Is App monetization more crucial than good UI design?

What should a developer prioritize towards app monetization or a good UI design? Let’s ask what should be placed forward depending upon the kind of business model the company is working towards. Here are a few pointers given by those who know the relation between the two well.

Davide ‘Folletto’ Casali (Design Director & Advisor http://bakerframework.com/)

Twitter address: Folletto

The two things aren’t really disconnected and must be balanced in relation to many different factors, between which you can find:

• Kind of market
• Time to market
• Positioning
• Brand
• Strategy
• Moment in the evolution of the company
• Financing
• Company values

For example. If you’re a startup that has as a primary objective to achieve exponential growth in order to monetize later (take the usual examples like Twitter or Facebook) then you need to work more on the user experience and within that you are likely going to craft a good UI.

If instead you’re building a different kind of company, for example an enterprise focused one, you might focus on monetization earlier to be better suited and better perceived in that market, also it’s likely you will have in place a wider strategy to contact valuable clients instead of going for scale.

Or maybe you’re going for a low-end market with an hardware company. In that case you need to find the right price to start balancing the hardware costs, and it’s likely (but again, not a rule) that the user experience and the UI within that will fall back a bit.

In general terms, there’s never a “crucial” things. There are crucial choices in specific moments of your company, but these can’t be generalised.

Valentino Spataro (Software web developer and legal consultant)

Linkedin Address: : Valentino Spataro

Twitter Address: IusOnDemand

I agree with Folletto where in free services UI can be the first step in development. But because the interface is linked to the business model linked to users’ data and behaviors.
In my experience a user interface must always follow money, otherwise the message you spread won’t be understand when you’ll ask money. That is also, in my poor opinion, the reason why even huge projects don’t find money from final users.

Ejaz Asi (Director Planning and Strategy at The Brand Crew)

Linkedin: Ejaz Asi

Twitter: Ejaz Asi

If you are left with the last month’s pay/funding and can’t afford or know any good UI/UX designer, go for Monetization but chances are even if you started monetization, you would still have some sort of customer-service, app maintenance, bug removal, updates, new features and things like that lined up and before you think about anything they will suck you in the overhead costs that your monetization or revenue will be meaningless because pretty soon no matter how good your customer service, app maintenance and everything I mentioned above is, the lack of good design or good experience will cost you everything you earned.

So, may be don’t go for monetization even if you have last month’s pay or fund. We live in a world where Apple and Google get countless hours of non-stop thrashing should they fail to deliver good reasons for the experiences they craft. Just go to Facebook and Twitter app pages on Google Play and iTunes and start reading the reviews few months older before 3.6 for Facebook. You’d think people take it easy on the big guys for their disregard to good UI, you’d be surprised.

Good interfaces deliver good user experiences which create happy customers who are willing to give little extra to enjoy those experiences.

In any case, a good UI cannot and must not be ignored. However quick you want app monetization if the users are unable to understand or enjoy the user experience an application no matter how useful it is, will face a downfall. So if you want happy loyal customers raving about your app and growing your downloads exponentially make the users happy and work out on a great UI design!

Selena works as a Mobile application developer for SocialCubix which is one of the largest App development company in Washington D.C.