LBi London

Weekly Social Media Update

Posted by Sinead Doyle March 29th, 2011

Color: a New Breed of Photo App

Photo-sharing mobile apps have been getting a lot of attention recently, as apps like Instagram start to find wider adoption (even Starbucks wants a slice of the action). Color is the latest service to get geeks excited, with its dynamic interpretation of social connections: your elastic network learns who your closest friends are and helps you see the world through their eyes. It also makes use of all the phone’s sensors, cleverly using camera and microphone data to triangulate users’ locations. While many people may be content with conventional photo sharing via Flickr, Facebook or Twitter, this app hints at the direction in which all mobile apps are heading: a brave new world of location and context-sensitive intuitive sharing. Try it out!

Color, the photo-sharing app

Asos and Diet Coke

Asos and Diet Coke have teamed up to launch a fashion competition. Street Style Stars will give one lucky fashionista the chance to feature in a fashion shoot displayed on the Piccadilly Circus Coca-Cola sign.

Street Style Star

Tags: Android, app, Asos, Color, Diet Coke, elastic network, Instagram, iPhone, photo, photo-sharing, sharing, Social Media, Starbucks, Street Style Stars

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Recent reading

Posted by Merje Shaw November 1st, 2010

There have been quite a few interesting posts online recently which we thought would be good to share with you:

Jessica Kerr reviews the new takes on web form design in Fashionable Web Forms: Traps and Tips. In this article, she cautions against taking a too novel approach to web forms and reminds us that there is a reason why certain from- design techniques are well established.

A very interesting post by Stefana Broadbent on why private communication from the office upsets colleagues in which she analyses the effect of making calls on a mobile phone from the office and compares this to the usage of personal e-mail and IM.

You may have already seen this article on An App That Makes Android Smarter Than Ever. The Tasker seems to address the time/ contact management issues that people are faced with more and more these days. It is a shame that you require quite a lot of time/ technical thinking to actually configure the app to anything usable.

Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D. reveals the research that found we are more likely to choose the first item on a list in her blog post 100 Things You Should Know About People: #45 — You Choose (And Vote For) The First One On The List

We also read a really lovely article from June on a blind person’s experience with an iPhone: My First Week with the iPhone

Tags: Android, choice, communication, form design, iPhone, LBiQ, User Research

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Interface Development team weeknote (week 1029)

Posted by Paul Carvill May 24th, 2010

A weekly note detailing the joy and the pain of LBi’s Interface Development team.  One of the apparent conventions of the weeknote format (which started with the esteemed BERG, according to Russell M Davies in this Wired article) is that the week numbering scheme runs from the date of the business’s incorporation.  LBi has a long and interesting history, but I managed to trace it back to the earliest incarnation of the group: Linkhand, date of incorporation 03 September 1990, hence the spectacularly high week number.

Week ending 21/05/10:

This week Will spent a few enjoyable days appreciating the benefits of working to a single platform when he put together an iPhone-specific implementation of one of our clients’ sites. It’s probably a bit hush-hush for now so we’ll do a big reveal of that at some point in the future, but let’s just say it’s “kinda interesting”.

After an enquiry from a colleague as to the existence of a platform-independent version of the popular performance analysis tool dynaTrace Ajax Edition, Ray started to put together a “node.js traffic proxy analysis tool thingy” which has the beginnings of something very useful. It lets you route all your http requests through a node.js webserver, where you can analyse the request headers for all sorts of interesting information. Some further tinkering with this will prove fruitful.

Andy and I continued work on our top secret iPad-targeted webapp. We’ve already spent a few weeks developing the client-side architecture, where we employed an MVC pattern to manage the app, made use of mobile Safari’s offline storage capabilities to take care of state, and layered on our own touch interaction system. Now we’re taking a deep dive into the rendering of the views, which it looks like we’re going to split out into a smaller, independent module and which, thanks to some impressive design work, presents some unique challenges. We’re delivering this module with its own test suite of QUnit unit tests, and we hope it will be integrated into a larger continuous integration workflow.

Our fortnightly Interface Development team meeting had two presentations — Filip talked about the HTML5 geolocation API, and I showed an outline of “How To Design A Good API” which will be pertinent to some of the code libraries we’re developing in-house. We also got some amazingly good biscuits.

We currently have around 20 interface developers in the team so we’ll feature a few here each week and try not to bludgeon you to death with detail.  We’re also looking for some more great interface developers, so if you like what you read here then get in touch!

Tags: api, dynatrace, geolocation, interfacedevelopment, ipad, iPhone, javascript, mvc, nodejs, qunit, tdd

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iPhone OS 4 — raising the bar again

Posted by Lorenzo Wood April 8th, 2010

Steve Jobs today announced the next generation of iPhone software. In the quality of execution — not just the length of its feature list — it keeps its lead in user experience. Apple would like you to believe that it’s the only game in town. It isn’t, but it does raise the bar again in many areas — increasingly not just in mobile. Advertising, in particular, gets a shot in the arm.

Steve Jobs did his customary keynote to launch the next generation of iPhone software — iPhone OS 4.0 — as a developer preview ahead of its end-user launch in the summer on the iPhone/iPod Touch and in the autumn on the iPad. There is a complete video on Apple’s Web site and, naturally, lots of coverage and analysis elsewhere on the Web (Engadget’s is geekily thorough).

It’s nice to see changes that address LBi’s key criteria for mobile usability:

• Discoverability — the ability for users to discover that something is possible (as distinct from the also important ability to figure out how to do something once you know that you can);
• Interruptibility — the ability to handle interruptions and changes of context with minimum disruption and overhead for the user; and
• Demonstrability— the ability for users to show (off to) others what they can do, in particular with little or no risk of failure and consequent embarrassment.

Discoverability has improved with new ways to make apps available. Allowing enterprises to send apps directly to iPhones they manage and allowing end users to gift apps to others removes barriers to awareness and trial, particularly for those less familiar or confident with buying and installing apps. The Game Center feature that provides some standardised underpinnings for social features in games (many of which are already provided in existing games by the developers themselves) also helps by introducing pop-up invitations.

Demonstrability and interruptibility are both improved by “multitasking”. The lack of multitasking has been high on the list of criticisms of the iPhone by fans of other platforms. In my view, it is also a major reason for the iPhone’s success — it’s so much easier to use that the (mostly slight) trade-off is worth it. The iPad (at launch) kept this simple idea and it certainly doesn’t detract from the seductive properties of the product in practice. As we predicted, therefore, Apple’s “multitasking” is an extension of its careful approach to the problem, the first step towards which was the introduction of push notifications. What iPhone OS 4.0 really offers for the majority of apps is very fast task switching — reducing the time and perceived effort of switching between apps by avoiding the need to go to the home screen first, and by encouraging developers to preserve complete state when not in focus. To this, they add some more specific services on top of push notifications — backgrounding for music (and a happy 13 million Pandora users); backgrounding for VoIP (happy Skype; less happy operators); location notifications. These changes allow multitasking while retaining good battery management and good foreground performance. They also keep extra load on the user to a minimum, so it looks to me like Steve’s claim that Apple has “nailed it” is pretty fair.

Interruptibility is also improved by the most important feature, iAds — Apple’s own in-app advertising mechanism. Mobile advertising isn’t new; nor is Steve’s claim that (on the iPhone, at least) that “search isn’t where it’s at… apps [are]”. What is new is the quality of the experience, which is arguably the best advertising experience on any device, mobile or not. Consider:

• If I touch an ad, I’m instantly immersed in it but my current state is visibly preserved. The whole app I was in slides quickly off the screen and the ad takes it over. Alarming? Not when you’ve experienced it a couple of times, because it’s consistent and robust and you’ll quickly gain confidence that it’s not going to disrupt what you’re doing.
• Dismissing an ad is trivial and instant. All I do is touch the top left corner and it’s gone — no hunting for a close box. Again, builds confidence to try ads. (1)
• Ads are rich — with full-screen video — and interactive. Built in HTML5, ads can include plenty of basic functionality — the demo included a simple game and a feature that exploited the accelerometer. And if ads have “taster” functionality built in…
• Ads can leave rich functionality on the device for later. This is a brilliant way to address interruptibility. I may spend a little time engaging with an ad, but sooner or later I’ll want to get back to what I was doing. By exploiting the new mechanism for delivering apps directly, ads can allow me painlessly and without interruption to leave an app on my device — all ready for me to use later on.

If you haven’t got a spare hour to watch the whole keynote, jump forward 44 minutes and watch for about 10.

A rising tide floats all boats — and drowns everyone who doesn’t have a boat

When the iPhone was launched, we said that it raised the bar for mobile user experience. This has been borne out by its success and by the way it has driven the mobile market as a whole (2). The new iPhone OS, and particularly iAds, push the bar up higher. This time though, the iPad has revealed Apple’s ambition to displace the 1970s interfaces of today’s Macs and PCs, so benchmarks are being set for experience on all digital channels.

In his keynote, Steve painted a picture of Apple dominance. He casually chose a “pretty good proxy” for market share in the form of mobile Web usage — where the iPhone dominates. This is a testament to the quality of the experience rather than evidence of penetration in most brands’ customer bases. For all the size of the opportunity in the Apple universe — which has grown bigger and more quickly than most expected — Apple is not the only game in town. Everyone is running to catch up. Handset makers, PC makers and operators all have multitouch and “apps” and some sort of “app store”. Microsoft and Google are pushing their own visions hard (look out for Microsoft’s announcement this Monday). (3)

How these experiences will be delivered to end users and who will be responsible is not clear. That they will come is a certainty, and today the iPad and iPhone OS 4.0 are the most tangible prototypes of what that future will be.

Notes:

(1) It wasn’t clear whether this feature is part of the iAd platform or whether the mocked-up ads shown in the demo are simply done this way by convention. If it’s the latter, it will serve Apple well to enforce the convention.

(2) People with every kind of phone are increasingly using the language of “apps”. Apps have effectively become the dominant concept for describing functionality on a mobile device, not least because the the computer-centric “site” has been so unimpressive for those that have tried it. We have seen expectations of the (largely not iPhone-owning) public for their mobile phones rise, particularly since Apple began its “there’s an app for that” TV campaign. For most people today, the way available to them to explore those possibilities is the mobile Web, which is why we see traffic to Web sites we monitor from all kinds of mobile devices is on the rise and why we say that 2010 is the year that many people will get their first impressions of brands on the mobile Web. Apps as experiences are here to stay, regardless of the technology used to deliver them — users don’t care.

(3) There is even an Android-powered television.

Tags: advertising, apple, ipad, iPhone, iphoneos, Lorenzo Wood, mobile, touch

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