Adam from Design

Why I wanted to remake the "CrapApp"

I did not hear about our iOS platform until I was at SERMO for 3 months. One of the first things I heard about it was that our users had nicknamed it the "CrapApp." And to be a little too frank, it was probably an accurate name. The new app was slow, buggy, and had removed features that were a part of our old app. When the product owner came over to me, introduced the app, and asked me for help making the app better, I casually responded:

We have an iOS app?

I was intrigued and I wanted to help. I wanted to work on the project, not because there was so much opportunity for improvement, but because as I started playing around on it, I felt bad using it as a tester. So naturally, I agreed and over a year later we now see monthly posts titled "I love the CrapApp." Pick your battles.

What made our app so bad? Well, instead of counting the way I will sum it up as "Doctors couldn't do what they wanted to." And that could be broken down into 3(4) segments:

1. It was frustrating to use (it was slow and unstable)
2. Doctors couldn't do what they were used to doing (we were missing key user flows)
3. It lacked empathy (I could not figure out what was going on in half the screens)
4. It was missing "standard tech" (this one was purely personal)

My partner in crime and I worked off the books to figure out our best path forward. We were given half a developer in resources, so we decided that since we did not have resources to do a major overhaul, we needed to start at the beginning and improve each flow from the most common use cases, like seeing a post in the newsfeed, to the least common, changing settings. So we started with the newsfeed.

It is hard to see an entire 2-week sprint dedicated to 1 story. You have put all your eggs into one basket of improvement and there is no guarantee of success. When that 1 story becomes 2 sprints, it is even harder. But low-hanging fruit is not always the answer. Sometimes you have to invest in what is important, even if it takes longer to produce. We worked on 3 enhancements over the first few months:

1. We consolidated our navigation and moved our browse mechanic into the top left corner
2. We increased the speed and stability of loading the newsfeed (by a factor of 3)
3. We removed unnecessary actions from the feed cards, which allowed us to surface a translate CTA for foreign language posts.

But there was more value for me. I was embarrassed by the lack of empathy our product had. So I fought to instill that empathy through minor updates like:

• I wanted search to be easier to find, so we brightened up the color
• I could never tell where I was in the app, so I added a more noticeable visual signifier to the selected tab
• Our doctors couldn't find clinical categories, so I raised the profile of clinical categories
• I enlarged the create button in the center of the screen, because I wanted more users to join the conversation.

Our next challenge was how to make the next step a user might take better. We had 3 possibilities:

1. The might load a post
2. They might search for a post
3. They might go to a page for browse.

Our biggest challenge was the post page, so we tackled that first. Our developer completely re-wrote the post controller to stabilize it. Other than the stability, this was the page I struggled using the most. Everything felt out of place to me. I thought the post title was "following" the first time I looked at a post. I did not understand if that was my rating at the top of the post or the aggregate rating. I could not even tap the add comment box because it was below recommended size.

The improvements we made to category pages and to search are my two favorite improvements we made throughout the entire process. Because they were the simplest improvements we made and they were some of the most impactful changes we could have made.

For category pages, we added imagery and copy to our blank pages. Previously they had just been blank

For search, we added a standard spinner and a little message that the app was searching.

Since we had brought stability to the app, the next set of enhancements was all about making our app easier to use. There was an added benefit that some of the improvements allowed me to bring in some standard features I was baffled we were still missing, like TouchID.

We live in a constant state of fear over security. Even though our security policies are outlined in our Terms of Service... we know no one is going to read through that entire document. Apple likes to place easter eggs in their Ts & Cs just to see how long it takes for someone to read through the entire document. So I felt it was important to reassure our users what exactly would happen when they shared a post with a friend or colleague. It was another simple update, but one that could put people's uncertainty to rest.

I was personally annoyed that I had to put in my password every time I wanted to log in. So we implemented Touch ID so that our users could swiftly log in to their account. We also implemented password unmasking so users could review their password if they type it wrong.

Our latest improvement, Auto-translate is an attempt to increase interaction between English speaking doctors, specifically US doctors, with doctors who speak other languages. We did extensive research on our doctors and found that they enjoyed interacting with foreign doctors, but they were overwhelmed when most of their feed would appear in foreign languages. So we implemented a solution that would take away the cognitive load and allow them to interact freely.