Pulse mobile app
Overview
I led the 0-to-1 launch of App Annie Pulse, a companion app to the company's flagship Intelligence web SaaS product. Pulse introduced groundbreaking new AI-powered news, insights, rankings, and more, boosting platform engagement by 25%, and earning a 4.9 app store rating in it's first year.
Challenge
App Annie Intelligence is the company’s flagship SaaS product, providing third party market data and insights for every app in the app stores. By design, Intelligence is available only on the web, as larger screens are necessary for performing data analysis.
However, in reviewing our product analytics, we noticed an increasing number of visits from mobile devices, despite the non-responsive experience. So we embarked on an initiative to learn what users were trying to do on mobile, and explore how we could better serve them in that context.
Discovery
Research
My team and I interviewed/surveyed over a hundred users to:
- Identify the types of data they would want most in the mobile context
- Understand what apps and news they use to inform their work
Hypothesis
Based on the research, we found that mobile users wanted to:
- Quickly lookup and benchmark competition
- Keep tabs on market movers
- Get insights while on the go
Personas and motivations
Through our research, we found that mobile use cases were primarily needed by executives and senior leaders. These users wanted to quickly consume vs. analyze (which they left to their teams to do on the web).
The executive
- On the move
- Monitors
- Activates team
The rest of the team
- At their desks
- Deep dive analysis
- Complex workflows
Rapid user testing
We took a lean approach to gathering user feedback. A simplified prototype with basic features was created and distributed to internal and external users. This allowed my team to gather rapid feedback and make continuous iterative improvements.
Visual design
My team created three conceptual directions using our core brand elements. The “Modern” approach was overwhelmingly preferred by our internal and external panels.
Final designs & key features
AI-powered news feed
- The default News tab keeps users up to date on the latest performance changes to the apps or publishers they care about most.
- The feed includes apps or publishers users explicitly follow, along with suggested news based on their own apps, behavioral signals, and topic affinity.
News - detail view
- Data analysis takes time, and is far too complex to be done on a mobile device.
- We created a method using applied AI to surface and explain the likely causes for changes in app performance.
- The result is packaged insights, available on the go.
Top charts
- These leaderboards allow users to easily discover and keep tabs on new and existing market movers.
- Charts include the top apps by Store Rankings, Downloads, Revenue, and Active Users.
- Filters allow users to easily hone in on the criteria they care about most, including platform, device, country, category, date range, and more.
App - detail view
- Provides detailed app metrics and rankings, filterable by country and date range
- Metrics are configurable from a larger set of options, allowing users to tailor by growth, revenue, engagement, and more.
Instant benchmarking
- Users can get an instant snapshot of any app’s performance with the all-new “Performance Score”, a FICO-like number (0-100) based on nine key underlying metrics.
- The Compare toggle allows users to see the scores of two apps at the same time.
Results
4.9 star rating
In it's first year, the Pulse app had overwhelmingly favorable reviews
+25% Engagement
Mobile app users increased their platform engagement by 25%
3x MAU
Mobile users were using the mobile app 300% more often than the web app
