The cost of a bad app

Revisiting my earlier, "How's your mobile experience," Forrester's "Good Apps, Bad Apps: The Cost Of Creating Exceptional Mobile Moments Through Mobile Apps" give a clear insight into the apps market and the lessons being learned by developers - often hard lessons. There's much in that report that is worth digesting, but while I'm still on my hobby horse about apps that have annoyed or impressed me of late (there are many), I'm just going to look at five areas that Forrester call out.

1. When it comes to apps, it's a user's market.
If an app doesn't give a user what they want, they'll look elsewhere for one that does.  Or, from personal experience, they won't bother at all.  I tried using my bank's mobile app some time ago and frustrated by the experience of having to continually re-input and re-select data from one screen to the next, I reverted to their website interface. Entering text on a mobile is not an exact science, particularly when you've got clumsy great digits like I have.  The interface and requirement for user interaction should be simple and intuitive.

2. Successful apps give users "mobile moments".
The experience of using an app should combine functionality and performance at the right time. So, if I decide to give my bank another try at getting it right (which won't be anytime soon, but let's go with that for now), their app should deliver the information I want in such a way that is tailored to my mobile experience. The mobile interface and the way content is delivered to and presented through will decide whether users come back for more.

Another example of this was when I tried to book tickets via my mobile.  The pop-up keyboard completely obscured the box I was trying to fill out, so I was left blindly trying to input my credit card number. All the while, the number of available tickets was shrinking fast. I got there in the end but my mobile moment in using that app was one of frustration and just maybe a little bit shouty.

On the other hand, consider something like National Rail's app, which is tailored beautifully for the smaller screen. Data can be input simply, responses are delivered in a quick, fun and friendly way and the experience of discovering my train has just been cancelled is improved considerably.

3. Mobile development is maturing, with both investment and use still subject to experimentation.
With over 1.5 billion smartphones in operation, enterprises know that if they want to reach customers, they need to have an app.  It's important to invest the time and money required to develop an app which engages the user, delivers what they want and helps them to do whatever it is the app helps them do, better.  But of course they don't always get it right first time. Few rarely do.  What matters though, is giving the user a worthwhile experience from the first iteration. It doesn't have to offer everything the enterprise aspires to do via its app, but it must at least perform a core set of functions and do it well.

I'm a staunch supporter of the Pebble smartwatch. Now Pebble were a small start-up who found themselves overwhelmed with orders thanks to two hugely successful Kickstarter campaigns. They came close to becoming a victim of their own success on several fronts, not least with the phone-based app they developed to manage the data to and from the watch. The first generation watch didn't even have an app for many months after it was launched. And when it did finally come along, it was iOS only - the Android version was some months behind.  A couple of years and many versions later they still haven't got it 100% right - the app is sometimes slow to respond, not always as intuitive as it should be and updated functionality seems slow to arrive at times.

But every iteration of the app has delivered what was promised. It works, it manages the watch effectively and it's a useful front-end to the bewildering variety of watchfaces and apps that the watch can run.  And it did all of those things from day one.

Pepsi's Amp Up app

4. There are significant benefits to getting an app right and they're not just the ones you might think of.  When a customer is happy with their mobile experience they will come back for more. An app that works, that delivers a good experience engages the user. And an engaged user has the potential to become an advocate for the enterprise as well as improving their productivity.  The two most popular app stores, Apple's and Google's, enable purchasers to leave instant and public feedback on the software they download - and that feedback affects the brand of the app developer.  But

Pepsi's Amp Up Before you Score app, released in the distant past that is now 2009, was a game aimed at men designed to help them pick up one of 24 in-game female stereotypes.

I know, right? Needless to say there was an entirely justified outcry from consumers and media, alike, and the app was quietly pulled.  Read The Guardian's article on that whole sorry affair.

5. Understand your cost drivers and how to manage them
A comprehensive understanding of the cost drivers behind your app can mean the difference between saving up to 10% on development costs or doubling them.  How does the app fit into the enterprise's overall strategy; what does the enterprise hope to gain from the app, how will it simplify customer or employee interactions, what is its planned impact on productivity, what resources are available

It all comes down to the question of why the app is being created and how it fits into your business model.  And when bearing those elements in mind, the prime concern is how all of this makes the life of your user or your employee just that little bit better.

A side effect of the mobile, always-on experience is that our attention spans have shrunk. The app user needs to be able to get what they want quickly and with no fuss.  Therefore, an effective app must balance form against function. Complex data and processing must be represented in a highly simplistic, intuitive way. That's a challenge, but it's one the enterprise must face up to.  A bad experience on the part of the user means they will be reluctant to go back for a second try.

Pebble Time - A very smart watch

Wearable tech is very much in its infancy but it's a market that looks set to explode over the next few years. Gartner estimates that the market for wearables will be worth in excess of $12bn by 2020 and presently most of the growth in that market is spearheaded by the smart watch. Attracted as I am by shiny things, I became a smart watch early adopter when, a couple of years ago I was given for Christmas a Pebble smartwatch.

The bright red, shiny plastic bezel and rubber strap looked anything other than smart, I'll freely admit, but the Pebble quickly became an essential part of my everyday life. So, when Pebble announced earlier this year that they were aiming to launch a new, colour version with enhanced features, I quickly became one of the 78,000 backers who funded Kickstarter's biggest ever project, raising over $20M.

My Pebble Time was delivered a little over a month ago, and it's everything I hoped for and more. Like its predecessor, the Time is no flashy, attention-seeking miniaturised mobile phone with a strap glued to its back. It is, first and foremost, a watch. It looks pretty unremarkable and it tells the time. But its benefits are subtle and numerous. Press a button and the Timeline pops up with a friendly animation, displaying information essential to my day - upcoming appointments, weather updates, news headlines and which of my favourite TV shows are on tonight are just a few of the delights to be found there. The Time also runs apps, of course - I can control my music player, my PC, my TV with it. I can see exactly how late my train home is going to be, how quickly I can get a cab instead, how much I'm likely to pay for it and then book it via the watch. I can decide which restaurants to take the family to and then discover which of my choices has offended the least amount of customers in recent months. I can play games, send messages, update my fitness record (or not, given my current state). I can do all this and more.

But, and it is a crucial "but" for me when using mobile technology, I can do all of that on my terms.

The Pebble Time is a masterpiece of functionality. It doesn't constantly demand attention; I don't spend most of my day pushing buttons, squinting at the screen or shouting into the microphone. Better still, I don't spend every waking hour worrying how much battery life it has left. A single charge gives me a week of normal use. Yes, that's right - a week. While I religiously plug in my phone and tablet every night, I don't bother with the Pebble until it tells me to with another cute animation. Even then, it has a magical ability to keep on running for days even when the battery reads 0%. The good people at Pebble watched Kramer in Seinfeld's "The Dealership" and thought "Yep".

I use the Pebble Time when I have reason to and I know that when I need to use it, it's not going to conk out on me through lack of power. That's exactly what I want out of a smart watch. It's an addition, an enhancement to my lifestyle and an extension to my phone, rather than a replacement.

For those reasons it's the classiest gadget I own.

Smile for the camera

My wife asked me the other day whether I could print out a particular picture of our eldest child that she could use in her end of term project at school.

"No problem," I thought - I've been diligently saving all our pictures over the years.  Three days later and I'm no closer to finding it than I was when I started.

Every two minutes, we take more photographs than were taken in total during the 1800s.  Indeed, it is estimated that in 2015, the human race will take one trillion photographs.

Our generation has become the most documented in history. We are more instrumented and interconnected than ever and as the power and ease of use of mobile technology grows, the amount of thought we invest in how we use it diminishes.  There's probably an offshoot of Moore's Law to describe that.

Photography is one of the most important means of documenting our history but is the proliferation of photography in the digital age helping us to document our lives better than ever before or are we devaluing them through sheer volume? How will future generations look upon us based on our digital footprint? Will they see a species in thrall to mildly amusing cats? Earlier this year, Google's Vint Cerf, pointed towards a more disturbing scenario.

As the simplicity with which we preserve our memories evolves, Cerf maintains that there's a real danger our generation is rushing towards a dark age, as the software and systems we rely on to preserve our lives become obsolete, taking our treasured data with them.

"We stand to lose a lot of our history. If you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives which is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, people's tweets, all of the world wide web, then if you wanted to see what was on the web in 1994 you'd have trouble doing that. A lot of the stuff disappears."

I recall my first digital camera, sometime in the mid-1990s. Back then, CDROMs were the preferred way of archiving and I diligently saved and backed up all those early, now laughably low-res images to disc. Inevitably, many of those discs have degenerated and, along with them, the backups I made, just to be sure.

As time progressed, I began uploading to photo-sharing sites - sites whose names I can no longer recall, let alone remember the last password I used or the email address my account was registered to.

It seems unimaginable that social networks like Facebook or Twitter will fade into obscurity, but didn't we think the same about Friends Reunited or myspace back when they were the latest thing? Come to think of it, I'm sure I've got material uploaded to both of those. Inevitably, a quick check to see if they're still around (they are, but they're in a sorry state) is accompanied by the sinking feeling that my accounts on both were registered to a domain name I no longer own.

The solution? Cerf says we should print out the photos and documents we deem most valuable, just like we used to. In a digital world, it seems good old analogue is the safest way of future-proofing that we hold dear.

So that's what I'll do. Once I've waded through the thousands upon thousands of images I have backed up to my Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Google+ and Amazon Prime accounts. There appears to be some level of synching between all of those but how can I be sure I'm not missing out on important private memories that I chose not to share online? No problem; I have archived those on an array of hard drives...in their thousands.

If I want to preserve my most precious memories I'm going to have to invest a considerable amount of time organising and prioritising them. And all the while I'm generating more images every day.  The photo gallery on my mobile currently contains 418 photographs. Now, I'm relatively disciplined when it comes to housekeeping on my phone and a quick check reveals that I last wiped my camera gallery 23 days ago.

Of the 418 photos, then, that I've taken in the last 23 days, which would I consider worth keeping? And what criteria would I apply to make that decision? I'm renovating my house at the moment, so the pictures I'm planning to construct into a time-lapse are certainly of value for the moment. I could probably lose most of the photos of my cat - as amusing as they are in the moment, I don't really need 50+ pictures of her, mostly taken as I await that supposedly spontaneous silliness. Pictures of friends and family are naturally more important but do I really need every moment of that party the other weekend captured for posterity?  How can I be sure that the pictures I hold dear now are truly important or simply being kept because it's easier than it is to spend the time to categorise and validate them?

In the 30 minutes it's taken to write this blog, 7.5 million photographs have been uploaded to Instagram.  And I'm certain that none of those are the one I'm looking for, either.