The Next Trend In Mobile – Gorgeous Design
This week, two mobile apps have pushed UI (user interface) design to a whole new level on the iPhone. Those apps – Path and Flipboard.
If you’re not familiar with Path, it bills itself as “the smart journal that helps you share your life with the ones you love.” Basically, it’s a gorgeous app that looks like it could’ve been Facebook if Facebook debuted on mobile. Flipboard is a customized news reader that has been iPad-only for quite some time and finally made its way to iPhone & iPod Touch.
Path
Path is not a new app, but it feels like it after the recent 2.0 release. Path has always been a very beautiful app, but that’s all it had going for it. You could only share with a small number of people and the number of friends I had using it I could could on one hand. Path 2.0 takes sharing to a whole new level and ups the game in user interface design by doing so.
The first thing you see when you launch Path is your home feed. It comes pre-installed with a beautiful stock photo, but it can easily be customized to anything you like.
Path also has a fantastic pop-out menu for sharing new content: photos, videos, music you are listening to, location, text, people & sleep/wake.
While some may argue that Path isn’t really doing anything new and that there are many social networks that allow for sharing all this information (a scrappy little startup called Facebook comes to mind), what keeps me coming back to Path is it’s user interface. It’s a joy to use as both a content sharer and consumer and is really pioneering mobile social sharing forward in terms of user experience. It will be interesting to see how Path’s momentum holds up once Facebooks revised app is released with support for “timelines.” It’s supposed to be incredible.
I always wondered how Flipboard was going to bring its magazine-style format to the iPhone screen and still have it feel like the Flipboard I knew and loved. To my surprise, they pulled it off wonderfully.
The app revolves mainly around upward-swiping gestures to navigate through individual stories. It also has a wonderful “Cover Stories” feature that attempts to highlight the content most important to you. Similar to Zite, this is supposed to get smarter the more you use it.
As you drill down into each tile, you get news, photos and other content that can easily be shared or bookmarked for later reading. This is all formatted in the same magazine-style format found on the iPad but perfectly tailored for the iPhone’s 3.5″ screen.
As you can clearly see, Path and Flipboard are really upping the game when it comes to UI design. I’m really anxious to see how other apps follow suit. The recent updates to the iPhone Twitter app area also a step forward in design aesthetic, it’s just unfortunate that it comes at the expense of user experience.
What other apps have you seen that have exceptional design? Let me know in the comments.
Social Saturation
It seems like every day a new social network or mobile app launches to mixed amounts of fanfare. In fact, just this past week saw the launch of the popular iPad apps Zite and Flipboard expand onto the iPhone/iPod Touch, as well as Google’s introduction into the mobile personalized news reader space with Currents. While I’ve been a big fan of Zite and Flipboard since they first launched on iPad, this competitive landscape is a micrososm of very disconcerting trend – social saturation.
The social networking market is too saturated and is handicapping innovation. Aside from the user interface of Zite, Flipboard and Currents, where is the innovation here? Granted, Flipboard was the first to really succeed in bringing curated news in a table-friendly format, and Zite’s claim to fame was that it got smarter the more you used it, but with so many other competitors in the market now – AOL Editions, Yahoo! Livestand and Flud to name a few, it’s hard to differentiate between them all. This is even more painfully obvious when each app is pulling in roughly the same personalized content.
I get it – make something successful and others rip it off. This isn’t anything new, however the difference here is that for the most part, when it came to mobile & social apps, companies were always one-upping each other and we the user won in the end with increased innovation.
Again, this is a problem across the board. Developers need to get back to basics and remember the mantra that to be successful, one has to do one thing and do it very well. I can’t think of a better example of this right now than Instagram. The photo sharing space was as saturated as it got, at least when it came to the web. Flickr and Picasa were the big players with a bunch of other clones. It wasn’t until the success of 500px that the web photo sharing market seen any real new innovation and disruption, but even so, 500px still has a far way to go before it can topple the big boys. Fortunately for Instagram, there was no clear leader in mobile photo sharing realm. Flickr and Picasa both dropped the ball on dominating the small screen and the success of apps like Hipstamatic and Camerabag showed that people love filters, although none of them were truly social. Realizing this opportunity allowed Instagram to become one of the hottest startups in years and grow to 5 million users in it’s first eight months. Not bad for an app that’s not even out on Android yet!
Instead of trying to be the next “(insert name of your competition) killer,” stop recreating the wheel and focus disrupting the industry. Instagram caught Flickr and Picasa with their pants down and neither of them have anything close to compete. This is how you gain an advantage and become the next “big boy.”
Why You Need To Include Twitter Into Your Communications Strategy
A recent article published titled “Twitter users are more likely to impact your brand than any other social network” is a must read for every communications professional. Far too often, people disregard the power of Twitter in their communications mix because they don’t see the value in it. In my experience, this is because they are too often hung up on meaningless metrics like “follower count” and are completely oblivious to the fact that Twitter sees over 800 million searches per day. Just because someone isn’t following your account doesn’t mean they are not necessarily exposed to your message.
The article also presents some fascinating statistics. Of Twitter’s active daily users,
- 72% publish blog posts at least once a month
- 70% comment on others’ blog posts
- 61% write at least one product review a month
- 61% comment on news sites
- 56% write articles for third-party sites
- 53% post videos online
- 50% make contributions to wiki sites
- 48% share deals found through coupon forums
Twitter users are social media power users; these are the people that are going to be much more likely to help or hurt your brand; it’s wise not to ignore them. Sure, Facebook is great and 750 million active users is a sexy number, but it certainly shouldn’t dissuade you from doing a deeper investigation into Twitter as a medium of communications if you’ve avoided it in the past – you might just be surprised what you find there.
Photo by Josh Semans
Three Companies That Deserve Customer Service Kudos
People, myself included, love to turn to social media to complain when a company does wrong by them. Unfortunately, this fact often makes it very hard to find consumer reviews of products and services that are positive – it’s much easier to raise a stink than to give praise. Well, I want to use this moment to call out three companies that have provided me with amazing customer service using social media.
Warby Parker
Warby Parker is a company that has been turning the eyeglass industry upside-down. Okay, maybe that’s a bit overstated, but they are certainly poised to do so. In a nutshell, they provide prescription eyeglasses that are highly fashionable for only $95. They also will ship up to five pairs of frames for you to try on at home before you purchase to make sure you like them. As the icing on the cake, they donate a pair of glasses and a portion of the proceeds to a wonderful charity called VisionSpring. I’ve already ordered two pairs from them personally, as well as referred four or five others that have all made at least one purchase and it’s mostly due in part to their fantastic customer service.
When I first went to order my home try-on’s, I was having a problem with the website. It wouldn’t accept my order and kept crashing the server. I made a comment on Twitter about how disappointed I was that I wasn’t able to order my try-ons and within 30 minutes I received a phone call and email from a member of their customer service team trying to assist me in solving the problem. After we both realized there was something awry with the site, the gentleman took my order over the phone and gave me free overnight shipping for the inconvenience. I was so impressed by the proactive engagement on Warby Parker’s behalf, not to mention the beautiful glasses, that they now have a customer for life in me.
Eye-Fi
I have been using an Eye-Fi memory card in my camera for a couple of years now. An Eye-Fi card can do many things, but the main reason I use it is to have my photos geotagged automatically. A couple of weeks ago I realized that my photos were no longer being geotagged in iPhoto and mistakenly thought I had to pay $30 for a yearly subscription rewnewal of HotSpot access. After making the purchase and still not seeing any geotagging data, further investigation showed me that my model Eye-Fi card includes free lifetime geotagging. I emailed customer service and told them of my mistake and within 24 hours I had a refund in my account.
Where the customer service really impressed me was when trying to identify the cause of my geotagging problems. Evidently, recent iPhoto and Aperture updates have essentially broken the reading of the Eye-Fi geotagging data. After pointing out the issue to Eye-Fi on Twitter, they spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was causing the issue. While the problem currently remains, I have seen my issue escalated to their support forums by members of their team who really appear to be working hard to get to the bottom of this.
The Tie Bar
I will be the first to admit that I have a bit of an obsession with The Tie Bar. After discovering this amazing company a couple years back in GQ, I was hooked. They create gorgeous, highly-fashionable ties and accessories at unbelievable prices. Every time I get an email from them with the season’s new additions, I usually buy at at least two or three ties.
Last year, a tie that I ordered was marked as “delivered” by the Post Office tracking, but it never made its way to my front door. After reaching out to them on Twitter, I was handed off to a customer service representative that really went above and beyond to help track this tie down. A few days later, the postman evidently found it in his truck and delivered it to me, but the whole time The Tie Bar was in contact with me to try everything they could to track this down. What really impressed me is that they recognized me from my previous purchases and knew I was a loyal customer and not someone trying to rip them off. That little act of telling me how much they value my business really made me appreciate them much more than just another company, but a brand that I now have a real, human connection with.
What “kudos” do you want to give to a deserving company? Let me know in the comments.
The New Information Superhighway
The other day while driving in my car it occurred to me that “the information superhighway” is such an appropriate term for this wonderful thing we call “The Internet,” although for a completely different reason than originally intended. In the 1990′s, as the Internet first started reaching critical mass, the ability to navigate through millions of web pages was very similar to a crowded highway. While it has only gotten more crowded, the superhighway now takes on a new meaning around social media influence.
One of the first things I learned in driver’s education class was that on the road, everyone is equal. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a Ferrari or a Chevy Nova, your essentially barreling down the highway in a giant instrument of destruction. This is no different with computers; no matter how one accesses the Internet, whether it be a fancy new MacBook Pro or a seven-year-old Compaq, we’re all the same. There are many companies out there trying to tell you otherwise by placing arbitrary influence scores on you, but at the end of the day, it all means nothing.
The power of social media is that it’s the great equalizer. If you have a connection to the web and something to share, you can literally change the world. Those that risked their lives in Egypt to share their revolution with the world were not allowed to do so only if their Klout score was higher than 40. If you can share it and people can search it, your words, images and videos are just as powerful as someone with 1,000 times the followers or “influence score.” Sure, just like the shiny Ferrari, those with the larger networks may have a faster ride to their destination, but don’t ever think that what you have to say isn’t as valuable as any “social media guru” or “Internet celebrity,” because in the end, getting hit head-on by a Chevy Nova at 70 MPH is going to hurt just as much as it would if it was the Ferrari.
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