ACTIVE Network API Developer Blog

As you may already know, we’ve been cultivating a developer community around ACTIVE Network data to make the world a more active place. In our struggle to motivate the human race, we’ve been racing to make it easier for developers to create apps that connect people with the things they love, want and need to do. Sadly, most apps fail to catch on and find much success, so we have put together some tips to help you develop a successful app for the fitness market.

Mobile apps in the Apple App Store tend to lose an average of 76 percent of their consumers after the first three months of use. This means that you will need to create a highly engaging experience that fills a need in the marketplace. You may be asking yourself “How does one go about creating a successful app that will attract users, keep them engaged, and support a revenue model?”

Before you get started building your app, you have some homework to do. Here are the steps you need to take before you write your first line of code:

1. Identify the need in the marketplace: The first thing is to find out if there is opportunity to fill a need in the marketplace. For example, you may discover that there are a bunch of people that are actively looking online for fun ways to get in shape. 
2. Research the competition:  Next, you’ll need to find out if there is anyone out there already doing a great job at filling that specific need. Check out the apps - review them and determine what would make for a better user experience. You may find that they are lacking some features or make it difficult for users to understand. For example, Improved user navigation and/or an extra feature can be the difference between success and failure. You can take a look at some apps created using the ACTIVE APIs in our App Showcase.
3. Review the data available: At this point, you can begin to determine what sources of information will be used in your app. You may decide to use some of the APIs from other apps found in your research or choose other APIs that are easier to integrate or have better information. This will give you an idea of what features you can offer within your app. If you decide to use the ACTIVE APIs to provide activity data, then you may also want to use Mapping APIs and Social APIs (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc) to allow users to locate and share their favorite events. Try searching ProgrammableWeb’s Directory of APIs to see what cool mash-ups you can create. There are new APIs being built every day.

Now that you have done your research, you should have a pretty good idea of what the core functions of the app will be. Check out some of the lessons learned from other app developers using ACTIVE APIs. We’ve compiled some tips to help you launch a successful event/activity app:

• Make it intuitive: Users should be able to find the events they are searching for within your app. Using the Activity Search API will allow you to include search functionality with ability for user to filter results based on available parameters. The API documentation outlines a variety of different parameters allowing you to filter results, although the most popular parameters are keyword, location, and date range – be sure to include these in your app. People are used to convention, standards, and have an idea about how things should work. Don’t design according to your database or programming limitations, but according to how the user thinks about things. Like websites, apps are incredibly disposable. If an app doesn’t make sense immediately, users feel little pain in deleting it and moving on.
• Make it fast: The last thing anyone wants is to get excited about a new app only to be disappointed by the slow load times. ACTIVE APIs open a comprehensive directory of events at the local level. You’ll want to be smart about caching results to serve them quickly. Using the user’s IP address or geo-location (from a GPS-enabled smartphone) to prepopulate the location field to serve results is one way to speed things up. Another way is to cache all API results and only make calls to the ACTIVE APIs to update events in the database. For example, If you are trying to do a search using the API to retrieve all listings that were modified 'yesterday' then you can use an API call similar to this: http://api.amp.active.com/search?v=xml&num=25&m=meta:startDate:daterange:12%2f8%2f2012..12%2f8%2f2012&api_key=[yourAPIkey].  Some events will be updated within our databse to better classify and categorize them appropriately. The event you are searching for may not have the same channel, so you may need to exclude the mediatype filter, or use the splitMediaType filter such as above. Also, you can try limiting the results shown to the user after a search is performed. After about 20-30 search results are displayed, the user will typically search again to be more specific.
• Make it social: This one is fairly obvious, so I won’t spend too much time here - you should already be aware of the need to include social elements within your app. To help with raising awareness for your app, you could include ways to syndicate the activity happening with the app itself (e.g. automatically post to Facebook or Twitter). Your app might import users from other platforms, allow a user to invite users from other platforms, etc. By creatively integrating other social platforms you will be broadening your potential user base.
• Make it relevant: As mentioned earlier, using multiple APIs to build an app is commonplace.  Whatever APIs you decide to use in your app, make sure to keep them relevant. User’s will appreciate that you do no dilute the core functionality of the app by including something completely irrelevant (even though you and three of your friends thought it was cool). For example, you might use the Twilio API to send SMS messages to users that have ‘favorited’ an event that is coming soon, reminding them of the date.
• Make it specific: One of the most important lessons learned is to keep your app specific. This is similar to the point made above about relevancy, however, this is in regards to your target audience. Apps are created for specific purposes for specific groups of users. To get people excited and keep them engaged, offer features and content that speaks directly to them. Identify the type of person that would use your app and design it for that use case. Instead of building a ‘running app’, try to target a specific type of runner. One example would be beginners, or advanced runners that have specific needs. If there are enough users that fit that use case, then you may have just found a market for your app.

Once you’ve designed your app and your confident with bringing it to the marketplace, the last thing you will need to do is test. Sometimes you're just too close to the app to see the flaws so it helps to have beta testers give perspective on simplifying user experience. As your app is revised and goes through the various iterations, new issues and bugs may arise where none previously existed.

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