (if you want to learn how to make a perfect pitch, you should probably read Pitch Perfect by Erica Sadun and Steve Sande), but it was pretty short, gave the basic value proposition pretty quickly, and provided the key information that journalists like. It also included the press kit, a folder full of screenshots, the app icon at various sizes, and a press release.

Video or No?

A lot of great apps launch with an amazing launch video. It’s a great idea if you can afford to hire a video producer or can shoot it yourself well… like, really well. But whether you make a video for the public or not, definitely make a short one for the press. Journalists would rather spend 30 seconds watching your app in action than spend a few minutes trying to “get it” for themselves on their phones.

In our case, we didn’t have time to shoot a professional video, so we just made a short video for the press, showing off all of the features. It was pretty rough, but it did the job.

Go Time

“Sorry, can’t talk right now. I’m super-busy launching Languages.” That was typical launch-day conversation. You would think that launching an app is a pretty good excuse to do nothing. It’s not. While I might have responded to some urgent questions from journalists or taken an emergency call with Apple here and there, this was really a day to kick back and watch all of our hard work pay off.

The majority of the day consisted of one activity: refreshing. Refreshing Twitter search for “Languages app” to see who was talking about it. Refreshing my “mentions” feed to see who was saying “Congrats!” Refreshing Google’s “past hour” search results for “languages” to uncover any new reviews.

Most of all, launch day can be characterized quite accurately as one of desperate and incessant refreshing of the App Store to see where Languages stood in the infamous top charts. It is the ultimate stroke of the ego after a year of blood, sweat and tears. This, folks, is what dreams are made of.

Results

Aside from a few blunders on my part from miscommunications about when journalists could start posting reviews, the launch went even better than I expected.

We got some amazing reviews from some of my favorite journalists.

We blasted the announcement to Sonico’s substantial mailing list, the Languages mailing list, our blog and social media channels, resulting in a lot of buzz on Twitter and a swift climb up the App Store’s charts. Before long, we reached the number one spot in the “Reference” category.

Apple

Our relationship with Apple is one of my company’s greatest assets and one that took time to cultivate. Getting featured prominently by Apple is one of the best things that can happen to your app. It will usually get you far more downloads than any coverage from the press.

When people ask me how I’ve gotten all of my apps to be featured by Apple, I usually recommend a big marketing push during launch in order to get Apple’s attention. This time, though, we were fortunate enough to have piqued Apple’s interest a few months before Languages launched. We were fairly certain that Apple would feature us, but were pleasantly surprised to be featured as the “Editor’s Choice” in many countries and very prominently in the “New & Noteworthy” section in others.

Blast Off!

Concentrating all of our marketing on launch day really paid off. With over a dozen press reviews, thousands of tweets and retweets, a blast to our mailing lists, and an important feature from Apple, Languages blasted into the top-25 overall paid apps on launch day. The snowball effect kicked in, and by day two, Languages peaked at number 5 in the US.

Results from the other countries were staggering, with the app hitting the number one spot in France and a few other European countries. Over 70% of our sales came from outside the US. Suffice it to say, app localization, the App Store description, and the screenshots that showed most of the major European languages paid off.

Whew, what a ride! I could finally check off one of my life goals: beating all incarnations of Angry Birds in the charts, if only for a short period of time.

Aftermath

Languages managed to stay in the top 100 for a couple weeks, and then slowly but surely made its inevitable descent down, down, down into the App Store abyss. Fortunately, Languages found a pretty comfortable resting spot around number 30 (and then later number 50) in the “Reference” category’s top-100 list.

We were pretty happy with the few hundred downloads it was getting per day. It wasn’t going to make us millionaires, but most of the money you make from these kinds of hit-based apps will be from major launches — i.e. major updates, the iPad version, etc. — so, the decent consistent sales are a bonus.

Support

Support doesn’t just mean updating the app with new features. One of the most time-consuming parts of making a popular app is addressing all of the bugs, feature requests and comments you receive via email and Twitter every day. During launch week, we were getting hundreds of emails a day. No joke.

Thankfully, the comments were mainly positive, asking for new languages and features.

I tried to respond to a lot of the emails, but pretty soon we realized that support was a full-time job, so we shifted responsibility to one of Sonico’s support guys. That being said, we did look through the emails to find recurring bugs reports and feature requests so that we could address them in the next version.

I expected users to ask for things like voice support and conjugation, but it turns out the most popular feature request was to be able to customize the bookshelf and to hide dictionaries not being used. That blew my mind, but we made sure to include that in the next version.

The most negative feedback was from users who said that, while the interface was great, they couldn’t find certain words in the dictionary. We learned from the Apple Maps fiasco that the robustness of an app’s content can easily overshadow the beauty of the interface. While our content wasn’t perfect, it was pretty decent, so fortunately we didn’t reenact the Apple Maps disaster, but we did need to work on it going forward.

Raising the Price

We decided to go for the mass market at launch and set the app at $0.99. If you are trying to hit the top charts, the app needs to be an impulse buy.

Having gone with a launch-sale approach, we raised the price to $2.99 once the app fell out of the top 100. Raising the price when the app is falling out of the charts might seem counterintuitive, but you actually make more money that way. The only reason we ever set it at $0.99 was to get the app to the top charts and to keep it there as long as possible. Once it falls out of the charts, the people who will find it are not impulse shoppers; they will have to actively look for it and will be willing to pay a higher price for it. This has worked out well for us.

Conclusion

Wow, that was quite a journey. If you’ve scrolled to the end for a reader’s digest, you’re in luck. The big lessons to take away are these:

1. Yes, marketing matters! Start way before your app launches.
2. Do it yourself by making friends in the industry.
3. Build buzz through social media.
4. Concentrate the marketing in blasts.
5. Spend time getting your pitch right.

The App Store is certainly not easy street. Building a hit app takes a ton of hard work, and there are never any guarantees. That being said, it sure is a fun ride, and there is still plenty of opportunity for those who are willing to work at it. So, get out there and build something great!

(al) (il)

© Jeremy Olson for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

By this time, I can assume you’ve formed some type of opinion of the iPhone’s newest operating system. Some love it, lots (of designers) hate it, but either way, I’m sure you have an opinion about it.

The design community seems to have a pretty unanimous opinion that the new look of iOS7 is a bit of a fail. From the extremely colorful icons to the inconsistent stylistics, I’m sure there’s something out there a great software user interface designer can point out for fixing.

What should iOS7 look like?

Complaining about the design of iOS7 gets us nowhere. I live by the idea that one shouldn’t complain about a situation unless they have a fairly good solution. Well, a whole bunch of designers obviously agree, because they’ve been redesigning elements of the new operating system. 

Some of these changes are subtle corrections whilst others are bold designs completely rethought from scratch. Fortunately, designers have given us alternatives to stack against the designs of Jony Ive. Let’s jump right in.

Anton Kovalev

As we know, the designers at Apple decided to completely ditch their skeuomorphic design and go with something a bit flatter. Apple kind of redefined ‘flat’ as they just used some different gradients. This designer created a flat UI that sticks with the concept from top to bottom. The consistency in colors is also important because it gives the icons a cohesive feel.

Alexandr Nohrin

This redesign doesn’t stray too far away from what Jony Ive has already deemed his new software design. A major issue with the icons of iOS 7 were the gradients and how inconsistent they were. Some were from light to dark, others were from dark to light and others just seemed to be pretty random. Nevertheless, this designer found a way to make it fairy cohesive while taking a stab at redesigning some of the other icons.

Ariel Verber 

We talked about flat design and how Apple has tried to use it better. This redesign isn’t just flat, but it’s extremely simple as all the icons are essentially white and a single colored background. This is even a different layout for the iPhone where the clock is put on top of the icons. This is just a completely rethought design.

Jackie Tran Anh

Again, this is a pretty safe redesign of iOS7 that tries some different things with new and rethought icons. The icon backgrounds seem to still be a bit less consistent, however there seems to be a rather smooth feel for the actual icon.

Leo Drapeau

I really like this set of icons because they decided to use a coherent style for the icons. Of major importance is the new, redesigned look of the compass and stock icons that really seem to stand out on iOS 7 because they don’t feel as minimal and structured as the others. This designer did just that.

Pascal Assaleh

These icons for iOS7 seem to be extremely precise. Each icon’s background has a subtle gradient that adds a bit of depth to it that makes it more like a button. There’s also a very thin shadow under the actual icon. I’d be very interested to see how this redesign looks and feels in the hand. It seems like it could offer a wonderful experience.

Nicole Calace

Of course, we will continue to see lots of designs that utilize flat color, so here’s another. First, the design of the icons is really nice and almost gives off a bit of a vintage feel with the color choices and the ultra-simplicity of the design. I like how each icon was given that added shine at the top to give a little bit of something else.

Sam Nissinen

Lots of people took to the icons to redesign for Apple, but there are many other things that could be redesigned for iOS7. One of my personal dislikes was the control panel. It originally seems a bit busy while being monotonous. This designer does a great job of cleaning that up by adding some color and by using smaller, neater icons.

Venkatesh Aiyulu

This design seems to stray away just a bit from what’s new in iOS 7. Obviously, this designer decided to re-imagine it on a leash and came up with some wonderful stuff. The chunkier icons and subtle gradients are pretty consistent throughout all the icons.

Isis Marques 

How do you fix a set of icons that people keep saying isn’t cohesive enough? Well, you put them on the same color and then you use the same style to make them. These minimalist icons attempt to give users an easy way to use iOS7. While they lack some excitement, it’s hard to argue how well all these icons go together.

Naxo Garcia

I like this set of icons because the designer didn’t really dismiss the feel of the new icons. These are still bright and have flat elements. It’s just easier to see the completeness in thought. One of the things you have to consider when doing something like this is how much to keep and how much to drop.

Andrei Brink

I love this attempt at a flat UI because it’s especially unwaivering (no gradients or shadows) and has a very mature look. It’s really hard, in my opinion, to create a flat concept and keep it looking adult rather than “toy-ish.” There’s a lot of detail to these icons that really give it that extra notch of beauty that it needs.

Ida Swarczewskaja

With some slight variations (except for the total re-design of the compass icon), this is one of the many re-imagined concepts that just attempts to build on top of what Apple already has. I think with another stab that the newsstand icon, this could really be a legitimate redesign for the new operating system.

Alexis Jossart 

I absolutely love this redesign because it doesn’t seem to be caught up on trends of the moment, but about what really looks good on a smartphone and what makes sense. The icons are gorgeous (especially the Twitter and the Camera ones). The other screens for the redesign are super clean and well thought out for users. This is an overall great redesign.

Dmitry Kovalenko

First off, I like how the designer took all the icons and simplified them. He used richer colors for his icons and then added this beautiful drop shadow underneath it all to really set it off. The new icons just seem to be a more mature version of what’s already been created by Apple. 

Conclusion

While many of the reviews on the completely redesigned iOS 7 are extremely mixed, it doesn’t take away from the fact that we must give Apple some credit. I remember reading somewhere about how difficult it is to launch a new product or launch a rebrand. The idea is that not everyone’s going to love it at first, and you’re sure to hit some hiccups every now and again. Doing something new and different is a process, one that isn’t necessarily considered a hit over night. Because of this, I have to give tremendous respect to Jony Ive for taking the extremely popular iOS in a different direction, one that many of us never thought we’d see. Hopefully, on the way to perfecting iOS 7, some criticisms are accepted and built upon. Until then, let’s enjoy something new!

Which of these redesigns is your favourite? Do you prefer Apple’s version? Let us know in the comments.

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