Where holographic apps are "just another app"

I will repeat what I said earlier--people do not read manuals when they are using mobile or holographic apps. The app should be easy to use and, if you need to explain things, do so in a tutorial style. Show the user how to do things, and then let them try it out for themselves.

When designing apps for the HoloLens, you can learn a lot from the lessons we learned when the industry started building apps for the mobile space. After all, there are a lot of similarities between the two spaces. Let's take a look at some of them:

• Limited ways to input data
• Limited hardware
• Fixed set of peripherals
• Wearable
• Location aware

There are five key points you have to take into account when designing apps. In no particular order, these are the following:

• Usability: The app has to be usable. I guess we all know this, but it is still worth mentioning. There are a lot of apps out there that are too hard to use, and therefore people will not use them at all.
• Goal-driven design: The app has to be designed with a certain goal in mind. Great apps have one goal and one goal only. If you want your users to achieve more, create more apps and eventually, you can bundle them into a suite. However, ensure that your apps are goal-driven and that the goal is clear to the user.
• Discoverability: The key to great discoverability is to ensure that users can navigate around the app and find the functions they need. For instance, in apps, hyperlinks are usually displayed as blue underlined text. Users will see this and recognize this for what it is. If you create your app in such a way that these things are obvious and consistent throughout the experience, the user will feel invited to explore your app.
• Learnability: If you happen to have a scenario where the usage is not so obvious, ensure that you leave the user some pointers as to how to use the app. You can do that by giving him labels, hints, or spoken text to explain what you want the user to do. However, be careful; regular users do not want to be taken by the hand every time they start the app. You have to ensure that tutorial items can be turned off, or, even better, automatically switch the tutorial off once the user seems to understand the goal. Don't let the user guess what he has to do, but guide him toward achieving this goal.
• Feedback and response time: A good app is responsive, which means that the user does not have to wait for a long time until the app does what the user wants it to do. Of course, the term long time is rather subjective, but on average, users ;do not want to wait for over 0.5 second before they are notified that the app understands their intention. If your app needs a longer time to perform a task, let the user know. Show a popup, hint, or play audio to explain that you have understood the user and that you are working on it, but it might take some time.

These design principles apply to both mobile apps and holographic apps, and are applicable to most desktop applications as well. It gets interesting when they differ. In other words, what are specific design points for holographic apps?