Does your mobile app feel ancient? (appiterate.com)

In case you have not been living under a rock, you would have heard about Paper (the mobile app from Facebook) by now.

The Facebook app, by all counts, has grown ancient over the years and needed a major overhaul. Now, every redesign of popular online products initially is met with some disapproval, with users getting used to it eventually (Think – Gmail!).

So, the brains at Menlo Park clearly seem to have launched a new product (with Facebook-ish features) while looking to phase out Facebook in the longer term (Any relation with the Princeton study? We don’t know!).

Paper – the app

Paper, at first look, clearly seems to be an app designed for 2014. It has derived a lot of its features from Flipboard – the big home image and the swiping gestures. But, the tilt-n-view and the diagonal pinch-n-zoom of images are a sight to behold.

So, the question remains – Does your mobile app feel ancient in comparison to paper?

How do you, as an app developer, make your app feel less ancient?

How Facebook rolls out new features

“Great products don’t start with a billion users, they start with just a few,” says Michael Reckhow, product manager of Paper. And we know what they do on those few users!

A big decision driver in Facebook is A/B testing, before rolling out new features. They havedocumented in great detail how A/B testing has shaped both their Messenger and main Facebook apps.

So, how does A/B testing make feature roll-outs more accepted by users?

You test different versions of your assumption with live users and then you determine which version is being more liked by users. For instance, you might be wondering whether to introduce a vertical (Flipboard-style) or a regular horizontal swipe on your app. You just need to define these two variations in a test, choose a particular target segment you want to test on, and wait for user data. You choose to go with one of the variations, which performs significantly better over the other.

Similarly, A/B tests on each feature is a small iteration for your app, all geared towards making your app feel less ancient. A complete overhaul of your app is always composed of small, data-driven iterations like these.

Stop living in the stone age – A/B test now!