Helping customers navigate the complex process of app publishing

I was the lead designer for this project. It required extensive cross-functional collaboration and involved multiple teams in different domains, including product leadership, engineering, customer support, marketing, legal, data, and operations. I led early discovery and subsequent research efforts and defined the end-to-end experience.

Project summary

Our customers are entrepreneurs who sell content online, such as courses. When their members buy from them, they can download a free app with the company’s branding and access their courses. However, this was confusing because the company has nothing to do with an individual customer’s brand, and their members often didn’t understand why they needed to download the app.

The new app publishing platform allowed customers to build branded mobile apps. This provided their members with a consistent brand experience across the platforms and helped our customers build credibility by having their own apps.

The problem

The inconsistent branding between the company and customers’ branding was causing confusion for their members.

For the business problem, we were losing opportunities to competitors that offered the branded app service.

Fast pivot from visual builder to intake process

The app publishing process was very involved and complicated because of the number of steps required to build a functional app. On top of the complex nature of the project, there was extremely limited time due to reasons beyond my control. I also had to quickly pivot the solution due to changes in strategy, which ended up excluding the initial idea of a visual builder and limiting the scope to an intake process to purely gather the necessary information for the app approval process.

Deep dive into the process

I started learning the processes from the platforms Apple and Google. The problem with the official resources was that the information was spread out in different places in their help centers. There were also gaps in technical steps in terms of how things were supposed to be done. To mitigate these problems, I supplemented my understanding with third-party articles and YouTube videos, sometimes even published in different languages. I also created Apple and Google Developer accounts to try the steps myself.

Repurposing the free app to be customizable

Due to the time constraints against the launch date, the team decided to reskin the existing app instead of building it from scratch. Because it was out of scope to build the preview to see real-time changes, my job was to decide where we’d allow customization without that, which had to be foolproof. I decided to apply a logo to the splash, login, and header for visibility. I initially thought about customizing primary and background colors but decided not to include background for potential contrast issues regarding text legibility.

Usability testing

Although it wasn’t part of the initial roadmap, I felt strongly about testing the solution, especially because it's a long, complicated process. I was able to convince my product manager and the leadership, and I made about two weeks in between the dev team's downtime and conducted the testing.

The solution

Outcome

For the beta launch, the self-service intake process has resulted in the publication of over a hundred apps on the Apple App Store and Google Play, exceeding the subscription goal by 152%.

Future plan