When adding a new application to your web page, device, or system, you will often focus primarily on the core use cases of this application. If you, for example, add a calendar to a web page or a device, you will usually focus mainly on the presentation, on creating easy methods to add reminders, on alarm handling, and so on.

However, there is huge potential if you also start looking at how your new application can interact with other applications and parts of your product. Looking at these interactions can help you find user experience innovations in the links between applications.

By innovating in the links between applications, you can provide users a seamless experience, and this can truly distinguish your product in the market. Many brilliant web pages, devices, and systems are unique not because of the actual design of the standalone applications they have, but because of the seamless integration of multiple applications, which gives the entire product or set of products a great and powerful user experience.

In this chapter I describe a five-step process that I have used many times with success. The process helps you examine links between applications with the goal of providing a seamless and delightful user experience. The five steps for this method are as follows:

1. Identify target user needs.
2. Identify applications to interact with.
3. Create a diagram with your application in the center.
4. Innovate solutions.
5. Document the results and process the output.

In this chapter I will again use a concrete example to describe the method. We will consider a social community web page. Our scenario will be that we want to add an events calendar to that web page.