A domain name doesn’t win you a market; launching second or fifth or tenth doesn’t lose you a market. You can’t blame your competitors or your board or the lack of or excess of investment. Focus on what really matters: making users happy with your product as quickly as you can, and helping them as much as you can after that. If you do those better than anyone else out there you’ll win.
From Why Wesabe Lost to Mint, a post on the blog of Wesabe co-founder Mark Hedlund
By Ollie Campbell
Interactive Director, DTDigital
Dear iPhone app developers (and Apple),
I love my iPhone, it’s awesome. I use it more than any phone I’ve ever had. In fact I almost use it more than I use my computer nowadays. And one of the main places that I do this is in bed.
No, I’m not talking about vibrate mode, I’m just talking about playing games, reading ebooks, and generally overstimulating my brain so that I can’t get to sleep. But there’s a special thing that happens when I’m in bed, that doesn’t happen much during the rest of my day. That thing is lying down.
When I do this, any tilt based interface becomes completely useless. Steering a car by tilting? Impossible. Tilting to get to the menu in Monkey Island? Really really annoying. I spent a whole week only being able to lie on one side while I was playing that game (OK in that case it was worth it).
And it’s not just the interfaces that use tilting for control, it’s also the ones that have different modes for portraint and landscape. Take the built in mail app for example. I don’t really like writing emails or SMSs in landscape mode. I mean, maybe somebody does, but personally, I like to see more than 2 millimeters of the message that I’m writing. But I’m not knocking landscape modes of apps in general, I’d just like to have a bit more control about when they do (or don’t) happen.
Some apps, (like Stanza, the ebook reader) let you lock the phone in a certain orientation, which is pretty nifty. Maybe you iPhone devs could have a think about implementing this in the OS as a standard feature, cause it’s pretty cool.
But more generally, what I’m seeing here is people making things without thinking about how I’m gonna use them. And when people do that, it makes me feel neglected.
I’m a bit of an IDEO fan (especially lately). They have some great techniques for finding out about their users, one of which is their method cards. Here’s one I particularly like:
A Day in the Life
HOW: Catalog the activities and contexts that users experience throughout the day.
WHY: This is a useful way to reveal unanticipated issues inherent in the routines and circumstances people experience daily.
Maybe you guys could keep it in mind when you’re making the next top 25 blockbuster apps :)
Kind regards,
Ollie
