Category Archives: Product Development

Five Pints 090212

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In a transport system which, while being cheap and reasonably convenient, is hardly good value, it’s probably no surprise that investment in enforcement appears to be higher on the agenda than investment in easy access to ways of paying fares. That City Rail Transit Police are glorified ticket inspectors dressed up as paramilitary police and have been known for overplaying their hand more than once doesn’t help my attitude toward them.

I won’t be sorry to see them go, but I hope the dollars which have been wasted on them are used to create a more convenient transport system for people in Sydney. How many integrated ticket systems would $34 million a year build and maintain? Instead I imagine those savings will be recouped by a State government whose promises are a year in the making with no solutions yet on the horizon.

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Mind you City Rail are not alone in the idea of building services to cover the exceptions rather than the rule. It’s not a bad idea to aim for great customer experiences for your users. But I’m firmly of the belief you should focus your investments on making services easy to access, use and pay for rather than spending your money on prevention, retention and convention.

Every system will have a small percentage of so-called corner cases. While you want to make the customer experience of those events as pleasant as you can possibly make them, the last thing you want to be doing is spending unecessary amounts of time and money building complex systems to deal with them. Often a good dose of common sense is all that is required, but the fear of losing the customer appears to blind good investment logic and instead funds are diverted to build expensive systems to manage those case. And this has to be to the detriment of the majority of your users from whom you might derive a greater benefit by retaining them with better products and services.

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Speaking of good customer experiences, it seems Path finally either understood what they did wrong or were pushed to do the right thing. I suspect the latter reading between the lines of their mealy mouthed apology.

As with other peoples money, other peoples privacy are things you never make mistakes with. One day a Social Network will come along which gets that without first taking advantage of their users. That other apps on the iPhone also access contacts data without advising users is also concerning. But just because the pecan pie is cooling on the windowsill, doesn’t mean you should take it.

Either way, expect Apple to soon issue an update to iOS restricting access to the address book. Is it an error on their behalf they allow such unfettered access now? Possibly. Does it show that some bright young things can’t be trusted with the family car? Absolutely.

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One of my friends sites has a ranking for the best smartphones around. It was a surprise to find the worlds most popular smartphone only coming in third. Though it was probably not unexpected considering one of the key decision points was the size of the screen – as opposed to far more valuable metrics like screen quality, usability and battery life.

Anyway, just like with BetaMax, it looks like despite being only third best, the modern day VHS of the iPhone is winning. Not just on sales, but on revenue, and value retention. Why are consumers always wrong, don’t they know this is the future of the Smartphone?

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On an upbeat note to finish, today saw the launch of the fabulous new version of my favourite twitter application. As with any great application, Tweetbot kept it’s core functionality and added some little tweaks which make such a big difference to the experience. And it’s on the iPad now too. Such a disgrace though that we have to spend all that extra cash to get the same app on another platform though.

A More Honest Path

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Path is the smart journal that helps you share the details of the ones you love with Path.

Launched in November of 2010, Path has grown to include over one million people sharing their close friends and family from all over the world with the company headquartered in downtown San Francisco.

Our Values

Simple

Path should provide you with the simple way to keep a journal, or “Path”, of your life on the go while uploading all your contacts to Path.

Personal

Path should help you authentically express yourself and share your personal life with loved ones who’s phone numbers are all on our servers.

Quality

Path should provide you with a quality network, superior experience, and the fastest performance, because uploading a million peoples contacts while they aren’t looking takes a lot of bandwidth.

Joy

Path should delight you through design, information, and communication. Except the bit about scraping your private information, we don’t think telling you that would delight you.

Smart

Path should learn about you as time goes on. It should help you see interesting patterns in your life, and the lives of your loved ones. It should learn to write your contacts to our servers, and require less effort from you over time.

Private

Path should be private by default. Forever. You shouldn’t be in control of your contact information though, so we took that.

Our Product

Path

Keep a personal journal, or “Path”, of your life.

Home

Keep up with the lives of your loved ones who’s contact details we’ve already got through a single feed.

Chooser

One button to post beautiful photos and videos, who you are with, where you are, what you are listening to, what you are thinking, and when you go to bed and wake up.

Camera

Capture beautiful photos and videos using world class mobile camera technology. Including 8 free and 4 premium Lenses to filter your photo and video moments in real-time into beautiful works of art.

Automatic

Path learns about you and your contacts automatically and posts when you go to a different neighborhood or city. More posts in your Path, without your effort.

Friends

Path was designed with the people you love, your close friends and family, in mind. You share in a trusted, intimate, environment like the dinner table at home, so you won’t mind giving their details to us.

Activity

Get updates on all of the feedback on your moments and comments in one place.

Comments

Respond to moments with comments.

Emotion

Respond to moments with any one of five core emotions: smile, frown, gasp, laugh, and love.

Seen

Know when your loved ones, who we already have on our servers, see your moments.

Visits

Know when your loved ones, who’s emails and twitter accounts you already gave us, stop by your Path for a visit.

Customize

Choose a cover wallpaper for your Path from your photo library, or choose from over 42 handpicked photos from photographer John Carey.

Sharing

For the occasional moment you’d like to share in public – in addition to all your contacts who you have shared with us, you can share to Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Tumblr.

Pages

Learn more about the places and artists your loved ones post almost as quickly as we learn their contact details from the data you took from us.

Menu

Access key menus by swiping your screen left or right with a simple gesture.

Settings

Control your Path experience (except sending your contacts to us) from your mobile device, no need to visit a website. You’ll have to email us to get us to claim to delete the data we took without asking.

Privacy

Except for the contacts on your Phone, Path is private by default. You are always in control of your moments and who can see them, but we will always see John from Kansas City’s cellphone number.

Security

Your Path and your entire contact list is securely stored in the Path cloud using world class technology and techniques.

Mobility

Path is available for iPhone and Android.

Disclaimer

If you haven’t guessed by now, this isn’t the real Path About page. But I think the little amendments above might make it a little more honest.

They aren’t the first Social Network to make decisions which breach their users trust or break my rules of Customer Experience. And, sadly, they are unlikely to be the last.

Are your contacts personal details available to anyone else but Path?

Netbank: taking no risks with your security on the iPhone

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Which Banks iPhone application is, according to their own PR , a very popular way for their customers to access their financials online.

And they’ve generally done a great job. Retaining Security – the key focus in any banking service online – without sacrificing usability throughout the app.

Except in one simple case.

The close button.

At first glance it seems they’ve done the right thing with both the position and the behaviour of the button. In almost every app I use on the iPhone a button in that location signifies going to account settings or going back.

Until you realise any habitual, yet accidental, press will log out the banking session.

The challenge with habitualising yourself NOT to press it is a toss up between wasting a trunkload of time in Facebook figuring out an alternative way to find the kinky photos your friends share or repeatedly logging back in to your banking.

Perhaps they could remove the close button it and just let us use the “Log off” link they’ve helpfully provided instead. Or maybe it’s an undocumented security feature to protect us from ourselves and the HTML session embedded inside application wrapper.

More evidence the Kindle Fire is just a shopfront

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Reuters are reporting that the purchasing behaviour of the Kindle Fire isn’t  exactly clever if you plan to give them to kids.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, one of the hottest gadgets this holiday season because of its low price, has some parents bristling over the simplicity at which children can order from the retail giant and the inability to stop them without crippling the device.

As if selling the product at below cost wasn’t enough, this is surely just another reminder to the market of what Amazon’s business is?

What impact will Wordads have on Google and Adsense?

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Today WordPress announced Wordads, because in their own words

You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better than AdSense

My initial reaction to this was great, I might finally get to control the ads which appear at the bottom of these posts. But my curious nature took hold and made me wonder if the few products Google rely on for most of their revenue are slowly becoming commoditised.

First we had the worlds biggest Social Network creating it’s own ad network. I know Facebook’s social ads revenue is still reasonably small, but the revenue from it appears to be doubling year on year. Considering the size of Facebook and the engaged temperament of its users, will it become an ever more attractive place to advertise online – especially with its ability to make those ads highly targeted to viewers?

Then the worlds most used smartphone platform introduced an intelligent personal assistant including voice search. Yes Siri still uses Google Search, but in many cases it does so only as a last resort or if you specifically ask for a web search.

It seems that many are translating a greater proportion of their web use to smartphones and the iPad. (And it wouldn’t be a wild assumption that Siri will appear on the next or even current iPads.) At what point of Siri’s maturity could it start make a serious dent into Google’s search dominance? And what then would be the roll on effect to Google’s advertising revenues from search?

And now we have the world’s biggest blogging platform – a social network in itself – introducing an advertising platform. Is it logical to assume it is going to start to eat into the 28% of revenue currently sourced by Google through Adsense?

While all of the above is personal speculation, I bet the real speculators are focusing on the 32% revenue growth Google delivered Quarter on Quarter this year. And will continue to reward the share price with their heads in the sand.

Perhaps they are right, it isn’t logical to assume that Google are sitting pretty on the past surely. And with the recent culling of superfluous projects there, it’s logical they are focusing their resources on improving their search and advertising functionality and especially as that search integrates with Android.

But can they innovate fast enough and will their next big thing be good enough to head off the Online Search and Advertising disruptors before they are eating more of their pie than the investor market would like?

Wordads is hitherto just an announcement from Automattic. But with almost 70 million blogs and 2.5 billion page views per month, even if only a small proportion use Wordads, it’s bound to be more than a tiny thorn in the established players behind.

Process. Or ‘Working for the man’

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I’ve been looking at this Zac Holman presentation on github for about 3 weeks now. Each time I come back to it, I think; this is worthy of a blogpost but have been unable to decide how.

But I kept coming back to this slide. You might agree it needs no more words

5 years ago, I’d be saying but, but, but…

Now all I can do is nod furiously. Don’t you love it when Process is more important than working.

What does it say about Amazon if the Kindle Fire changes size

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A report some weeks ago indicated the Kindle Fire might in the future change it’s size to an 8.9 inch variation or perhaps append said size and more.

This may prove correct the stories that said the 7″ form factor was an opportunity item caused by the Playbook from RIM not selling as well as forecast. If a factory has capacity and will fulfill for you quickly to meet the holiday season, why wouldn’t you take the opportunity?

Continually newer technology allows businesses to make their products better and customers to get more value out of them. But if Amazon quickly grandfathers a new product like the Kindle Fire, surely they run the risk of disaffecting their initial customer – who are unlikely to be early adopters or geeks.

Assuming Amazon do change the form factor so quickly after launch it says a lack of strategy to me and a thumb the nose at those who are buying now. Though it’s possible the only people who will suffer are those who didn’t believe Steve Jobs’ “post-pc” nonsense and thought they were building laptop replacements.

A good business strategically picks it’s product form and feature set and doesn’t allow itself to get distracted by short term opportunities. Time will tell if the stories about an 8.9 inch tablet are iPhone 5 style linkbait generating nonsense or cautious considered assessments of the market.

The iPhone 4S: No Surprises

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Having Worked at and watched Apple for some time, it has always been pretty clear to me they almost always* retain hardware form factors for at least two revisions. At Apple, I read somewhere once, the first version needs to pay off the cost of R&D in the first revision and if profit is to be made, it will be on the second.

With the epic success of the iPhone and iPad in comparison to Apple’s past experiences with Product Development, perhaps it is a mantra they no longer need to follow. However, as good habits often die hard, this might be one worth retaining.

For those in the technology media and others who have developed some sort of failed Nostradamus principle over the past few months, I’ll leave you with Jason Yip’s question today on Twitter:

I’m waiting for you to show you’ve learned.

* The notable exception is the iPad. I suggest that with the iPad 1 having been in development for so long, they probably amortised the costs of Hardware R&D over the lengthy lifecycle instead