photo credit: codepo8

RIM is putting the remaining stock of it’s BlackBerry Playbooks on clearance for $299. This is after HP engaged in a rummage sale of both it’s new and refurbished WebOS tablets. What are buyers running on the hacked devices? That’s right, Android.

That’s now two major players who have thrown up their hands rather than compete. For Microsoft it means a long uphill climb against two established competitors. Nokia won’t help MS much here, once Android squishes their existing phones out of the developing world marketplace.

So what will MS have to do to establish a toehold? One or both of two things:

1. Hope that their aspirationally dubbed phones really are "super" and have something that people really can’t live without. Teleportation?
2. Are able to run Android apps out of the box but offer some better functionality or experience than the Android devices.

Given that MS hasn’t set the world on fire with it’s previous mobile product development efforts (is anyone doing real customer research over there?), I wouldn’t hold my breath.

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I came across this infographic earlier today that illustrates how quickly physicians are embracing mobile devices and mobile healthcare solutions. Presented this way, it’s suprising how much faster demand for mobile healthcare solutions is rising than in other areas. But if you look closer, it’s not surprising at all. Healthcare is an almost perfect setup for mobile: Physicians usually don’t sit at desks, but are at the side of the patient, in the operating room, doing rounds, or taking call from home. In all of those situations, they need information at their finger tips, clearly presented, in context, and in real time. We see this every day in our work with physicians, hospital systems and medical software companies.

Hat tip to the fine folks at Airstrip and the creators of the infographic at spinabifidainfo.com.

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The folks at Mobile Mondays Chicago were kind enough to post a video of the talk Todd Wyder and I gave to their group in February at Morningstar’s swanky offices on State Street.

Part 2 is here.

Part 3 is here.

Part 4 is here.

and Part 5 is here.

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Todd Wyder and I gave a talk on marketing mobile apps at Mobile Mondays Chicago last night at Morningstars swanky offices on State Street.

Selling mobile applications is far more difficult than selling SaaS applications. In December of 2010, the iPhone App Store averaged 627 new apps every day. The Android Market averaged 243. Long gone are the days of throwing an app up into an app store and watching the dollars flow.

We launch a lot of mobile applications for our customers, and one of the things we’ve found is that in order to achieve success, you need to start marketing before you start building, and that your marketing efforts may be greater than your development effort.

Topics covered include: 
- The many different marketing channels you can use to market your app

• The pros and cons of each channel
• How to instrument your mobile business so you can make data driven decisions.
• How to create ways of looking at your prospective customer’s actions to inform how you market to them.
• How to determine how your customers are using the product to drive future sales.
• A 21 step marketing plan for your mobile apps.

It’s a rapidly evolving field, so if there are additional techniques that work for you, please share them in the comments.

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Mary Meeker recently moved from Morgan Stanley to Kleiner Perkins. Luckily she’s continuing to publish her presentations on Mobile Internet Trends (along with Matt Murphy). As usual, the presentation is chock full of great analysis backed by great data.

A couple of highlights for me:

• The inflection point where smartphone + tablet sales became greater than laptop + desktop sales moved up – it was actually in Q4 2010!
• Mobile is global, but still has a lot of room to grow.
• Real-time social features are accelerating mobile usage growth: sharing + location + friending (SoLoMo)
• 60% of time spent on smartphones is NEW ACTIVITY for mobile users
• Global Mobile Data Traffic should grow 26x over the next five years.
• Facebook’s 200 Million mobile active users are 2x more active than desktop only users
• It’s still early for mobile ads, but they show huge promise. Arbitrage opportunities exist.
• Mobile commerce improvements(location based, transparent pricing, discount offers, immediate gratification) are changing behavior and driving revenue and ROI for retail partners.
• The shift in app revenue from paid downloads to virtual goods is strong.
• Gaming elements = Key to success for many mobile/social applications
• The difference in platform engagement is striking – iOS and Android have from 10x to 90x app usage of other platforms.
• The percent of free users converting to paid on iOS is 4.5x other platforms.
• Mobile internet adoption is moving 10x faster than desktop internet adoption did -> technology wealth creation/destruction will move faster as well.
• Mobile apps are already disintermediating many, with more to come.
• Mobile provides the ability to reward and influence behavior in real time, for exactly the right people.

I look at Mary’s presentations whenever they come out – she’s a strong influence on my own thinking on the space. If you want more depth on how mobile is different and where mobile opportunities are, I recently published a series of posts on mobile opportunities that are a good companion to Mary’s presentation.

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Mobile apps need to be designed and tested to scale to avoid surprises when actual human hands start operating the app. Designs crafted or presented on large monitors can be deceiving, because it’s hard to think in terms of two scales at the same time. Better to work at scale, and if possible even view key screens and simple prototypes on the device itself.

Following are some simple techniques for designing and testing with scale prototypes.

Index Card Prototypes
For a mobile smart phone app, a stack of 3×5 index cards will roughly approximate the size of the device. Screen concepts can be sketched on the cards and a walk though demo can quickly be assembled. While this kind of demo is rough, the time to create it is minimal and the resulting card stack can be used for informal usability tests.

When sketching a prototype, try several ways of organizing the content to keep the screens simple. Finding the right organizing approach should make the design of the supporting parts easier, so it pays to try as many ideas as you can think of to get an optimal one. Spend minutes, not hours, on your initial concepts.

To-Scale Storyboards
Another effective and simple prototyping technique is to make to-scale blank storyboard screens that represent the footprint of your device. Be sure you represent physical size correctly, so when you print the blank storyboard pages your screens are true to your device size. Storyboards are particularly useful for illustrating ideas of how an app can flow, or what a key usage scenario might look like.

On-device Sample Screens
Sample screen mock-ups and even sketches can often be best reviewed if you display them on the actual device. This doesn’t require a lot of code or even any code. Graphics images produced to-scale could be loaded onto the device in an application or prototyping program with minimal functionality that just displays the images.

On-Device Prototypes
The most reliable way to test a touch prototype is to get some actual functionality running on the target device. Of course, this is also the most expensive way to test but it can be worth the effort. This is especially true for testing the feel of the app, because the feel will depend on several things working together, including how the device is held (or positioned), the ease of seeing where things are at on the screen, the ease of locating interactive elements, the expected behavior of the app vs. the actual behavior and the responsiveness of the device to actual gestures.

To reach a compromise between the cost and value of such a test, it is usually best to focus on one or two key aspects of the feel and plan to do a few iterations of the test. The ability to re-iterate a test after doing some refinements can lead to much more valuable findings than a simple one-shot test.

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In part one of this series, I wrote about how mobile should be central to your development strategy because of the major shift that is happening to people’s computing habits. In part two, I cover key characteristics you need to consider in determining what you should (and shouldn’t) build. In part three, I will cover the opportunities this presents, and key questions to ask when you are exploring those opportunities.

1. Smartphones: Bite Size Interactions

Within the current mobile computing platforms, there are important differences between smartphones and tablets. A smartphone (iPhone, Android, Blackberry and other emerging platforms) is for quick, bite size, on the go interactions. You pull it out of your pocket, do something quick, and put it back. You can record, capture and share.

That means application interactions should be optimized for this type of use: fast, easy, bite size interactions first, larger interactions available, but broken into bite size chunks.

The use of smartphones has contributed to the use of platforms and applications built on small bite size chunks of information, like twitter, foursquare or instagram.

2. iPad and Tablets: the (Huge) Spaces in Between

At the latest when the iPad sold over 3 million units in the first 3 months, people realized that this was not a small hobby, but the start of something big. Selling 15 million iPads in 9 months confirmed it, as did the spectacle of every manufacturer announcing a tabletat CES 2011. This space in between is still evolving, but it’s huge, with estimates for 2011 sales ranging from 30 to 50 million, and further growth expected beyond that.

If laptops want to be on desks, and smartphones are for small, bite size interactions, iPads (and other tablets coming on the market like the Blackberry Playbook, Android tablets from Motorolla, Dell and Samsung, as well as the just announced HP Touchpad) are for all the spaces in between on the go and at your desk, where you need a bigger screen but otherwise desire the ergonomics of a smartphone.

This turns out to be quite a few spaces: Some examples include:

• Anything that would be done with a clipboard, like inspections, construction punch lists, gift registries in a store or physician rounds
• Things you would use a laptop for, if it were ergonomic (for example, I’m writing this post on my iPad while sitting in the passenger seat stuck in traffic in the Philippines.)
• Controlling devices in the home, from tv to surveillance cameras to temperature to security
• Sharing, for everything from sales calls to retail environments and trade shows, with everything from video to configurators to immersive games
• Replacing kiosks, as for check in at the doctor’s or the airport, or menus at a restaurant
• As a more ergonomic substitute for laptops and desktops: for reading, writing, sketching, watching video, playing games, learning, creating presentations, making video calls or making music.

Larger tablets are much more personal than a desktop, and much more immersive than a smartphone. Size makes a difference.

Steve Jobs made an interesting analogy when he compared the iPad to a car and a desktop or laptop to a Truck. Nearly everyone drives a car, but only some people, some of the time need the specialized features of a truck. I believe there’s a lot of truth to that analogy, which will be borne out over time.

3. Sensors can replace purpose-built devices

As YCombinator’sPaul Graham states:

“Many if not most of the special-purpose objects around us are going to be replaced by apps running on tablets … I think it will surprise people how many things are going to get replaced … The advantages of doing things in software on a single device are so great that everything that can get turned into software will.”

Smartphones and tablets continue to add more sensors to the base platform, from audio and cameras to gps, accelerometers, compasses and gyroscopes. These are additional pieces of context, which can be used together with with location and time based information to track movement and interpret visual input.

Sensors that aren’t on board can easily and cheaply be attached via functional cases (cases for smartphones or tablets that contain other sensors or electronics) or bluetooth, further enhancing your ability to interpret and augment your surroundings. As a consequence, a lot of dedicated devices can now be substituted through mobile platforms. We expect this to be an accelerating trend.

Examples include point of sale systems with magnetic card readers, blood analysis, temperature and chemical sensors, bar code scanners, augmented reality stargazing like Starwalk and even keys.

4. Data Collection and Feedback Loops

All of these sensors and Internet connectivity let you create feedback loops, where your customers are collecting data – whether you a retailer like amazon collecting comparison shopping information via barcode scanners, or a parking application collecting up to date parking space info via your customers use, or an electronic medical records app collecting information on physician rounds.

Analyzing Your Opportunity: 3 Questions

Mobile offers you the opportunity to form deeper and more meaningful engagements with your customers, to provide new products and services, to transform business processes, and radically disrupt industries.

When generating ideas for possible applications, don’t just focus on the device, but focus on the context. Mobile presents you with new ways to allow people to interact with information. This means you can break free of old habits and what it means to “compute”. Be mindful of your own thinking – don’t be anchored in the past.

Start by asking yourself three questions:

1. How much time do they spend at the desk, on the go, and in the spaces in between?

2. What do they do there? What problems do they have?

3. How can you help them kick ass?

This is a good starting point for your brainstorming. Once you’ve come up with product ideas and extensions, work on validating them using customer development or the Pragmatic Marketing framework.

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In part one of this series, I wrote about how mobile should be central to your development strategy because of the major shift that is happening to people’s computing habits. In part two, I cover key characteristics you need to consider in determining what you should (and shouldn’t) build. In part three, I will cover the opportunities this presents.

Just port it? Wrong.

The wrong answer is to take all of your existing applications and literally move every single thing over onto iPhone, iPad or Android  If you do this, you’re wasting your time and money, disappointing your customers, and ceding opportunities to your competitors.

Mobile is Very Different from Desktops and Laptops

To make the best use of mobile, you need to look at why mobile is different from desktop for your customers, and look for opportunities in those differences:

1. A laptop wants to be a desktop

A laptop computer wants to be a desktop. It’s most often used in a seated position in relative privacy at a desk or table, at home, in the office or perhaps at a coffee shop, with a persistent connection to power, a network and a printer. They’re pretty good devices for that purpose, especially when fitted out with multiple large screens. Using a laptop for anything outside of that context reveals it’s limitations. They’re just not ergonomic when you’re not sitting at a desk or a table. That’s why people don’t use them much outside of that context.

2. Mobile: You Can Take it With You

This may be stating the obvious, but mobile computing is just that – mobile. Mobile devices are designed for mobile use, and that’s how people use them. You cary your smartphone with you and use it sitting, standing, lying down, walking, running, almost anywhere. Modern smartphones and tablets are designed for just that: instant on, always connected, all day battery life, and usable standing, sitting, walking, lying down.

3. Mobility > Screen Size > Keyboard = Touch

When you’re on the go, portability is more important than size. You carry it in your pocket, pull it out when you need it, use it with one hand, put it back. The ability to do this constrains the size of the device, and thus the size of the screen.

But even though you are making compromises on screen size, maximizing screen size within that form factor is of paramount importance.

That’s one reason why touch dominates in mobile, and why chrome-less interfaces (in which navigation, borders, toolbars, controls etc. are hidden until accessed by a gesture) are preferred on touch devices. Both of these create more usable screen real estate when you need it.

Touch has other consequences – while you can build apps that mimic familiar keyboard and mouse interactions, those need to be modified. But touch allows for many other types of interactions – it’s essentially a blank canvas with inputs ranging from multitouch gestures to voice to tipping to shaking to bumping to pointing the device at something available. This opens up a whole new set of interface possibilities, as can be seen in apps like Smule Magic Piano, various musical instrument emulators, games, bump or drawing apps.

4. In Mobile, Context is King

Since mobile devices are almost always with you, time and location can provide very valuable context for your applications. And because you can so easily and instantly share, social becomes an important part of the context as well.

What has this led to? Music recognition services like Shazaam; location centered apps like Foursquare, comparison shopping via in store barcode scanning from Amazon, time and location capture built into many more applications, weather for where you are, the start of augmented reality apps, just to name a few.

As Luke Wroblewski puts it: “When you design for mobile you are designing something that can be used anywhere, anytime, and be instantly shared/discussed with other people.”

5. Mobile is Embedded in Your Lifestyle

You add all of these things together, and you end up with devices that are much more personal than a computer. Always on, always with you, always connected, always convenient, always collecting data and providing feedback on the world around you, storing your information.

They fit into (and alter) your lifestyle. They are lifestyle devices, in the most powerful sense of that phrase. This is true if you are using it for work or not.

That makes mobile much more powerful than desktop ever was.

6. Customer Expectations: Information Always Available, In Context

Your customers are used to having web apps, desktop apps and mobile apps. They expect to work with the same data everywhere, with experiences tailored to the device and the context, whether it’s an iPad, an android phone or a laptop.

So now that we’ve covered how mobile is different, what opportunities does mobile present you, and how do you go about figuring out what you should build? That’s what’s next in Part 3.

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The blogosphere has been humming the last few days with rumors of how Apple is about to turn your iPhone and iTunes into a digital wallet. This sort of discussion always makes geeks like me turn into the digital equivalent of Colombo, Nick Charles, Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, or Andy Barker P.I.

In my case, you probably would choose Andy Barker P.I. as my sleuthing character. The reason? I am about to cobble together the loosest set of links and information to present to you a future that Apple could (emphasize could) bring to your digital lifestyle.

This is my first entry in the “If I were Steve Jobs…” series that will make Oliver Stone’s JFK look like a documentary.

Evidence

This case has everything – Suspects, Venue, an intended Victim, & multiple Motives (motive 1, motive 2). Let’s connect the dots.

Theory

Imagine a world where you could use your handy iPhone X to buy any product you wanted at any retail store or restaurant but using your iPhone instead of a piece of plastic. These venues would all use RFID scanners instead of the card swiper youuse today. Apple in its infinite loop wisdom would allow you to tie your very secure iPhone X RFID chip identity to your iTunes credit/debit account.

When you go to buy your Super Venti Iced Coffee with Two (I SAID TWO) Pumps of White Mocha – Hold the Corn Syrup, you just hold your iPhone up, enter your iTunes password and “Boom!” – legalized stimulants. Nothing new here right?

But its possible Apple’s faithful Teslas and Edisons are working up something a little bit more unique. If privacy is less of a concern to users (and Facebook seems to be knocking down those walls everyday), its possible that Apple could track all of this brick and mortar purchase data about you in ways that would make Don Draper giggle.

Every time you purchase Nike’s shoes, Starbucks Coffee, or Walmart T-shirts this all could be added to your iTunes data profile. Why is this valuable? One iWord – iAd. iAd’s relevance to consumers and marketers could exceed any other marketing method available today if it had access to all of our offline and iTunes purchases.

Imagine, with Apple’s unique portfolio of entertainment and lifestyle products, they could allow advertisers to target you with 1 to 1, interactive video ads based on your actual purchase tastes. An AppleTV with its own app store could allow you to ditch cable and buy the ESPN app channel with all advertising driven by Apple’s iAd. ESPN would love this because it gives them access to iAds + iTunes Wallets data profile on you. The same goes for every in-app ad on your iPhone or iPad. Each ad would be pushed to you based upon your actual purchase data. Data, that if the public would allow it, is more valuable than the behavioral or content driven contextual ads of the competition.

Conclusion

Does my inner Steve Jobs know the above ideas to be reality? Not at all, but I can see a world where this combination of technologies and products in some digital ecosystem could change all of our lives, in the not so distant future…

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It is amazing how much one company has influenced our digital lives. You can not seem to look at any “smartphone” today without seeing Apple’s influential design sprinkled in. Need proof? Take a look at the Android prototype before the iPhone came out. Now look at Android today.

Does Apple get everything right? Heck no, but they have been setting the interaction trends for the last several years. This can especially be noticed when you are developing for iOS. If you have ever released an app to the iTunes store and not followed the standard interactions Apple places in its apps, then you know what it is like to get negative reviews from users on seemingly trivial interactions that ultimately still get the job done.

As a designer, interaction patterns matter because subconsciously they matter to users. Users like to understand things instantly without relearning how the same task is done. A user who has learned how to delete an email in one app does not want to have to learn a new set  of gestures or buttons to delete a video in an editing app.

Sometimes even interaction patterns that can be improved on, but are consistently implemented across other apps, are considered right just because so many users understand them from repetition. Apple thought of this and is kind enough to provide a designer/developer with a set of iOS Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). But when you are designing and developing the next killer app, how do you know when to follow the guidelines or not?

There can be many reasons to design an interface differently than the HIG but the “good” reasons are limited.

1. It is an interaction or app that is innovative and thus is not covered by the HIG’s limited set of interactions, controllers, and controls.

You are really not breaking the HIG in this situation, so there is no question its your opportunity to innovate. Have fun, young Jeff Raskin.

2. You are designing to differentiate your application from the rest in the App Store.

This is a bit tricker, as the interaction had better be very powerful and memorable to break the mental model users have learned from all the other apps. In this case its often better to just stylize your design but keep the controls and interactions in line with the HIG. This way users understand how your app works but remember your design as being different and/or fun.

3. You have a limited budget and you can build your non-standard design quicker than what is in the HIG.

This is a dangerous path that many fall into, but rarely does it work out well (although there are exceptions). If you are a bigger company with a hot established brand you may find you can get away with this allot more often than the little guys. More often than not, user reviews, Gruber, and general market confusion often force this designer to go back and rework the app to match the HIG and thus it ends up costing more in the long run.

In general, remember the HIG is your friend and can save you design effort and research, giving you time to focus on what makes your app unique and insanely great. I look forward to paying you $0.99 for making my life easier. Now if Apple would just give me a way to add another 200 app screens to my iPhone…

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