Why we use what we use

The A-ha! moments of Trello, Slack, Spotify and more

We use many apps across our day — be it for ordering food, booking a cab, buying clothes online or jotting down tasks. More often than not, there are multiple apps vying for our attention for every activity. But we all have our favourites, apps we inadvertently turn to first whenever we want to do something. What makes these apps stick? What do they have that makes us keep coming back? What’s their ‘A-ha!’ moment?

Here are some of my favourites (I’m going to stay away from some of the biggies like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp because their USP’s are well-documented). Note that I’m writing from the perspective of a user and so my ‘A-ha’ moment might be different than yours or that of the creator. It’s also possible for an app to have more than one ‘A-ha’ moment.

Trello

Trello is a nifty little task management app that was in the news recently after its $400 mn takeover by Atlassian. The size of the acquisition speaks volumes of the app’s popularity among professionals. That it managed to appeal to all kinds of people from marketeers and designers to Sales reps and freelancers is what many believe is its strong suit (Atlassian’s own task management app JIRA was panned for being too complex and developer-centric).

For me, the beauty in Trello lies in how well it imitates the real-world task management process. It’s almost like a digital Scrum board, where you can create ‘Boards’ for broad-level activities (like ‘Ideas’ or ‘In Progress’) and ‘Cards’ to jot down the details of your task (like a Post-it note).

A-ha Moment — Moving a card from ‘In Progress’ to ‘Completed’

You know how awesome it feels when you finish a task and can safely check it off your list. This is where Trello hit the proverbial hammer on the head. By getting users to develop a habit of signing off on tasks after moving it to the appropriate board, it gamified the irritating task management experience and made it fun. Every time I move a card from ‘In Progress’ to ‘Completed’, a small voice inside me goes ‘Boom!’. It almost feels like a small win and giving me that winning sensation again and again is why I love Trello.

Flipboard

I’ve been an early adopter of Flipboard and it’s one of the first apps I download whenever I get a new device. It’s arguably the most well-designed content aggregator, with stories from nearly every source out there. It’s curated collections are called ‘Magazines’ and you’ll find magazines on a wide variety of topics and interests.

A-ha Moment — The ‘Flip’ action

Flipboard has this addictive interaction of flipping between stories, almost like turning a page of a book. As I started to use it more and more, I realized how quickly this lets me get caught up on all the latest news and updates from the topics I follow. Tapping on a story takes you to the article, beautifully laid out in a clean interface. It also learns from the stories you read and like, and gives you great recommendations on other magazines to follow. Definitely a must-have for everyone who likes consuming all their content in one place.

inShorts

inShorts (formerly News in Shorts) is an Indian news aggregator and content discovery application. It delivers the news in crisp, 60-word summaries that are very useful for news junkies and for reading on the go. You can stay informed on all the latest happenings in and around the world without delving too deep. If you do want to take a deep dive, just swipe left on a summary and it’ll take you to the original source.

A-ha Moment — Getting caught up with the news in my work commute

I realized the brilliance of this app when I found that I could get the latest news (politics, current affairs, sports, tech etc.) entirely in my 20-minute commute to and from work. Another thing worth mentioning here is that they do push notifications beautifully, since it takes less than a minute to tap on the notification and read the corresponding article. If you want to read more, you can always bookmark it for later. Sleek, efficient and timely.

Spotify

Saying that Spotify revolutionized the music consumption industry is an understatement. With 50 million paying subscribers, Spotify now has enough clout to take on a record label as artistes just can’t afford to miss out on the traction their music can get. And the more artistes that Spotify gets on board, the better the service becomes. Listening to music was a tedious process before Spotify came in, there was no cross-platform consistency. I had to download music on one device and transfer it to other devices (who does that anymore?). Spotify ushered in the streaming paradigm and others have followed suit.

A-ha Moment — Playlist recommendations (that actually work)

Earlier, discovering new music used to be a very painful process for me. I used to scour YouTube for ‘Top 100 rock songs’ , ‘Billboard top 10 this week’ or worse, ask friends who had similar tastes in music (rarely works). Then I came across Spotify and it was like looking into a mirror. Spotify has amazing curation as well as recommendation. For an artiste, getting on their ‘Discover Weekly’ playlist can mean the difference between a hit and a dud. I quickly created my own playlist and as I added more songs, the recommendations started improving to the point that I now rely completely on their recommendations for discovering new music.

Slack

A lot has been said about Slack (good and bad), about how it has revolutionized the enterprise communication industry and how it’s going to be an email killer (many disagree with the latter). The darling of Silicon Valley, Slack’s meteoric growth (it reached 4M DAUs last October, just 3 years after its launch) drew the scrutiny of business insiders and tech pundits alike, with many theories on what its secret sauce might be. For me, it’s quite simple:

A-ha Moment — FOMO (Fear of missing out)

I was one of the 4 million who used Slack religiously at my previous job, as my whole team was on it. For those 6 months, my whole life revolved around Slack (I had it on mobile and desktop as well). We had our work channels as well as our water-cooler conversations on Slack. And so, the relentless stream of incoming messages (work or otherwise) ensured that I remain locked in for the majority of my day. To the point that I began to miss being locked out. Work demanded that I remain caught up on everything and the workplace banter was also something that you just couldn’t miss. With Slack, FOMO is real and you just have to be in the know RE everything. At all times.