Andy’s post is a philosophy on how to make “good” apps. It’s a great post on the principle of having 80% practicality, 10% glamour and 10% character. Ideologically, this will provide you with an app that people will love and make you a multi-millionaire! However, it doesn’t always work out that way. We’ve seen it many times on Dragon’s Den where a young, hopeful entrepreneur presents their idea, only for the dragons to rip them apart and leave them empty-handed with their dreams in tatters……So who says it’s “good” – my argument is stress the importance of user-centred design.

Who holds the purse strings? Your wife, your boss, the queen? I work in part of a team that develop large scale websites for government organisations as well as advertisers with large budgets hoping to attract millions. The app / pitch can sometimes appear to be king. It’s what wins the client over and wins us contracts. However, that doesn’t always define your app as “good”,  just because the CEO of the company loves your app doesn’t mean Joe Bloggs who subscribes monthly and uses your app day-in day-out will too. If Joe Bloggs and countless others like him, hate your app and it flops……is your app still “good”.

Andy’s model sits perfectly in terms of assessing the values of the user. Ultimately, an app needs to work – 80% practicality. Too often products are thrown by the way side for not solving a problem or doing the job it was meant to do. This is particularly emphasised in our consumer culture today. The user’s value may indeed fluctuate between glamour/character and practicality as good marketing is always effective in blurring a user’s sense of need.

For an app to succeed, the user’s voice is priceless. An app will either thrive or dive by the user’s voice. This can be seen in Apple’s App Store. Angry Birds is currently no. 1 paid for app. This follows Andy’s model of 80% practicality – it’s essentially a great game. It’s engaging, not to difficult, but challenging enough to leave you wanting more. 10% glamour – it looks good, but more importantly it doesn’t distract from the game. The graphics don’t slow the game or make things difficult to see. 10% character – the birds are fun. There are talks of a TV series based on the strength of the characters in the game.

The user ratings and reviews for Angry Birds has propelled the app to the top of the store where it has sat for a good number of months. When making a transaction decision, advocacy is key. A recommendation from a friend, a high rating or positive feedback can carry a lot of weight for a user in whether to take the plunge with your app. Andy’s model is the foundation for creating a “good” app but ultimately the end user will decide whether the app is indeed good.

Hopefully, you’ll see the importance of valuing the user in every stage of the development of an app. User-centred design starts and ends at the user. It continually comes back to the issue of “who is this for?”, “what problem are we solving” etc. it uses usability testing to measure how we’re doing in the process, whether we’re still on track or veered way off course. It isn’t a launch and cross fingers….

This is a rule I’ve been using for a while now. Great for making web apps “good”, but can be used in other places too (product design, customer service, copywriting, advertising). Being “good” is a route to “win”.

80% practicality (”job done”); 10% glamour; 10% character.

So how does it work?

“Job done” practicality is the price of entry for your app (or product etc). You need to to give the user what they want, helping them achieve their goal easily and with minimal fuss. If you can’t deliver on this, the app or product will probably fail. It won’t be good, it won’t sell, it won’t gain users. You need to at least do what it says on the tin. That can be a lot of work, as rule of thumb, probably 80% of your effort.

Being ruthless about delivering practically is a great tactic for many reasons, including:

• can reduce your overall costs (by removing un-needed stuff that you have to make and support)
• benefits users (by decreasing the friction of using your app or product)

Practicality also has a couple of serious limitations:

• doesn’t distinguish you much from your competitors. Being better at “job done” might keep your existing customers, but it probably won’t create passionate advocacy and recommendation. Passionate advocacy and recommendation is great, it’s a route to “win”.
• practicality alone tends to lack warmth, soul, personality….the stuff that makes us human

Glamour make people feel smart, make things shiny, make people go ‘ooh’.

Emphasising glamour might sound shallow, but – take a peek – we can take glamour to mean beauty, elegance, chic, style; charisma, charm, magnetism, desirability (worth). The word ‘sprezzatura‘ might be better, but I’d be forgetting how to spell it

In a web app, glamour comes from the appearance of effortlessness. This could be things like outstanding graphic design or providing interactions that feel just great. Using javascript drag-and-drop to make a list much easier to use is glamour. Slideshows and lightboxes can be glamour. One way to increase glamour is by showcasing the user’s stuff and keeping your app out of the way – perfectly crafted background can enhance the glamour of a foreground subject.

Be ruthless with glamour. The goal is to flatter the user, not the designer. Make the user feel smart, make them feel they’ve made great choices. Glamour done wrong = tawdry, cheap, nasty, irritating, and might give you a rash.

Character is who we are. Who we are is a factor in having users come back to us, and in creating passionate advocacy and recommendation. Be ruthless with character – you’ll be judged by it. Be ruthless, but be generous. Character comes out in tone of voice, customer service, and (worthwhile) quirks. I could write more on this, but I couldn’t think of anything useful and I’m running out of time. You probably get it, ‘cos you’re smart people

– postscript —

This rule *is not* an 80-20 law, although it might look like one » Learn why.

This rule *is* effectively a variation of “Sell the sizzle, not the steak”

I was really taken by the thank you note and sticker, as they gave a sense of personality to a company selling pretty commoditised goods. Through this small gesture and at little cost, they’d become socially awesome.

And it isn’t just me who thinks this. As last night on the tube, I randomly saw a guy with an Awesome Merchandise sticker on his guitar case. So it looks like by dint of their little sticker and thank you note they’ve gone viral (a bit).

@Rubber_Republic

A quiet moment during casting earlier gave me time to reflect (You’ll get it).

‘New’ is addictive. Here’s some stuff that’s not new. Don’t matter though, try em anyway.

I should just fricking put these links on Twitter where they belong instead of saving them up to try and add some useful insight. Whatever.

1. Faris Yakob and some other blokes talk about interesting stuff in 2008. Seems a long time ago now. Still, nobody knew anything then, nobody knows anything now. If anybody does know, send me a postcard, ta. And if you don’t know (and nobody does), give it some interesting chat instead.

2. BJ Fogg on Simplicity. If I say more, you won’t bother clicking. Then you’ll miss out. Go on, click. It’s worth it

3. Five ways to ruin your industry reputation. Seems pretty retro and obvious, now right? Surely everyone knows Facebook is for baby pictures and debauchery; business networking is done with linkedin and twitter. Or do they? And who’s ‘everyone’ anyway. Get ‘everyone’ to send me a postcard, see how many I get.

4. John Kay. If you don’t like learning about business and economics at all, well, whatever. If you do like business and economics and you don’t like reading John Kay, you’re just wrong, and I’ll fight you. Unless you are (a) bigger than me, or (b) better at fighting than me or (c) nah.

5. “Viral marketing may also be limited by the virtue that most people are actually only talking to small groups of people online.” HP Labs research from 2008. So talk to lots of small groups, right? Or – get this – make sure you start a conversation with one person, repeat that n times. Don’t just arrogantly broadcast your views out at people…hmm. Irony fail. Kzzzpttt. [end]

Checking for freshness

Using Topsy.com pre-tweet will allow you to track the existing tweets of a URL to see if it’s past its share-by date. This will also allow you to see how influential people have tweeted it and to adjust the copy of your tweet to show a different insight which is more interesting and spreadable to build on the previous tweets. It’s also likely that within your niche you’re not going to get retweeted if something has already been tweeted over 500 times – so what remix can you bring to that tweet? Sometimes it’s something that should instead be married to the insight of a lengthy blog post, which then makes it more shareable than just an old link. Think about how increasingly you can be a step ahead of your favourite sources that tweet – who are they retweeting? Follow them/their sources and who they retweet and so on.

Keeping it on brand

Acclimatising yourself with the past tweets is a good start to make sure you remain relevant to your followers that have kept on following, but firstly being interesting outside of tweets that just communicate company culture earn your right to then gradually do so.

More than anything the brand becomes the sum of all the agency’s…….

Personality

Your followers will want to see an agency that has a consistent personality if they are to choose to follow it over individuals or indeed over just a twitterfeed of its blog posts. Too many cooks can spoil the broth if they are not singing from the same hymn sheet (double cliche all the way). When reppin’ a company’s voice in the social internet being apprehensive about being ‘too’ cavalier can turn you towards news-line tweeting and this can be a big undoing (you could say tweeting is like any good creative work that needs that bit of boldness to spread on the web). Just don’t overstep the boundary in trying to be insightful or funny so that your CSR becomes an issue!

Sacrificing your own tweets

You know that really brilliant tweet you have that you could tweet from your personal account? Yeah, it sucks, but if you’re PR’ing your agency it’ll have to come through its twitter first 99% of the time. Exception being when you specifically want to curate the interestingness of your agency’s folk every now and then.

Adding to the retweet

Credit a source on Twitter for a great link but always add to their tweet unless they’ve put it so goddamn well it’s hard to beat. Mindless retweeting has become as common as the like. It’s the thought that you add which is spreadable and meaningful about your agency brand, not the clicking of a button.

Much of life is not zero-sum: one person’s gain is not another’s loss. Work towards a win for all participants. Not just a compromise; a win.

Is that possible? Try anyway.

Source of Think Win Win here.

What’s Postr?

For being the first, I sent Tim a Postr two-fer

Sure, I was presented with a tantalising list of episodes, but there weren’t any play buttons – so I couldn’t make any use of Channel 4’s (very cool) site.

Suddenly it hit me, what if they were drawing the play buttons with javascript. Javascript is single-threaded, so a single script mis-behaving can stop the whole of the rest of the page from working.

Sure enough, looking at the site carefully it turned out they are including Facebook connect. The Facebook servers were responding incredibly slowly, but failing to respond with a server error that would let the rest of the site run.

So in short, the whole of channel 4’s 4oD site was useless to me (and, I assume to a large number of other people) because of Facebook.

Now I don’t know if Channel 4 have any kind of SLA with Facebook (I’m assuming not), but I’d be interested to know if there was a risk analysis done when they added Facebook Connect to the site.

How does it work?
I write something interesting and useful on a 2″ sticky note and send it to you by post. Character limit: whatever fits (not a lot, unless I write teeny-tiny).

Coming soon:
- Postr Pro – uses Royal Mail Special Delivery, guaranteed before 12pm next day.
- Postr Mobile – using pigeons.
- Postr Lite – smaller sticky notes, and I don’t bother mailing them to you. I just write them, then put them in the shredder.
- Postr API – allows you to slice and dice postr for mashups, archiving, integration with other services etc. To get started, signup for our developer kit (developer kit contains scissors, tape, pritstick).

Postr is currently in private beta. To signup, send a stamped self-adddressed envelope (SAE) to ‘Postr’, 35 King Street, Bristol, BS1 4DZ.

Latest feature: ‘repost’. Share *my* thoughts with *your* friends. Simply pop the sticky note in a new envelope and send it to the friend of your choice. Want to send it to more than one person? Simply ask the first one to pass it on when they’re done.