Building a product is easy. But building the company that builds the product is hard.
Love this quote from an interview with Dennis on what lies beyond the check-in.
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Mobile
Nice profile of the company and a little glimpse into @dens‘s past.
ps: If you squint you can see me right behind Justin Bieber (will the jokes ever get old?)
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Next Thursday I’ll be speaking on a panel called “Location, Location, Location” at Ad Age’s Creativity and Technology conference.
The details of the panel are as follows:
6:20 Panel: Location, Location, Location
Location-based services will undoubtedly be a bigger part of your personal life and the brand creativity world in the coming days. Find out how this space is evolving, for users and for brands, how user experience will progress, how it’ll all be monetized, and the new ways that local businesses and big brands will be involved. And what about your privacy? If you play along, do you forfeit it? Find out where it’s at from two of the biggest players in the LBS game, each of whom take a different approach to location.
Moderator: Kunur Patel, Advertising Age
Panelists:
Alex Rainert, Head of Product, Foursquare
Dave Wang, VP, Business Development, Booyah
Tina Unterlaender, Account Director, AKQA Mobile
Should be really fun. I’m also looking forward to checking out some of the other panels and speakers that day. Check out the full agenda – some really great stuff in there. Hope to see you there!
ps: I believe you can still register here.
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This is the first in what I plan to be an ongoing feature on everydayUX: the 3 x 3 review. These will not replace the in-depth, hands-on reviews you would get from a Gizmodo or Engadget but rather more of a quick-hit review laid out as 3 things I love and 3 things I’d change about a particular product or service.
The first product I want to talk about is Hootsuite the self-proclaimed “The Professional Twitter Client”. To set the stage a bit, I have a rather promiscuous history of trying many Twitter clients – Twitteriffic, Tweetie, Brizzly, Echofon, and Tweetdeck, to name a few. I’m hoping to give Nambu a go if I ever get a beta invite.
My favorite, and most-used, of the bunch is Tweetie (by far). I think it’s a near perfect 1 account Twitter client but I’ve started playing the field again for 2 main reasons: 1. Tweetie Desktop development has been stagnant for months (no RT support, no list support) while others continue to iterate and innovate and 2. the crisp + sparse Tweetie UI breaks down a bit once you start trying to manage multiple accounts, which I’m now doing with Tinker Studio. Because of that I’ve started to dip into some of the more “power user” apps like Tweetdeck, Seesmic and Hootsuite. I can unequivocally say after trying Tweetdeck for what seems like the 23rd time, is that there’s something that just doesn’t feel right to me, mostly in terms of UI responsiveness, about Air-based Twitter clients so I ended up at Hootsuite and luckily was immediately impressed.
Hootsuite has a ton of features (multiple accounts, brand managing, statistics, Twitter lists, Facebook pages, mobile apps, etc.) but I’m going to focus on the ones that affect me personally – managing 2 accounts and a Facebook page, posting links, viewing a couple of custom Twitter lists, etc. People looking for tools to enable a team to manage a brand’s entire online presence would most certainly have a different needs and a different take on Hootsuite so please keep that in mind.
3 things I love
- Performing the primary Twitter actions on multiple accounts is a breeze. The interface and UI is excellent. Setup is easy peasy. Hopping between accounts is great and posting to multiple accounts at once couldn’t be simpler.
- Interface feels so much more responsive than Air-based competitors. They’ve done one of the best jobs I’ve seen making a web app feel like a native client (thanks to the great Fluid app), something I personally think Adobe Air still struggles with, particularly when it comes to Twitter clients.
- Slick iPhone app. While the iPhone app isn’t perfect (see #3 in the next list) it just feels really solid and presents some nice UX touches along the way.
3 things I’d fix
- No support for other URL shorteners. Every link you post via Hootsuite gets shortened with their URL shortner (ow.ly). It’s obvious why they’re doing this – they want the data and they want you to see their bar (see # 2 in this list). These are both decisions that very clearly put their users second, which is never a good idea but wouldn’t be a dealbreaker if it wasn’t for most other major twitter clients taking a more flexible approach to the issue.
- Let go of my browser! Every ow.ly link takes your unsuspecting friends to a version of the page you’re sharing with the Hootsuite toolbar having hijacked their browser and url bar. If there was a Dante’s Inferno of web chicanery (maybe there should be?), I’d place browser-hijack bars in the second or third circle and judging by my informal Twitter poll last night, I’m not alone. To be fair, Hootsuite is better than most culprits in that they at least give the end user the option to no longer get the bar but I still can’t excuse it. Over the past week I’ve been painstakingly shortening my links with Bit.ly and then pasting them into Hootsuite – both because I have already have a bit.ly account I use with other apps and also because I like and respect my friends and want to keep my hands off their browsers.
- No Instapaper support in the iPhone version. As someone who consumes a ton of information from a variety of sources on my laptop and iPhone with equal vigor, I’m constantly trying to make my content consumption routine more efficient. Over the past year, the near ubiquity of Instapaper has made it the keystone to that routine and a clearinghouse for my content. I send everything I want to read there as well and make great use of the great custom folder support – i.e. Read Later, follow up, post to everydayux, save to delicious, etc. It’s become so easy to integrate support for Instapaper, you’ll find it in almost all of the popular Twitter clients for the iPhone… but not Hootsuite.
On the bright side, Hootsuite has managed to do a lot of the hard stuff really well. For the most part, my gripes center around deliberate business choices (particularly 1 + 2) they’re making so they might not change any time soon. I will remain optimistic and continue to keep an eye on the product as it evolves.
So what am I going to do? Until there’s Instapaper support on the iPhone client, I’m going to go back to using Tweetie on my phone. When I’m on the laptop, I’m going to continue using Hootsuite until I get tired of the Bit.ly > Hootsuite workaround – which could be soon. The fact that I don’t really have a better multi-account, non Air-based option at this point.
If anyone has any suggestions to resolve any of the issues above or about other clients I should try, let me know. In the meantime, stay tuned for the next episode of 3 x 3 on everydayUX where I tackle the FitBit.
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I’m happy to announce that Tinker Studio will taking part in the Square beta program so as of today, I’m ready to accept payment for services via my iPhone + my Square. I also plan on making Square central to the massive stoop sale Karen and I are planning for when the season turns.
Not familiar with Square? Check out the excellent demo and you’ll know exactly why it’s important:
Learn more about Square
Follow Square on Twitter: @square
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A couple of weeks ago, New York City-based online grocer, FreshDirect launched their iPhone app (iTunes link), enabling their customers to easily shop for groceries in a way that caters to the needs of an audience that is increasingly mobile.
This is doubly exciting for me: first, as a huge fan of the brand and weekly FreshDirect customer for the past 7+ years but secondly as a mobile designer as it was the last project I had the amazing chance to lead while I was at Schematic.
FreshDirect.com occupies a very unique place in the world of online shopping for many reasons that I’m sure you can imagine. At a high level, it presents a fundamentally different shopping experience because a) many of their customers shop weekly and b) those shopping experience involves building a cart with many more items than most other cart-based online shopping sites. This creates very specific interaction needs that that the team at FreshDirect has spent the better part of the last decade honing and improving on their website. Solving the problem of taking the relevant parts of that experience and making them mobile was a really exciting one to tackle and this app is the result of that process.
We focused on designing an experience that complemented and enhanced the primary web experience while always remaining cognizant of the mobile medium – giving you quick access to previous orders and custom shopping lists you’ve created on the site, browsing your favorite items and weekly specials, updating your delivery times or searching for any item in the store for those times when you remember that one thing you neglected to throw in your cart.
Working on a mobile product for a local brand like FreshDirect that, if done right, could make a weekly routine that people undergo more pleasant, efficient and rewarding, was one of the best professional opportunities I’ve had as a designer. I couldn’t be more proud of the team I got to work with on the project and I’m so excited that everyone’s work is now out in the world for people to use. Also, FreshDirect has a history of listening to its customers to continually enhance their products so know that any thoughts/feedback you have on the app. will be welcomed by their team.
If you’re in New York and you feel that you’ve got better things to do with your time than spend hours each week combing the aisles of your local C-Town, check out FreshDirect and make sure you give the new iPhone app a spin (iTunes Link). Hope you like it!
Update from the comments: Also, wanted to let everyone know Fresh Direct just launched a contest to promote the app. Grand prize winner gets $500 Apple Store credit + $500 Fresh Direct credit, check it out: http://bit.ly/FD_AppContest
Check out some screenshots:
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Am I going to ditch my iPhone for a Puma phone? No. I am, however, really impressed by how Puma has chosen to enter a space that’s already way over-saturated. In an industry full of me-too-ing, they clearly recognized that the only chance they have to make any mark is to come to market with something genuinely different and from the looks of these demos and screenshots, they’ve done just that. This is evident from the memorable (and very well-branded) UI, the playfulness that permeates the OS and even some of the hardware additions:
That might be thanks to some of the silly stuff like a calculator that teases you when you try an operation it deems too trivial, a pet puma on the device called Dylan (who shows up on-screen when you leave your handset untouched for a while), and an audio player with a turntable you can actually scratch — but the real draw is probably the solar panel around back.
In a lot of ways, Puma is showing up manufacturers that have been making phones for years by demonstrating how even the little guy can make a splash if he’s willing to take a chance.
Read more about it over at engadget.
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I really like the approach to health education GE is taking with Morsel. Naturally, the value ultimately rests in the quality of the content but as far as the way it’s presented – daily, bite-sized tips to living a healthier life that you can check off as “done” – makes it easily digestible, particularly for an audience that’s increasingly on the go.
For example, here’s today’s:
The next time you have a spare moment, exhale as you suck your stomach in for 15 seconds.
We all know that making big lifestyle changes can be really hard so I applaud GE for building something that makes it easy, and satisfying, to make a lot of little changes.
Kudos to Brooklyn’s Big Spaceship on another in a string of great recent launches.
Update: Thanks to a lovely commenter I found out that there is, in fact, an iPhone app. Get it here.
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Why build a new weather app? There are a ton of them out there (until now I’ve been partial to Weatherbug) so if you want to to get noticed, you need to come to market with a fresh perspective and Outside (developed by Robocat) does just that. The first thing you’ll notice is that the UI is meticulously crafted (courtesy of superstar designer Michael Flarup) in a style that remains playful without compromising credibility (after all, you want to trust that this app will properly equip you in your battle against the elements). This is apparent both in the visual design style but also with the impeccable attention to detail paid to the interaction design.
Once you start playing around, you’ll start to get a sense of their refreshing approach to communicating the weather to their users – they do it in a very human way by a) simplifying the amount of features they offer and b) focusing those features on how the weather will affect you.
Here’s a look at the instructions you get when you first fire up the app letting you know how to navigate their information. This style gives you a great sense of the overall feel of the app.
If you’re looking for detailed satellite imagery from the Doppler2000, this is not the app for you but if you want to be alerted when there’s rain on the way when then you might want to give it a spin.
Their human-centric approach manifests itself mostly in the importance they place on user-defined notifications based on certain conditions. What’s so wonderful about this is that this is the kind of stuff that you really care about 90% of the time – weather changes that will affect your behavior. Below you can see the alerts that I’ve set up for Cold (below 30 degrees) and Rain.
They allow you to set alerts based on the following conditions: Cold, Rain, UV and T-Shirt (and clearly working on others). For each one, you set the threshold at which you want to be alerted and then customize the push notification you get when it crosses that threshold. They also let you customize what the push notification will say. Here’s what I have for when we cross my cold weather threshold:
The notification system is also where their business model comes in – the initial $2.99 purchase gets you the app + 1 month of notifications and then after that you can pay $1 for 3 months of notifications. I am certain that paying for a weather app, much less subscribing to one, is going to turn a lot of people off. I’m also curious to see how the somewhat wonky payment structure plays out as it presents an interesting communication challenge.
This app might not be for everyone (i.e. hard core weather fetishists, people who expect weather info to be free) but if you want an app that delivers daily weather information via a wonderfully designed experience and interaction and offers a thoughtfully-executed notification system, I highly recommend Outside.
In addition to that, I think it’s important to recognize how they’ve approached an oversaturated market from a new angle. Are there other apps we take for granted that could be given a similar treatment?
- check out a thorough walkthough of the app on their site.
- download the app. (iTunes link)
- follow the dev team on Twitter.
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via engadget.com
After launching a beautiful redesign of their site a few months ago, Engadget is back with a custom iPhone app (iTunes link) covering their major tech news outlets – regular, HD and Mobile.
On the go, I’m the kind of user who’s more likely to get my tech news from my RSS app (Reeder represent!) than an app dedicated to one news source. That being said, this app provides much richer experience than simply delivering news and it’s definitely worth a download for anyone who enjoys the site as well as anyone interested in seeing how an online publishing brand can create a world class user experience across multiple platforms.
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