Trello
This Joel is cool. His product is exactly what I have been waiting for.
I’ve tried Asana few months ago, but I still find its UI rather cumbersome and messy.
Then came Trello. Joel aptly pointed out that “the great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures.” This is one hell of a killer app to organize to-do list, idea list, or whatever list you just need to offload from your brain.
Exact Sentiments Felt!
Dave Morin, CEO of Path, spoke of his new year resolution in this article.
As I embarked further into entrepreneurship this year, what he said resonated a lot with me, for I have similar sentiments and focus as well.
Takeaways:
- You can’t serve 2 masters - needless to say, mobile platform has the most potential
- Find the users who see your vision and talk to them - the importance of being user-focused can’t be emphasized more
- Being in shape makes everyone function better at work - dying to get back into shape and compete too
the platypus always fascinated me.
The Ornithorhynchus
This illustration makes me feel like I could train a platypus to beg for treats…they’d probably stab me with their venomous leg-spikes. Well, the males, at least.
Types of Animal Life. St. George Mivart, 1893.
When Man looked up and saw the birds in flight, a dream was born
So he reached up and touched the sky, his limit. But having flown the sky, he discovers that the limits was, all the time, within himself.
How far he wanted to go was bounded not by the sky, but by the courage in his heart.
Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Steve Jobs in an article on the birth of the iPod (http://tiny.cc/h0rw7)
I’m viewing with great interest the fight between Joshua Porter and YongFook. “Fight” because of the interesting language used.
So Porter was claiming that design is the key in startups and YongFook said its horseshit. YongFook argued that “Everyone’s a f*** designer now”. Porter rebutted here, this time with a better quote (see above main quote) that led me to think: “Is there even a need to claim which is king or which is horseshit?”
Honestly, I think both engineering and design holds their own right. I don’t think everyone’s a designer now, and I don’t think reading “Lean Startup” will make you one. I think design is still undervalued as of this year. That said, both are kings in their own right, not above one another. Pretty obvious statement but oblivious to some, how else do you think major wars started?
Oh, before you get the wrong interpretation of what I meant by design, read the quote above or read this. Steve Jobs summed it well, and I think his Apple embodied the balance of design and engineering well.
If there were to be an evil/loser, it has to be senseless, un-user-focused business demands.
This is best embodied in the example of Path. They have great balls to prioritize design and engineering above business demands. Check out the interview of its co-founder, Dave Morin, here. In the midst of the hype on “launch-first-is-everything”, and “user-growth-above-everything”, I thank Path for being dedicated to making a product that is so personal for its users. I love Path and I use it as a journal shared between me and my girl (sorry if I never add you to the network!).
Note to self:
Users first. Have a balance of design and engineering to meet users’ needs and create better engagement.
Southeast Asian play
“SNS+ has many advantages including in-depth market research, local platforms collaboration, local payment systems collaboration, localized operation strategies, and diverse marketing plans. SNS+ is not just a Taiwan and China play, but even more so a Southeast Asian play.”
We are deploying capital in our Fund 7 portfolio along the gaming industry wisely by focusing on HTML5 based mobile and online developers, publishers, and game platforms.
Renren (www.renren.com) is the dominant social network in China. With renren zhan 站 (http://zhan.renren.com/), its new blogging service, the tumblr blogging concewww.renren.com) is the dominant social network in China. With renren zhan 站 (http://zhan.renren.com/), its new blogging service, the tumblr blogging concept starts in China. Notice the similarities to Tumblr from the pictures? (click left/right to view)
Renren 站 is easily accessible through the tabs on your renren homepage. Imagine facebook with tumblr incorporated, sharing will be much more pervasive. Nice.
Good insights and analysis from Tim Chang.
Gamification is definitely at the top of the Peak of Inflated Expectations now. The sad thing is that several manifestation of “gamification” by web services/apps see them incorporating badges/points into their products without much thought of how they can enhance the experience of their users when using their products. Many of such companies also just slap a “game” tag to their products without thinking of “where and what is the game”?
The design has to be ground up. Deep understanding of the user and their behavioral patterns is crucial. So are clear usage goals and business objectives.
“Gamification of Life is the next big thing in social gaming” Tim Chang
the rise of Loyalty apps in Singapore
Deals services bring people to the business with discount coupons, but people tend not to go back without more deals/coupons.
Loyalty card, on the other hand, engages and motivates old customers to keep coming back. In my memory, loyalty cards became very popular in the heydays of Bubble Tea craze.
For the longest of time, I was hoping for the day when I do not need to bring all my loyalty cards out (I like my wallet to be thin). Till date, the loyalty cards I have are from Ikea, Starbucks, McCafe, Ichiban Sushi, one from an Indonesian-stall and one from a bubble tea shop.
So naturally, it’s great to see several “loyalty-card” app popping out during the second half of 2011. Here are some:
1. Hachicode
Saw Hachicode from the Angel’s Gate site. It has an “innovate receipt scanning” that tracks spending on the receipt.
(first impression, yet-to-try-app) This potentially can better draw the link between amount spent and amount of loyalty points rewarded. But I presume it will be difficult to get small merchants on board due to the need for a special receipt.
2. Squiryl
Squiryl encourages consumers to collect Acorns from participating merchants from every purchases, and use these Acorns to redeem rewards. As its name implies, squirrels and acorns are used in its branding. Its introductory video also stated the problem and usage very clearly.
(first impression, yet-to-try-app) Love the “Squirrel-Acorns” branding. Can’t wait to try it!
I like the general visual design of the app. The moving cloud and trees on the menu-selection fits into their branding of a squirrel collecting acorns in the forest. Its loading animation is also that of a acorn dancing across the screen.
However, their information architecture can be quite perplexing. The app adopt a menu-selection approach as its main navigation. However, users also have several other ways to link to the “Receive acorn” page. There’s also a tokens and acorns page, titled “Squiryl” which is a separate page only accessible through the sub-pages.
This brings me to my next point, I know there’s Acorns, but Tokens? Having two different types of “currency” in this small app made me felt even more lost and perplexed, especially when the metaphor used is not direct to start with.
Lastly, there’s the Trade page. Nice UI design again, but I’ve yet to test its usability since I’ve no acorns yet. On its function, it looks pretty interesting and fun to be able to trade acorns with my friends (i suppose).
3. Around
Around! app shows the deals around the vicinity of the user. User can only redeem the deal in the shop by scanning the QR code handed by the staff at the counter. Customers can also earn loyalty stamps pertaining to the deal.
Around! combines deals and loyalty stamps together. I wonder what will happen to the stamps if the deals are no longer valid.
(after using it) I think the interactions in the “merchant coupon” page can be better improved. The color combination of the app just felt too pastel for my liking.
4. Streetegy
From my brief understanding, Streetegy is more of a location-based service that directs people to places. It should have loyalty point feature built in as well. Hope to know more about it when it launches in a few weeks time.
5. Be Disloyal
This is not a mobile app, but it is rather special and deserved to be mentioned. BeDisloyal encourages the customer to be disloyal. To complete the card, customers have to try out one merchant, get a stamp, then move on to the rest of the merchants before going back to the starting place to claim the reward. It strives to introduce consumers to small business. For now, BeDisloyal card are only used for the 8 cafes under this program.
(first impression, yet-to-try) It is like a game that makes me want to explore all the 8 cafes. Very interesting. Hopefully they can enable this service on the mobile platform eventually.
6. Perx
According to the Straits Times report, Perx has the most number of merchants signed up with it, standing at 54 now. Perx uses the metaphor of “chopping” a loyalty card, and accumulating chops to redeem the voucher. With the usage of this direct metaphor similar to the physical cards that most consumers are familiar with, it makes it very easy for normal users to understand. I believe it will make it easy for the merchants to adopt since it’s just a direct replacement of their existing chops.
Perx has a shallow information architecture with just 3 tabs (Cards, Chop Card, Rewards) for its main navigation, and not much depth. The appearance of the UI is very clean and simple as well.
It will be interesting to see how these apps fight for the Singapore user and merchants bases. To me, a loyalty-card-app is something that I will only use when I’m at, or near, the merchant place itself. The maximum interaction time will be 2minutes, thus it has to be very simple and clear-cut. It will be good if there are some game-elements to make it more interesting.
Now, if only these apps can store my receipts as well. It will reduce the wastage of paper, and help me better keep track of my spendings.
*update* Straits Times released a report on 23rd Nov about the state of digital loyalty apps in Singapore (http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_737095.html) . The fight for merchants and users begin. The relationship between merchant and user adoption are so tightly intertwined together that it make this a much more interesting watch. It might be down to “first-come-first-serve”, and “cheapest-price-plan-wins” ultimately. Who will prevail?
