Set it Free to Compete?
Nokia is buying Symbian in hopes of setting it free.
By making the operating systems for its smart phones free and open source, will better compete with forthcoming Android and the iPhone App Store?
It must do more.
Not to repeat myself too much, but it’s all about the complete user experience, and Apps are the new Singles.
Unless Nokia finds a way to address the complete experience for users of buying and using the phone, it’s still going to be falling behind.
Perhaps more importantly, Nokia can’t drive all inovation for the industry. Independent developers must contribute. They must make it easy and fun to discover, buy, install and running applications for Symbian, as well as making it easy for developers to write and sell apps across handsets and carriers using their platform.
Otherwise, the innovations will all be coming from somewhere else, and the market share is likely to follow.
Focus on the User: Social Design and MySpace Redesign
Adaptive Path’s June 17 newsletter has great background on their MySpace redesign (first stage launched yesterday), as well as pointers to other interesting thoughts on design.
The full newsletter should be up on their website soon, but until then, here are a few highlights from the email version:
MySpace had traditionally felt that this link between Tom and the users provided a deep internal understanding of users and their needs. But MySpace recognized that the need [for]… some in depth research… [and] insight into its users, their preferences, and the how and why behind their migrating between MySpace and its competitors.With a charge to gain a fresh perspective on the user base, my colleagues Todd Wilkens and Jason Li engaged in an 8 week cross-country anthropological study of MySpace users. Escaping the tech- and networking-centric communities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, they traveled from Sacramento to Philadelphia, conducting one on one interviews with dozens of existing MySpace users about their lives online and off, how they used the network, what it meant to them. The results were anonymized and transformed into a set of personas. It was not entirely surprising that these personas communicated a more deeply nuanced set of behaviors and priorities than the self-selecting users who voiced their opinions to Tom. The personas would serve the redesign efforts to come by introducing the MySpace team to a different perspective on their users, and shedding new light on how best to meet their needs.
With the research completed and socialized within the MySpace product team, Adaptive Path found its roll expanding. My team and I were asked to assist in the redesign of the product, from navigation to page structure, as part of an effort to improve the overall user experience.
A series of prioritization exercises with MySpace stakeholders, concerning feature set and user behavior, allowed us to trim down the global navigation from an undifferentiated mass to a succinct tool for way-finding and discovery. When discussions about the non-logged in home page revealed a need for better opportunities to share space between advertising and feature promotion, the “wide-screen” element was created; a multi-use advertising and editorial programming space that can change based on user preference. Neither of these elements would be what they are without the active participation of the MySpace team in the redesign process.
Sometimes, you have to design from the gut… the best UX designers I know operate from a perspective of determining what’s good, what’s bad, and what’s ugly. Providing people with a straightforward means to connect and share with one another? Good. Presenting frustrating tools for user search when I’m looking for someone I know in real life? Bad. Repeatedly telling users they’ve got to “log in before you do that!”? Ugly.
Adaptive Path looks to have done fantastic work in understanding the problems of the old MySpace design. As I’ve mentioned before, their process is a model to follow.
They get it that this has to be all about the users. Kudos.
Based on the story in WebMonkey, they also seem to have done a great job working internally with MySpace:
Most importantly, Freitas says, these changes were more about the design process than the usability enhancements.
“You can see the way a team operates internally based on the way their product works when it comes out,” he says. “MySpace is pretty democratic, but they hadn’t ever streamlined their collaboration between tech, content and presentation.”
He says the Adaptive Path team pushed MySpace to become more inclusive as an organization. They brought all of the various stakeholders, from ad sales and technology to visual design, into the process of designing the user experience.
“It’s not just a UI change, it’s an organizational change,” he says. “It was a true ‘teach a man to fish’ situation.”
Yet the blasting of the homepage takeover and the obtrusiveness of other advertising still dominates the experience of visiting MySpace, however much easier the navigation just got. It remains to be seen how this might be addressed as the redesign continues.
Has MySpace already gone too far down an evil path to monitize their site? Is it too late to back up and create meaningful change?
The BBC’s take, MySpace clears up as users jump ship , is interesting since in their market:
MySpace is still the largest social network in the important US market with a 73% share compared with just 15% for Facebook and 1% for Bebo.
The internet research company Nielsen Online reckons that 4.7m Brits used the site in April, down 31% on last year.
Facebook, which only overtook MySpace as the UK’s largest social network in September 2007, now has 10m active British members.
Detractors such as the Washington Post say MySpace’s New Look Seems the Same Old Mess (complaining primarily about the weight of advertising still left after the redesign), while it gets a tentative Thumbs Up from PC World and others.
The LA Times stayed focused on the story of the ad money:
“It does seem a bit like rearranging the deck chairs to me, not necessarily on the Titanic,” said Rob Norman, chief executive of advertising buyer GroupM Interaction Worldwide. “I don’t see how this is game-changing.”Norman said MySpace’s challenge was not figuring out how to “gussy up” the site so it’s attractive to traditional advertisers, but rather, to extract value from the networks that connect people who use MySpace.
Google would not be in the position it is in today if it didn’t start by knowing to focus on the user and all else will follow. It looks like MySpace is still trying to learn that lesson and live that philosophy. I wish Adoptive Path the best of luck in teaching it to them!
Social Design
Oh yeah, I mentioned other links. Thanks, too, Adaptive Path, for the pointer to Bokardo. I enjoyed several posts and felt compelled to add a couple of comments there on social design (a fantastic picture catalyzed a thought I’d long had bouncing in the back of my head), and the growing importance of design (where the iPhone is a perpetual example).
Apps are the new Singles: Betting on AppStore Revenue
Filed under: App Store, iPhone, iTunes, pSMS, San Francisco Giants, user experience
Steve Jobs still hasn’t announced the App Store for Mac.
Referring to the iPhone App Store, analyst Gene Munster at Piper Jaffray estimates that Apple’s App Store could emerge as $1.2B business by 2009. Is that too low? Focusing on revenue per user, his most aggressive estimate looks conservative to me.
Look out, because the App is the new Single.
The apps that have already been shown (and those yet to be developed) are cool. People will want to try many of them before settling on the ones they continue to use. Good thing it will be easy to discover, purchase and install them. $15 in average app revenue per phone seems paltry, even if 70% of iPhone apps are free.
I think analysts missed it with their first estimates for iTunes revenues, too. They had to keeping upping them for years.
It wasn’t obvious from what was happening at the time in the digital music marketplace how ready the public was to buy from a store (and for a device) that got all the pieces right. You needed to talk to consumers in depth to look past business as usual and understand their unmet needs.
iTunes and iPod are literally the text book example of how user experience as strategy changed an industry in ways the number crunching business analysts couldn’t predict.
In the same way, there are thousands of fantastic uses for mobile technology which no one has been able to discover, develop and sell because the platform for it hasn’t been there. From the developer side, there are too many crippling limitations to development and barriers to sales. For consumers, the devices aren’t easy to use to start with, but finding, paying for and installing is a nightmare on more levels than Dante could describe.
iPhone and its AppStore are game changing because they directly address the total user experience for new mobile applications. This is a bigger change for mobile applications than iTunes was for music.
I remember the days when you bought (or copied) stacks of applications for your computer. There are many reasons we don’t still do that. So we don’t think of wanting to buy lots of small applications. Just as we didn’t used to think of buying lots of music as single songs. App Store might make you think differently. You’ll buy lots of these new singles.
I’m be willing to bet on a significantly higher figure for App Store per user average revenue in 2009. Any takers?
UPDATES
16-Jun-08:
San Jose Mercury News ran a great article by John Bourdreau today about the iPhone economy as Application developers swarm to iPhone with many good quotes and stats.
17-Jun-08:
In response to Forbes IPhone Apps Appeal, which raises many issues about usability, security and quality:
Not every release has to be a hit. User ratings and reviews like in iTunes will make it easier to discover the best apps that enhance the iPhone experience, and avoid those that need improvement. The ease with which they can be found, purchased and installed will make it painless to try several and discard any that you don’t automatically hum along with.
The best will become hits, driven by ratings, blog posts, status messages and more — no payola required (though it still has a leveraging effect to make hits even bigger).
This is a dramatic change. For the first time mobile has a viable ecosystem for new applications.
I predict that more revolution will come to the mobile industry (and to how mobile technology impacts people’s lives) through the App Store than came from the introduction of the iPhone itself.
In response to Apps First to Market will win?:
I think apps will work more like music singles. First to market in a given genre will not be an overwhelming advantage. In fact, releases will be inspired by each other and build on each other. There will be no stigma to having a new favorite next week. Ratings from other listeners, as well as what your friends are listening to, reviewers are writing about, etc., will help you decide what to tune in to.
12-Sep-08
iPhone Apps Store Growing Twice as Fast as iTunes Music
Location-Based Services Coming Soon (says a long-time naysayer)
Filed under: iPhone, LBS, location-based services, mobile advertising, mobile marketing
For years, I’ve heard that location-based services are just around the corner. “Later this year.”
For years, I’ve told clients, “Not for years.”
Especially when they want to do marketing by taking advantage of LBS.
Emphasis needs to be on “services” first, providing something the user wants. That has to be in place before there is an opportunity to market through LBS, and even then, privacy and other considerations will dictate the the marketing message delivers real value. The best marketing isn’t a message you want consumers to hear, it’s value you provide in some service, entertainment or education that they want.
Even if it becomes technically possible, I’m never going to want a coupon for a latte to pop up as an ad on my mobile just because I’ve walked by a Starbucks. That’s the kind of thinking that drove carriers to charge per-lookup fees for location, hoping to get revenue streams from both the end-user and from brands.
I might be interested in location giving additional contextual relevance to my search results. There are lots of really cool things I might do with location that no one has thought of yet.
Anyway, Mashable is right to suggest that iPhone 3g is game-changing in LBS.
The new pricing model for the iPhone 3g with GPS along with the forthcoming App Store make for a perfect storm coming. Developers have a great platform and now are freed from old constraints to think first and foremost of what services users will want.
No longer will they be constrained by rather than thinking of how be ad-supported (or how to cut deals with handset manufacturers or carriers).
For the first time in the history of mobile, a significant base of users will have everything needed and developers can take advantage of this to offer new applications and to incorporate location seamlessly. This will open many new possibilities, not all of which we can predict now.
Most of these, we won’t think of as location apps. They’ll just be apps that also take advantage of location.
In the same way, I hope we’ll see innovative LBS marketing that consumers won’t think of as marketing or advertising. Those will be the stand out successes.
Google CEO on mobile search (Why it’s different and what to do about it.)
This morning Reuters ran an interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt reinforcing some of what I know about mobile search and making “do no evil” more concrete.
First, the quote on mobile search and advertising, then some additional info and conclusions on working with mobile search.
Speaking of the emerging market for Web-based advertising on mobile phones, Schmidt said the vast majority of Google searches on mobile phones were done on Apple Inc’s year-old iPhones, which prominently feature a Web browser.“Mobile looks like it will ultimately be the highest of ad rates,” because ads can be targeted by user location, he said.
Since the iPhone has a small fraction of the market, this tells us that few searches are being done on most other phones. Today, buying Google mobile search ads amounts to targeting iPhone users.
As well, it reminds us that mobile searches are different from web searches in another way — they tend to be more locally focused (and that enhanced targeting can be worth paying extra for).
I recently spoke with a potential client who, even with a small test budget, had trouble finding enough mobile AdWords inventory to buy. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard this complaint, so thanks Eric, for reassuring us about why.
Earlier this week Mobile Marketer ran a good piece on why Search doesn’t play a large role in mobile – yet: Crisp CEO that also reflects his comments:
A surprising finding in the first quarter index is that only 7.51 percent of traffic to the publisher sites in Crisp’s network is driven by search engines.“Search does not play a large role in mobile yet, and it is not increasing much at all.”
Google accounts for 6.4 percent of the total traffic to the Crisp publisher sites, or an 85.2 percent share of the search engine traffic.
Traffic referred by search trends higher within local properties such as local newspapers and local television.
…local newspapers garnered a 27.36 percent… Local news TV was next, accounting for an 11.75 percent share of traffic from search… Categories such as men/sports, autos, online services, business, national news, magazines, TV and entertainment, women’ lifestyle and youth, in that order, accounted for the rest of the traffic from searches.
Note that what we’re really saying here, is that even on the iPhone (accounting for most current search traffic), people use search differently on mobile than on their computer. This is with the most usable device for the mobile web, the game-changing enabler in that space.
Therefore, it is the mobile context, not the device or dataplans, that accounts for these differences seen in use of the mobile web.
You can expect mobile search to grow as more folks get iPhones (or equivalent), but you can’t expect the mobile context and behaviors to change. Plan for these categories to continue driving most mobile searches, with inventory to match.
This is part of learning to Think Mobile. Users will always treat mobile differently from past media, including the desktop web, no matter how advanced the devices get.
Bonus Quote: On Evil and Changing The World
I’ve always loved the idea of Don’t Be Evil (and the Ten things Google has found to be true). Great to hear how it works in practice.
Even better to hear from one of the world’s most successful companies that making money is a side effect of wanting to change the world, not the other way around.
From the same Reuters article:
When he first joined Google as CEO seven years ago, Schmidt acknowledged thinking the “Don’t be evil” phrase was a “joke” being played on him by founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.Schmidt recalled sitting in Google’s offices later in 2001 when an engineer interrupted a strategy discussion over a planned advertising product by saying, “That is evil.”
“It is like a bomb goes off in the room. Everything stopped. Everyone had a moral and ethical conversation, which by the way, stopped the product,” Schmidt said.
“So it is a cultural rule, a way of forcing a conversation, especially in areas which are ambiguous,” he said of how the mission statement works in practice at Google.
Schmidt reaffirmed that the company’s primary goal is not to make money selling ads, whether it is banner ads or ads on Web searches, online video, TV and mobile phones.
“The goal of the company is not to monetize everything, the goal is to change the world … We don’t start from monetization. We start from the perspective of what problems do we have,” he said, referring to big, world-class problems.
iChat for iPhone (text and video)!
When Steve Jobs delivers the WWDC keynote on Monday morning, will iPhone have new instant messenger features?
I’d love to see an upgrade to the desktop iChat and add an iPhone version of iChat so that both handle SMS text messages as well as instant messages from AIM, Gtalk, Yahoo!, etc.
I want a record of all IM and text messages, so sync all IM and text messages in iChat like my photos sync with iPhoto. That way I have an archive on my computer. Make them all searchable.
Let me view text messages on my laptop screen if my phone is within Bluetooth range.
Let me video chat from my phone via 3g or WiFi.
UPDATE 9/16/08:
Steve still hasn’t given me any of these features, but last week at CTIA Yahoo! launched OneConnect which does let me see Email, SMS and IM for a given contact in a a unified view, and gives me a socially connected address book. Pretty cool!
Newly launched startup Xumii.com also looks promising as a way to do something similar through the mobile web rather than an iPhone app.
New iPhone Monday: Winning Combination
Filed under: 3g, bluetooth, gps, IM, iPhone, mms, SMS, user experience, video
One of the great things about new product announcements is that we get to play “second guess the Product Manager” on feature lists.
Fortunately, Apple design is typically more concerned with overall user experience than narrow focus on a feature list, but let that not stop us from enjoying our game.
Current set of tradeoffs in the iPhone contributed to its phenomenal success, and any new version should strike a similar balance. Development resources are limited. An extra chip adds to the price and decreases battery life. A software feature adds interface complexity or affects another desirable feature.
So it’s just not an option to make a list of “all the things missing” and add those to the product. Still, it’s nice to have a wishlist, and this is Monday Morning Quarterbacking, afterall. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some things I’ve wanted over the last year of using an iPhone. What would you add?
- cut and paste
- search (the contents of my iPhone)
- SMS Forwarding
- instant messaging
- 3G
- GPS
- MMS
- video capture
- stereo Bluetooth
- bookmark something to browse on my desktop when I next sync (it’s flash or too long or otherwise desirable to have there)
- allow allocating more memory to store text messages or email
- make it easier to send things to my desktop via Bluetooth (like a URL or photo)
- wireless sync’ing
Some I just don’t get. I often want to forward an SMS, and it seems like that would be a fairly trivial feature to add, and something long available on other handsets.
Others, like cut and paste, solve many problems, but certainly present interesting interface challenges. It may have been a reasonable strategy to intentionally introduce the simplest iPhone first and then to introduce new gestures with future releases.
Many of them, while folks say they want them and the geeks clamor for them, I wonder if they’re really worth the costs. GPS, for example.
The location feature using triangulation with cell towers offers something that is good enough for many uses, but without the expense, size and battery issues GPS might add. If I had to choose between 3G support and GPS support, you can guess which one I’d take. Do you need to break out GPS into separate devices and pricepoints targetted to different markets? Or does it need to be available on all devices to grow the market for location-based applications?
Other features, you need one or the other, but can live without both. My biggest problem with no MMS support is when someone sends me a photo from their phone. I get a text message like this, created by AT&T but delivered from the sender:
I sent you a multimedia message. You can view my message w/in the next 7 days via the web at www.viewmymessage.com using MSG ID pn0otzx Password jans8move
If I had cut and paste, it wouldn’t be so painful, but as it is now, I have to write down the ID and password before browsing to the link, or try to remember to do it when I next sit down at my computer.
Or, how much do I really need to be able to search the contents of my email if I can only store 200 messages on my phone? Instead, I browse to Gmail online and search there. But I’d love to use the memory on my phone for messages rather than music, and if I could do that, search would become incredibly useful (it’d be nice if it searched my text and IMs as well).
Aside from design and engineering tradeoffs, how do you get the best information about the market in regards to features? How do you find out from users and potential customers about their wishlist items and what mix and what experience are going to sell the most upgrades and new phones?
If you go to existing iPhone users like me, you get a great list of new features that I think might make my life easier. The problem is, I already bought one of these. Are any of those new features ones that would have gotten someone new to buy one? For that matter, how much am I willing to pay to upgrade for my desired features?
After we’ve talked about the features in isolation, you may pick the mixes that you’ll have me try out in mockups and prototypes to get a better sense for how they all work together. Each combination requires so much investment in design work that you can’t try them all.
I’d love to know how Apple has worked over the last year to solve these problems, or even to hear more about the research and design that went into the original release.
I think one of the reasons that so few companies do a good job of designing an overall user experience is that it is so much more difficult than the business task of picking features. Apple keeps showing the business win for going to that extra effort, and I look forward to seeing their latest effort on Monday.
Jobs announces Mac App Store?
At MacWorld in January, Jobs had announced iPhone AppStore, movie rental for iTunes and then the MacBook Air. He went on to explain how the Air didn’t need many ports or a DVD drive because you could do everything over the network, even watching movies.
I felt sure I knew what “and one more thing” would be.
Instead, he ended that keynote without “one more thing.”
Will he announce it in his keynote this time at the Apple WWDC Monday?
The one thing you can’t still do with an Air without a DVD drive somewhere is to install most commercial applications. I need to do that on my Air just like I need to do it on my iPhone.
A perfect “and one more thing” would be to announce that iTunes would support application sales for Mac and Windows.
iTunes struck compromises that revolutionized the business of promoting, distributing and selling music. It wasn’t perfect, but it solved enough of the problems of labels, artists and listeners to build with iPod into a perfect storm. It could do the same for applications.
- iTunes made it easy to find all the music you want in one place.
- Made it easy to buy, even at $.99 price point — owning a song is just a click away.
- With iTunes Digital Rights Management (DRM), you could share, but only so far, and you could authorize and de-authorize computers as needed.
This sounds like what I need with my software applications. A way to get them all from one place, instantly, easy to buy at any pricepoint, and no hassles figuring out what computers I’m allowed to use them on.
Likewise, publishers of smaller applications have difficulties marketing and collecting relatively small payments. Larger applications will have problems distributing their wares if Air starts a trend to more diskless machines. Both have issues of wanting to protect their software against unauthorized copying, and the kind of universal system and compromises in iTunes could work with software.
Can I rent software like I can rent a movie? It may not make sense when a single publisher tries to do it, but if it were supported universally from one interface, perhaps there are applications that I only need for a week at a time.
What about software in the cloud? Many web apps can only monitize themselves through ad-supported models. What if I could pay $.99 and up (one time or monthly) for Software as a Service? I’d use iTunes to find and rate apps, the iTunes payment system to start an account, and to manage my subscriptions.
Would you like to buy and sell software over the air? Would iTunes/App Store make a good model?
UPDATE 12-Jun-08: Apps are the New Singles: Betting on AppStore Revenue.
Verizon buys Alltel to pass AT&T
Reuters reports today that adding Alltel’s 13 million subscribers puts Verizon at 80 million, surpassing AT&T’s 71 million. The deal is valued at $28 billion.
Smart move for Verizon.
With US mobile subscribers approaching saturation, there are few options for growth. Verizon moves into rural markets they don’t already operate in. If their estimates are right, the deal is cash flow positive from the first year and saves $9 billion in operating and capital savings over the next three years.
What about cell phone users?
I love having choices in carriers, but the consolidation seems inevitable, and like it benefits me.
The expenses of building scalable networks and systems, of supporting them and of matching pricing is just too large for lots of smaller players to stay competitive.
The failure of the MVNOs shows us how subscribers see wireless as commodity wireless market, and how competitition in this market won’t tolerate any additional layer of overhead.
Ultimately, it should be a good thing for consumers when carriers grow. Economies of scale allow continued downward pressure on wireless prices at the same time as more R&D and infrastructure investment.
Big companies don’t always act in the consumer interest that way, especially when they become a (near) monopoly. However, both Verizon and AT&T are far from being a monopoly. Competing with each other is likely to continue to drive value for the consumer.
Who knows, maybe Sprint will even become competitive again…
before AT&T acquires them to take back #1.
SMS/Mobile Web promotion for In Plain Sight
Filed under: mobile marketing, mobile marketing examples, mobile web, SMS, WAP
Today’s Mobile Marketer has a long article about promotion for the a new USA Network series:
“This [In Plain Sight] program relied a lot less on our technical ability and more on our creative and strategic ability,” Ms. Lawrence said. “So, from conception to execution, the content of the [mobile] campaign was created by the Hyperfactory with collaboration with the USA Network.”
I’d love it if they had shared more of the thinking behind the strategy and the creative. The article also doesn’t detail the working of the program, but I like to try as many of these as I can.
Turns out, It doesn’t work on my iPhone, and it doesn’t seem to be well-promoted.
Still, it’s an interesting project, the problems are fixable, or at least worth learning from.
I haven’t seen TV spots for this promotion, but I hope they include them during the show and throughout the week. Mobile programs only work as well as the promotion for them.
You start by browsing to a website (online or mobile) where they ask for your phone number. They send you a text message.
Why not let me start by sending in a text message? Isn’t that faster to explain in a TV ad anyway?
Plus, that would save me a step.
It’s still difficult on the majority of handsets to browse to a specific URL. It takes even longer to go get on a laptop and find where to sign up for this mobile promotion on the USA Network website. Plus, I have to know what WAP is, since that’s the name they use in a list of games.
Why not speak in the user’s language and call it “mobile” or “cell phone” instead of “WAP Witness Challenge”?
Once I found the site online, I pick one of four characters to play, then entered my cell number. In a few mintues, I got a text message to my iPhone, replied, then got another:
49737: IPS: Welcome to WITSEC! To confirm your witness, please reply Y to this message.
me: Y
49737: IPS: Ur all set.U’ll reeive 1 msg/wk.Text STOP to end msgs. Follow the link to help Terry in his 1st situation. http://game.inplainsight.mobi/k.jsp?k=14
I wanted to know where the shortcode was hosted, so before I went on with the game, I also sent the ‘help’ command that carriers require:
me: help
49737: Nintendo T&C’s: http://professorlayton.msite.tv Max of 5 SMS/month. To stop, txt STOP. Std rates apply.
Hmm. Looks like this still needs to be updated and the shortcode is being re-used from a prior promotion, whoever is hosting it.
I went back to the earlier message and clicked the link in the text message. My iPhone browser loaded http://game.inplainsight.mobi/te.do.
This rendered a blank screen!
I reloaded and got the same blank screen again.
I copied it into a browser window on my laptop and was able to see the web page I couldn’t see on my iPhone.
It explained a simple scenario and offered me three choices.
The text seemed like it could be tighter, and I don’t understand why this refers to my witness, Terry, as “them” and “they.” Why pick a witness character at all if the following text would be generic?
I tried each of the three choices, each leading to a screen explaining the complications resulting from my actions.
My life as a Witness Protection agent sounds difficult.
All three screens end with the text:
Thanks for playing the IPS Protect Your Witness Game! Continue to secure the safety of your witness by making the best decisions to keep them alive to see another week. Good luck!
So I can look forward to another text message next week, hopefully this time it will render correctly on my iPhone.
Presumably they might also want to send me messaging reminding me of the air time for the next episode.
I like the idea of having a simple game to play along with a series. Getting a weekly text message along with the weekly show makes sense, especially if it serves as a reminder of the airdate.
To ensure the game stays interesting, all witness situations are rotated to make sure that no two witnesses receive the same question each week.
Also, the witness status is completely customized to a particular witness and the answer that the players chose. In essence, there are more than 290 different witness statuses that the players can uncover.
This part of the program doesn’t make sense to me and makes it sound like the program is more complicated than it needs to be to meet the strategic goals or to be creatively compelling.
It doesn’t look like the complexity actually enhances gameplay.
What is the strategic or creative imporance behind having players choose from between several witnesses anyway? Is the suggestion that someone might play this game with more than one witness (or more than once)? Isn’t the whole point to create a mobile subscription list and provide short, compelling content once a week to provide a airdate reminder and that little engagement extra?
I don’t see why this game wouldn’t be good to implement with a text-only option, dropping WAP altogether. The descriptions are text, the choices are text and the result is text. The only picture is of my character.
Sure, it’d take some fancy editing to cut down text to 160 characters, but it looks to me like that might result in an improvement. Mobile thinking requires focus that gets across the most important points and drops the rest.
We like mobile for it’s forced brevity: make things clear and respect our time.
As well, few mobile users in the US consistently browse the mobile web (latest public M:Metrics numbers: less than 15% access it in a given month), so that would have a major impact on potential reach of this promotion. Did they have a strategic reason to accept limiting the demographics targeted to mostly to those with smartphones and the few other regular mobile web users?
Taking that with the quote from the beginning of the article, it sounds like Hyperfactory avoided complex custom programming for SMS in favor of building all the complexity into WAP, and got a little carried away with the creative beyond what would enhance the actual user’s experience.
A different set of compromises could have stayed on strategy, increased reach, maintained creative integrity and been implementable on a budget with many mobile platforms without custom programming.
About Dale
Executive Coach to Entrepreneurs.
Prior to becoming a consultant, advisor and now a coach, I'd been a CEO, a software engineer, a rocket scientist, book publisher, editor and author, a personal trainer, helped build a couple of mobile and Internet marketing agencies. Yeah, I was also the guy at the front of the iPhone line; all four times. iPad, too.
I mostly write about startups, marketing, business, and technology (especially mobile, social and web), and sometimes about other interests such as travel and health.