Mobile Inc » Thoughts

Can The Next Instagram/Hipstamatic/Klout/Angry Birds Be Born Within An Agency?

Murat — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 01:15:37 +0000

This is post I’ve been meaning to write for a quite some time now, it’s spawned from a number of conversations I’ve had with people in several digital and mobile agencies around London.

Aside from an odd 14-months at Nokia, I’ve spent all of my professional working life within agencies and it’s always felt like the right fit. The combination of creative and technical minds plus big brands has always had that lure and promise of creating amazing work. The process of getting a bit of paper containing a brief and turning it into a real life experience is pretty great.

So with all the right ingredients, creative juice and technical ability on tap I posed the question - Can The Next Instagram/Hipstamatic/Klout/Angry Birds Be Born Within An Agency?

Actually my question was more like why hasn’t this already happened? Why aren’t more agencies making bets and try to build products and services that would make venture capitalists in Silicon Valley jealous?

I’m not just talking about internal projects that agencies do in spare time (or better still, dedicated time) but for client work too.

In my opinion it comes down to a mixture of two things – clients themselves and agency culture.

The sad truth is that if you’re expecting a client to drop a brief and a lump of cash in your hand that sparks off The Next Big Thing™ then you’ll be waiting a long time. It’s rare to see a ‘big idea’ digital or mobile brief from a client that isn’t suffocated by its own bullshit.

Instead of spending the time to create a 50 page deck containing arrows and buzzwords, why doesn’t the client ever take the time to step back and think ‘Who the fuck is going to do this and why?’

Brands need to realise that the available hours and minutes of the people they are trying to reach are being eaten up by Facebook, IM, Twitter, Foursquare, Angry Birds and browsing the web. What makes them think that people are going to spend time interacting with yet another augmented reality app for any longer than a couple of minutes before getting back to flinging birds and reading tweets?

Adam Glickman makes the fantastic point on Fast Company:

Startups and agencies alike always ask themselves, “What is the problem we’re solving?” If agencies want to think more like tech startups, they might focus less on clever storytelling and more on utility. In today’s media rich, attention-poor world, offering people something of use is the best way to cut through the noise.

Nike’s “Write the Future” and the Old Spice guy were the year’s best ad campaigns. I loved them as much as anyone. But I didn’t spend more than a few minutes with either–I was too busy devoting my spare moments to a relationship with Angry Birds and Foursquare.

I get that not every brief needs to turn into the next Facebook and I totally agree that there’s is nothing wrong with 1 million people using your app once as part of a short-term campaign.

But we can do better surely. How about 1 million people using your app every day? How bout every hour? Year after year?

Do clients and agencies want to keep creating branded fluff or do they want to build temples?

There’s no reason Hipstamatic couldn’t have come from Kodak’s agency. Or a global agency build something like Klout or CoTweet and have brands and rival agencies eating out of their hands paying to use it.

Agencies are just as guilty as clients, we pander too much for their insistence of ‘new’. Too happy to take their cash in return for some bollocks app that might get your client a couple of pats on the back in the boardroom but ultimately will be forgotten by the 5000 people who used it for a week or less.

I keep thinking back to another quote from the article on Fast Company:

Tech startups begin with the big idea, then seek to monetize.
Agencies start with a budget, then seek the big idea.

Two guys on a limited budget can get together and build Instagram, getting 7 million users in less than a year, a couple of guys at Odeo can start a side project called Twitter and become one of the biggest things ever. But at agencies we are consistently unable to turn a app costing 5 or 6 figures into something that can engage people for longer than a campaign (if that).

There are realities of course, I’m no account manager but I know that calling out your client for lack of sense and ambition isn’t the best way to keep people paid and the lights kept on.

So why aren’t more agencies (mobile epecially) creating stuff off their own backs? I know first hand how many amazing ideas get binned in pitches and projects, why not take a punt and prototype one that could benefit the agency (or brand)?

In my personal experience there is a extreme fear of failure and lack of desire to do anything innovative outside of paid client work which stems from the very top of the organisation. There must be 15-20 mobile agencies in London at the moment, how many of them have created apps that were part of side-projects or R&D initiatives?

It’s not like there’s a lack of will. Here’s a little secret – creatives and developers are ITCHING to do cool, innovative stuff and have great ideas every day. Some of these ideas might just be your agencies ticket to new clients, press, talent or revenue.

Try this test – if you’re reading this whilst working in an agency, when was the last time the creative and tech team all got together to launch something fun and interesting outside of client work?

The majority of the time the answer is either ‘a long time ago’ or worst ‘never’.

How are agencies meant to stay relevant and keep staff engaged without exploring technology and ideas in this way?

There are some agencies leading the charge – ustwo (@ustwo) based in Shoreditch have a portfolio filled with a mixture of client work and in-house projects.

They have heavily invested in their own IP and openly talk about the risks they’ve taken, one app called MouthOff has made them £123,456 through sales and licensing to brands, whereas another cost £80,000 of studio time and “utterly bombed”. Did this failure deter them from trying again? Nope! They currently have another big project in the works. Remember that Twitter spawned from the failure of Odeo…

I think I’m slowly finding where I sit within this industry. In the past I use to think that winning a award was the ultimate recognition of great work and aspired to produce campaigns that might get a sniff of a D&AD or Cannes Lion.

But fuck that. I’d rather have users who love and regularly use my app/service than any advertising award out there.

I want to build great products that people love and want to use. I want to solve problems by combining awesome experiences with technology and data.

Can that happen at a agency? Or is the only place for this sort of desire at a start-up or going it alone?

I think Don Draper sums up how I feel in this epic quote:

Thoughts On Designing A M-Commerce Site (PSDs Included)

Murat — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 12:08:14 +0000

Download the M-Commerce Site PSDs (2071)

Out of all the different types of things you can design in mobile I’ve always found shopping sites to be one of the most interesting.

Getting a user from the homepage of a site right through to checkout to spend their money is just damn right cool. Everything from the psychology of implying security by using a ‘padlock’ icon to rearranging a few form fields on the payment screen to increase conversion.

I’ve worked on a couple of M-Commerce sites now and I wanted to create something without the shackles of brand guildlines or a CMS. I had a bit of fun designing it and hopefully the source files (Photoshop PSDs) will come in useful for other designers out there.

I also tried to show a bit of the thought process for some of the bits you see in the designs below.

Here’s a few personal thoughts about M-Commerce (mobile web) design:

Don’t treat high-end phones the same as mid-range and low-end by serving exactly the same site without any attempt to utilise what actually makes them high-end. HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript capabilities can significant improve the user experience resulting in higher conversions.

Users don’t like clutter. If there’s lots of important information either decide a hierarchy or find clever ways to handle this in the UI like ‘tap to reveal boxes’.

Don’t recreate the same barriers you have online. If (for example) a part of your checkout process is causing drop-off then it will only been magnified on mobile. Rearrange and smarten up.

Of course all this is easier said then done with the ancient backend e-commerce platforms that many high street retailers have. Where open APIs are a luxury (and a huge investment) it’s no wonder the m-commerce war is being won by screenscraping (something that I’ll be covering in the future along the consequences for UX).

View the full size image here:

Some bits and bobs around the UI:

No related posts.

Limitations Of Blackberry Messenger (BBM) Drives Users To Become More Creative With Existing Functionality

Murat — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:58:46 +0000

A couple of months ago I wrote a post on the mobile marketing opportunities of the Blackberry Messenger (BBM) and got a lot of positive feedback from people within the industry.

It seems that everyone is starting to think about how to use BBM in their marketing campaigns, so I wanted to shed some more light on the types of things users are doing and interesting ways they use features of the service.

Once you start using BBM you quickly realise that RIM weren’t expecting it to be a huge success. It’s lacking in so many features and enhancements, yet users find ways around this to make it behave in the way they want.

So what I wanted to do is tell you about one of its more popular features – status updates. As you would expect, the purpose of status updates is just like every other service that has them – to tell people what you’re doing.

BBM status updates don’t have any functionality, it’s just a plain bit of text which is displayed on your profile and friends activity feeds (also very basic). No commenting, no quoting, no liking, no nothing. People outside of BBM can’t see them either.

Despite this people try and use it in the same way as if they were on Tumblr, Twitter or Facebook. I’ve put together a few examples of common status behaviour I’ve seen when looking at not just my friends (18-30, non-techy), but others groups too, just to make sure the stuff I’m seeing isn’t isolated.

The Twitter (frequent micro-updates, conversations, sharing URLs etc)

One of the biggest surprises of BBM is how often users update their status. If I was to compare my friends status updates on BBM to their Facebook accounts, they are roughly 7-8 times more active on Blackberry Messenger.

The updates are veeerry similar to the ‘micro-blogging’ style of Twitter and you would think their hunger to update all the time would make them the perfect candidates for the service. However I estimated that around 90% of my friends on BBM don’t have a Twitter account. When I asked a few of them why they didn’t have one, the response was “What’s the point of telling strangers what I’m doing?”.

Yet constantly updating your Facebook status is a no-no, despite all your friends being there. People generally take more effort in what they say on Facebook and only update once or twice a day max, otherwise you’re bordering on pissing people off. I’m sure you’ve all got friends who update constantly, filling up your feed and inching you ever closer to the ‘hide’ button.

These rules don’t apply to BBM updates, probably because of its unintrusive nature – the feed is not trust into your face when you open the app like Facebook on the web.

Here’s a example of a particularly active feed:

Another Twitter-like bit of behavior is users talking to each other in statuses. Even though BBM is about private instant messaging, it’s common to see a very public conversation take place within status updates.

What makes this even more interesting is that you get no notifications if someone mentions you – you literally have to keep checking the activity feed. There’s no @mentioning type of thing either.

Remember what I said about the lack of functionality? Imagine if Facebook status updates didn’t have commenting, and the only way to reply to your friends status was to update your own, think how quickly the news feed would fill up – yep, it’s like that.

The Tumblr (quotes, photos, memes)

Just like MSN and Yahoo Messenger, BBM allows you to change your profile. Nothing special there, but users update the picture almost as much as their status, in a way that you wouldn’t expect.

Profile pictures are used as a mixture of photo-blogging (live pictures of being out clubbing, on a beach, festivals etc) and Tumblr (interesting things found online, GIFs, quotes etc). This is literally like changing your Facebook profile picture every time you had something to share instead of using ’Share/post to wall’ function!

It’s clear that BBM needs a ‘wall’ kind of feature but in its absence users are turning profile pictures into their own version of Tumblr.

In fact the profile picture is just as much a status update as the text version. Here’s one example:

The profile picture is often changed to relate to a conversation the contact is having (Shrek example below):

BBM even has it’s own memes believe it or not. I often see a friend’s profile picture get changed to something funny, then later on a unrelated contact will have the same profile picture. For example, a few months ago 9 of my contacts (who didn’t know each other) had the same picture below:

…and because you can save other users profile pictures to your own phone, they tend to spread virally.

There you have it! I hope you found that interesting.

As I’ve said in previous posts I think the popularity of BBM will drop fast. RIM simply haven’t added the features needed to sustain its users and now Apple has announced iMessage, you’ll find a exodus of users (like myself) who only hung around for the instant-messaging.

But in the meantime it still presents a great opportunity to come up with some innovative marketing, you could have a lot of fun with the profile picture stuff!

Branded Photo Filters Are The Future – Nike Releases Hipstamatic Filter, Instagram Next?

Murat — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 23:34:58 +0000

If you’ve been reading the blog over the past few months you may have noticed more and more posts about Instagram and the various marketing opportunities it presents. I honestly think it’s going to become a hybrid of Flickr and Twitter.

I know that sounds daft but after seeing trending topics it made me realise that you have a army of users ready to take a photo about anything at any second then upload and tag it.

One of the key parts of Instagram is adding ‘filters’ to photos. These give the picture effects such as black and white or Lomo, usually putting it in a Polaroid style frame of some sort.

After creating the Instabam iPhone app, I saw the opportunity in creating ‘branded filters’ i.e apps that add effects to photos but relate back to the brand.

For example a Disney Filter could overlay really bright, cartoon-style colours onto a picture or Reeses Chocolate Filter could make photos orange tinted etc. You can even add a subtle logo or stamp around the frame or bottom corner, for example:

Users then upload the photo to places like Instagram, virally spreading the brand name and app. Win!

Over the past few months I’ve been scoping out this exact type of app for a global brand, but sadly it got canned a few weeks ago…then last night I got a notification from Hipstamatic saying they’ve just released a Nike photo filter! Pah! It’s available for free for a limited time only in the Hipstamatic store.

But if I’m going to get pipped to the post by anyone I’m glad it’s Nike. It’ really nicely done too, love the filter descriptions. Check the images below:

Brands have the ability to generate really rich user generated content within photo sharing applications, it’s just a matter of time before they all have a presence.

(Also in the news today was Topshop taking Instagram style photoshoots in stores.)

The First Ad-Funded Mobile Phone Is On Its Way. What’s Your Price?

Murat — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 16:17:23 +0000

” “It’s true that every man has his price….”
- Peter (Vince Vaugn), Dodgeball

If I was to ask you if I could place a permanent advertising banner on the home screen of your mobile phone which showed various adverts and offers throughout the day in return for paying £2 off your tariff each month what would you say? Not enough? What if I chucked in a extra £10 and also asked the change the colours of your phone menu to match that of my brand? Still no? What if I was to give you a free iPhone 4 and reduce your line rental to £5 a month for all of the above plus changing your alarm clock sound to my brand jingle?

There is no doubt that some people will see advertising embedded into their mobile as a huge violation, but the key point here is that it will always be ‘some’ people, not everyone. For every person who cries out in disgust there is someone who would lap up a discount on their tariff or mobile handset in exchange for ads. Everyone has their price.

As mobile technology gets better and cheaper at a rapid pace, the profits will come from software and services, not hardware. The device becomes a shell.

Android phones have now reached the price point where margins are so low that it’s not hard to see operators giving them away for free and mashing ads into them [Update: T-Mobile now selling a £20 Android phone on Pay As You Go]

Whilst the idea might sound horrendous it would be naive to think that it can’t be done well. A combination of the right data, interface, functionality and reward could find that sweet spot which provides a good user experience and adds value for advertisers. It’s in everyone’s best interest that the ads aren’t lame (like the examples I used above) because then both advertisers and consumers lose out.

Still it’s worth noting that research I’ve conducted in the past even the most intrusive ads will be accepted if the reward is big enough. A 20% off voucher for Pizza Express appearing on a homescreen banner might not be enough to entice a user in taking up a ad-funded handset but £5 off their line rental each month just might.

It’s going to take a while to get to the perfect blend of advertising on a ad-funded mobile, it was once my job to find the right balance, testing various concepts with consumers. It was a fascinating look at the psychology of mobile and advertising. What I can tell you is traditional ad-units won’t work, it will take a whole new approach.

I always think you need to slightly over-deliver in what you give back to the user in a ad-funded model. A perfect example of this is Spotify. They give you way too much shit in return for listening to a few ads, making it really hard to feel hard done by, that’s how ad-funded mobiles should be. And if you don’t like it you can pay for the ad-free version.

Today Amazon announced that they would sell a new ad-supported Kindle for $25 less than the original. The ads only appear on the home screen and screensaver, it’s a great deal in my opinion. This is a sign of things to come.

Expect various people in the mobile industry to start screaming generic comments like ‘It’s the most personal device there is!’ and ‘putting a advert on your phone homescreen is like putting one on your childs face!’ etc etc.

What’s your price?

Yesterday, 3.5 Million Commuters In London And The Rest Of The UK Read That Android Was Unsafe

Murat — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 02:56:50 +0000

Over the past couple of months I’ve been following the situation with Android and the increasing problem of malware appearing on phones with Google’s operating system installed.

Malware is “software designed to secretly access a computer system without the owner’s informed consent”, this includes viruses, worms, Trojans and spyware – something we see often on desktop PCs but rarely on mobile phones.

Unlike Apple, the Android app store doesn’t have a approval/vetting process, meaning that any old hacker can submit a app with malicious intent and not only that, they can also copy and resubmit popular apps like Angry Birds with their code in.

It’s a situation which has been simmering since last year when more and more incidents and reports showed that Android was vulnerable to apps spreading viruses and accessing personal data.

Then it happened – last week Google announced that they found 58 Android apps loaded with malware, built with the intention of gathering device-specific information. The amount of devices affected? 260,000.

Google sorted the problem by removing the apps Android Market and pushing the ‘Kill Switch’ which allows them to remotely remove mobile apps without the users consent (a talking point within itself).

I tweeted a few times on Monday about what this could mean for consumer confidence. We all saw what happened to Apple with ‘Antennagate‘ , it blew up big time and even though it was a non-issue, it still affected purchase decisions and the way people perceived the device.

I spoke to one friend nearly 6 months after it happened when she was due a upgrade, when I suggested trying a iPhone 4 she said “I’ll wait until the next one when they sort the aerial out”.

She’s not going to go online and read a review on Techcrunch or search forums to find out that actually the phone works fine. The damage has been done.

What's the concensus on this Google Malware stuff? Big/small problem? OS updates will fix? or is it going to be like Antenna-gate for Google

March 8, 2011 4:30 pm via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@mutlu82

Murat Mutlu

i.e lots of rumours/misinformation spreading around consumers - "no don't buy that Android phone I heard it gets viruses easily"

March 8, 2011 4:31 pm via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@mutlu82

Murat Mutlu

Aaaand then yesterday the Metro, a popular free daily newspaper with over 3.5 million readers, published the Android story on the front page turning a tech/geek story into a mainstream fear fest. You can read the full article here.

You can just see where this is all heading, a couple more stories like this, one high profile celeb gets their Android phone hacked, then suddenly every operator will be selling you a £5 per month ‘McAffee Android Security Centre” when you buy a Google phone. Suckering fearful consumers.

We’ve already got articles like this ’5 Easy Ways to Protect Your Android Phone from Malware‘. Jesus.

Remember it’s not just a high-end, expensive phones we are talking about, Android is built for a huge range of devices, anything from £80 handsets to £500 tablets. Meaning that news like this affects a larger consumer base.

I’ve got the feeling that compared to Antennagate this could be a huge consumer perception problem for Google, partly because you know this is just the start.

So will people care? Do consumer make the connection between Android, Google and the handsets made by HTC, Samsung etc? Or will this be forgotten?

One things for sure – Anti-virus companies are licking their lips.

Why Is No One Using BBM (Blackberry Messenger) In Mobile Marketing?

Murat — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 15:42:06 +0000

Ahhh Blackberry Messenger, never has a service been so popular but also so massively misunderstood.

Over the past couple of years the service has seems to have developed this slight air of mystery about why ‘youths’ are so crazy about it. People outside looking in always have the same questions, ”What’s the big deal…isn’t it just instant messenger like MSN?” or “Why do I need BBM when I get unlimited text messages for free?”.

It’s tricky to explain, I really think some of the biggest incentives to use BBM just don’t work across every demographic. It’s one of those things where you have to be in a environment which would make BBM appeal to you, I mean you have to like instant messaging for a start but I mean things like constant banter between mates in group convos, speaking to friends and family abroad for free, going out and exchanging details with other people, broadcasting daft jokes and pictures etc.

Essentially BBM is extremely well implemented, simple mobile instant messaging application that only works between Blackberry devices. However it has subtle differences that makes it better than any third party IM applications out there. In fact it’s more like a private social network than a instant messaging app…one with over 50 million users.

Blackberry users had traditionally been a older demographic but BBM has changed the perception of the device rapidly. Now it’s in the hand of every teenager because of Blackberry Messenger and you can see RIM have wised up to this, promoting BBM in all their latest ad campaigns without a suit in sight.

Here are some of the reasons why it’s so popular:

The messages are free globally because everyone is on a compulsory Blackberry data tariff in their own country. Images, files and voice notes that you send to contacts is also free (not while roaming of course)
It is installed on every Blackberry device as standard
You can add someone as a contact without revealing your actual mobile number (useful in clubs)
You can see when someone is typing and when a message is delivered and read
You can change your status (this is used very often), avatar and availability
You get on-screen notifications and sounds when a message comes through. Different types of message get their own icon on the status bar.
You can invite multiple contacts into a chat, even if they aren’t friends with each other
It’s always on, running in the background eating up very very little battery. All messages go through RIM’s servers and are pushed to the phone in the same way emails are. This means battery consumption compared to something like mobile MSN (which has a constant data connection) is very low.
Even if you don’t have reception you can still use BBM, the messages get queued until you get back in signal
You can have a flowing conversation with someone, feels more easy and natural than SMS
You can set up Groups where members can share pictures, calendar entries, all without being on each others contact lists.
It’s integrated into the rest of the phone really well, for example you can select a image from your gallery, press options and ‘send to Blackberry Messenger’ without being in the app
Girls and their mates have BBM which of course means…yep, boys want to have it too. Don’t underestimate this one.

I got my first Blackberry two years ago after a few of my mates owned them and raved about how great BBM was and that everyone now had one. In the beginning I resisted after taking one look at the Blackberry interface and dismissing it as a huge pile of shit. Two years after purchasing it hasn’t disappointed me, the Blackberry is one of the worse phones I’ve ever used, the audacity for it to be priced in the same bracket as some top-end Android handsets astounds me.

Despite all that I still carry the bloody thing around. Why? Simple – BBM.

It says a lot about a service that I’m willing to put up with all the other crap, the slow, grainy camera that always misses the moment, the browser that repulses me from browsing the web and the GPS that takes so long I always miss the correct road turning.

I now have enough friends that use BBM that it makes it difficult to leave, I have 40 close friends that use it compared to 8 on Twitter. It’s a bit like being locked into Facebook because all your mates are there. I wholeheartedly believe that Apple/HTC/Samsung will start looking at creating their own version and snatch users away from RIM.

BBM is truely the jewel in Blackberry’s lame-ass crown. So how can it be used for mobile marketing?

Well you can pretty much share whatever you want, offers, coupons, movie trailers, news, customer support, polls, questionnaires, music clips, drive traffic to links, create a community around a product or event, even create UGC campaigns asking users to send stuff to you like images and video.

BBM users have the potential to be a very active and engaged audience if done right. The key is shaping your campaign around this functionality.

Let’s quickly go over a couple of basics:

1) There is no platform or CMS for BBM, everything has to be done on the device.

2) Don’t just assume your Twitter/Facebook strategy will work for BBM Marketing, try and differientiate by adding value and incentive (for example treating it like a VIP club). There is absolutely no way I would let a brand onto my BBM contact list just for news updates, give me more.

3) Someone literally has to sit there and type in promotions, links, responses etc directly into the phone so you set out your objectives and strategy beforehand to the person/team handling the phone.

4) If you don’t tell people about what you’re doing they won’t find you. BBM doesn’t have a search engine or appear in Google, make sure you spread the word about your campaign.

There is only two ways you can do any sort of marketing on BBM, either by inviting people to add you as single profile or setting up a group for them to join. Both are slightly different but because groups can only hold 30 people max it makes them a bit pointless for marketing so I won’t cover them.

Here’s the details:

Single profile

This method is literally the same as if you were a normal user, you tell people your BBM contact details (each device has a unique 8-digit PIN which you give to people so they can add you) and then start accepting friend requests. The maximum amount of friends you can have on BBM is 3500 (or 5500 but it then becomes unstable). This might seem like a deal breaker but it’s all about how you go about positioning your BBM campaign.

Once you have contacts you are able to send and receive messages. There are a few useful tools to make marketing a bit easier:

Broadcast Message – This blasts a message out to every single contact on your BBM, it’s plain text but urls are clickable so it can contain links to external websites, audio, video or coupons etc. Used wisely it can be very affective at driving users to a destination, obviously it also can piss a lot of people off if you do it too often so get the balance between user benefit and objectives right.

Status updates – A function regularly used by BBM users, as you would expect this updates your status and puts it on the ‘Activity Feed’ of your contacts. Very handy if you don’t want to broadcast but are trying to drive users to a URL or update them with news.

Status Updates on Blackberry Messenger

Profile picture – This might sound silly but your profile picture on BBM can be a great way to draw attention, whenever it is changed a new event is created in the Activity Feed so everyone will see if it’s a flyer/promo/offer etc.

QR Code – BBM generates a QR Code for each profile which can be read by the in-built QR Code reader within the app. This can be used instead of giving out your PIN number for friend requests. You can export the code as a image and use it whenever you like!

Of course you have all the 1-to-1 IM features too, so you can respond to messages from individual contacts.

Here’s some examples I knocked up just to get you thinking:

BBM has a huge amount of potential and isn’t really being used for marketing by agencies or brands. I think it’s due to a general lack of understanding about what it is and how it works.

One thing to bear in mind that last year RIM announced that they would be realising a BBM API early 2011 so when that happens you should be prepared with how you are going to utilise what is effectively a social network with over 50 million users.

I expect to see a ‘share on BBM’ button to join the ones you see for Twitter, Facebook, Digg etc.

Is Adding A Artifical Delay To User Interfaces Right Or Wrong?

Murat — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 01:18:51 +0000

Picked up this post by Harry Brignull on the great blog, 90 percent of everything.

The discussion stems from a article on locksmiths and how they can open doors within seconds but actually go through a slow, theatrical act of ‘solving’ the lock, which increases customer satisfaction and gets them bigger tips.

The logic is sound, Dan Ariely sums it up perfectly by saying:

What this tells is that consumers don’t value goods and services solely by their utility, benefit from the service, but also a sense of fairness relating to how much effort was exerted.

Believe or not you can find the same logic in apps, services and user interfaces that you are using today. Complex actions are done almost instantly by servers and computers, so why do companies add a artificial delay? Here’s one example on Blogger.com:

One of the things they found in user testing was that when new users clicked “Create my Blog” on the last step of the setup process, they were confused at how quickly their blog was created. “That’s it? Is something wrong?” were the types of things people said. So they added an interstitial “Creating your blog…” type page that did nothing but spin a little animated gif and wait a few seconds before sending new users to the “Yay, your blog is created! page”. Users were far more satisfied with the new experience that took longer.

It poses the question: Is it right or wrong to purposefully add a delay to a service or user interface?

Harry makes the valid point that adding a delay to a UI is wrong and ‘involves pandering to consumers’ incorrect mental models rather than helping them understand the reality of the situation’. You would expect that eventually the user will learn that whatever they are doing is instant and build trust in that process.

He is right, you are effectively being dishonest, but on the whole I disagree that it is wrong. Humans aren’t perfect and sometimes you need to create imperfect experiences to move forward.

I’ve been part of a few projects where we’ve added a artificial delay because users were attempting to go back to redo certain parts as they didn’t believe in the speed that we had actually collected the information and processed it. You are left with the option of losing/frustrating customers or adding a few second delay (with a little spinny wheel, whatever) so they know something is happening and chillout.

There is nothing sinister intended, it’s all done to produce better results and make things clearer for the user. And believe me this stuff happens a LOT in apps.

It also works the other way, I’ve known apps to use a static low quality screenshot of the main menu as the loading page to give the impression of a faster load!

Use Facebook To Check Handset Popularity Between Your Friends

Murat — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 22:30:40 +0000

If your interested in consumer behavior and trends, I always think that one of the most valuable tools you can use is your friends. They are pretty much your own personal consumer research group, you can ask as many questions as you want, do as much observation as you want – all for free.

So what are the most popular handsets in your social graph? I’ve found there’s a simply way to find out using Facebook.

All you have to do is go to the official Facebook application page for your handset and click on the ‘Info’ tab, you’ll be presented with a total number of friends, plus who has it installed.

I checked my mates and out of 168 friends:

106 have the iPhone app installed

54 have the Blackberry app installed

12 have the Android app installed

0 have the WebOS for Palm installed

There is no app for Nokia listed although one exists, in any case they would surely be fighting for scraps.

If you’re wondering why the amount of friends with the Facebook app installed is greater than my total friends, it’s because many people change phones and even borrow their phone to friends to use the Facebook, meaning that they are listed under multiple handsets. So remember these figures aren’t 100% accurate but a good guide no less.

As you can see iPhone and Blackberry dominate, Android has such a small impact between my friends (18-35 year olds, majority mid-twenties, nearly all non-tech) which is strange considering it has now overtaken Apple and RIM in marketshare.

One thing I’m noticing with friends who own Blackberry’s is they are voicing their discontent and slowly jumping ship. Simply put, BBM just isn’t enough for them any more, especially as those iPhone users who are the majority will be influencing their decision to get a different handset.

The Blackberry OS has barely changed in the last 3 years and it shows. Everything from the browser to the way it handles media is absolutely shit, rivals are raising the bar and RIM hasn’t responded. I think RIM will end up down the same road as Nokia in terms of sentiment if they don’t change things soon, all it takes is for Apple to do a OS update enabling a BBM-like application on the iPhone to haymaker Blackberry.

Try it yourself and post your findings in the comments

Facebook iPhone page (click here)

Facebook Blackberry page (click here)

Facebook Android page (click here)

Facebook Palm page (click here)

If Facebook Knows When People Break Up And Google Can Predict Flu Outbreaks, Does LinkedIn Know When Companies Are In Trouble?

Murat — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 01:21:56 +0000

Here’s something that I’ve been thinking about all day after seeing some interesting data revealed by British Journalist and graphic designer David McCandless, so I thought I would braindump and get it all out in a post.

David and his team scraped 10,000 status updates on Facebook for the words ‘break up’ and ‘broken up’ and discovered trends in the days and months in the year that people choose to end their relationships. The data showed that break ups peak before social occasions like Spring break and Christmas (tightwads).

One slight problem with this data, it’s rubbish. The trouble with using keywords in status updates is that unless its dead specific, you’re just going to end up with junk. For example, how many people use the word ‘break up’ in their status before SPRING BLOODY BREAK? And before summer, and before xmas, and before easter. “Can’t wait to break up!” or “Broken up for da summer Wooowwoo” or just simply “Broken up!…lol” etc etc etc.

Anyway lets forget about the data that David scraped for a second because Facebook CAN tell when people break up – but sadly that info is only available to Facebook themselves.

How? Relationship status updates.

Facebook knows when people end their relationship or ‘get complicated’, also when people hook up. Times that by 500 million people and you’ve got a pretty good picture of when the world just is going through break ups and make ups.

I love using data to find out this sort of stuff, that’s probably why I’m so fascinated with Facebook, once you get to critical mass like Facebook has you can literally find out how the world feels, which brings me nicely on to -

Google Flu Trends

This.is.amazing - Google can predict the outbreak of flu epidemics in cities and regions 1-2 weeks earlier than federal centres for disease control and prevention.

How? By analysing the millions upon millions of search queries occuring each day and looking for keywords such as ‘cough’, ‘fever’, ‘flu symptoms’ and ‘flu cures’.

From Google Flu Trends

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries are added together. We compared our query counts with traditional flu surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in different countries and regions around the world.

Click here to see if your city is about to get ill or read the Guardian article on the service.

So Facebook knows when people are love sick, Google knows when people are actually sick, how would LinkedIn know if a company is in trouble?

Well think about how most people use LinkedIn, you pretty much treat your profile like your CV, when things are stable you tend to leave it, never updating or checking it reguarly to improve it. However when it looks like you need a new job you’ll keep logging in, add new career experience, tidy up summary, education etc.

Now if your data sample is a 100 people in one company, then of course you might not get any solid information out of that.

However, lets say you take a company with a few thousand workers, if a significant amount of those goes from not logging in within 3-6 months to logging in frequently AND updating their profiles, then you might just have a company that’s about to cut staff .

What makes this so powerful is that staff know about cuts and redundancies way before internal and public announcements are made, whispers and rumours spread like wildfire and that’s when people start logging in and updating, meaning that LinkedIn knows about cuts and redundancies too – suddenly making this data extremely valuable.

The value of this information for people playing the stock market is massive, so on that basis, I erm, had a quick look at the LinkedIn APIs to see if I could grab it, I can’t think of a way to do it (although it is 1am) so looks like its only available to LinkedIn.

Imagine plugging this into a automated share buying/selling system for the FTSE 500?

Is that even legal?

Anyway some food for thought there