• How to Make Your Small Business Geo-Location Ready
• Six Ways Your Business Can Leverage Geo-Location Marketing
• Geolocation for Businesses: How to Handle Your Checked-In Customers
• Geolocation Service: Find a Smartphone, Find a Customer
• Geolocation is a Game-Changer for Sports Business
• Social Location Marketing: Outshining Your Competitors on Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp & Other Location Sharing Sites
• Checked In: How to Use Gowalla, Foursquare & Other GeoLocation Applications for Fun & Profit

1. To evaluate. Social media is a faster and more trustworthy way to find out information..from people you KNOW. Yes, we ask people about what to buy or where to eat most often but we are starting to use social media to evaluate even more important life decisions such as health care. Facebook allows you to quickly post a status..such as I’m looking for a new dentist..anyone have suggestions? All of a sudden you have this trusted network of family and friends letting you know the best dentist in town. More than 60 million consumers interact and discuss their health care online.
2. To learn. There is nothing like a recession to motivate and inspire people to learning something new. You mix in technology advancement and improved accessibility and the social media boom is a natural result. More people have access to the internet than ever before..almost 240 million internet users in the US alone. Wikis, forums and sites such as LinkedIn with their questions/answers section provide people information on just about any subject imaginable.
3. To interact. People like to talk to people…especially people who have similar interests. Twitter is great for interaction! You basically answer the question, “What are you doing” in 140 characters or less. It can take a little bit to get used to but once the comfort level kicks in it can become a valuable tool for you. I typically recommend people start by going to search.twitter.com and type in any word or topic you are interested in and hit enter. You will see all the tweets that are out there on that topic and the people who are talking about it…this is how I initially found people I wanted to follow and figured out how others were using twitter. It is a biological fact that people need people and social media makes it easy to formulate and grow those relationships that can make a difference in both your personal and professional life. I think what is really interesting is that 1 out of 8 married in the US met via social media last year. Social media removes barriers such as geography and time…you work, you have kids, you may not be able to interact socially until after the kids go to bed or before they get up in the morning…here is this interface that has people on it around the clock and there is someone out there who wants to talk to you about the same stuff you want to talk about.

1. Apps must be real-time
2. Make it easy for consumers to pay
3. Integrate feedback quickly
4. ‘This is not the wired web’
5. People will pay for value…
6. …But free works to drives sales for your endemic product
7. Apps need to be part of an integrated message
8. Utility, frequency and viral distinguish long-term success 
9. People find apps through other people
10. Use existing assets to market your app
11. App marketing needs to be targeted
12. Don’t discount the iPod Touch

The design feels pretty nice at first glance… the colored backgrounds and typography on top of them seem readable. But because they put two cells on the screen at one time, they feel a little “squished” for my taste. I think there’s a way to unsquish them and display only one using the full screen, but I haven’t yet figured that trick out. As a user experience specialist, I deliberately don’t want to use the Help for it, because I am trying to ascertain the application’s intuitive learning curve. (Unfortunately for me, that meant my husband ended up telling me how to listen to ringtones because he figured the secret out first.)

A brand design, an amazing application interface, and ultimately the entire user experience of any system is dependent on two external things:

1. The technology that runs the interface must enable the software to work (data & wireless connectivity that seamlessly works without issues, etc.)

This is where my Celltop experience begins to crumble. I tried for several days to put my zip code or city into the Weather cell, and it wouldn’t connect to the Alltel database for some reason, but finally on the third day of trying, it worked and now I can see my local weather. I got this same error on some of the other cells, as did my husband who has been letting me observe him use this system for the first time. I can imagine how much this would frustrate a non-technical user, who is tentatively attempting to use his phone for reasons other than making calls anyway.

2. The marketing plan and price structure must offer enough value that customers will pay to become users, without flinching.

(Note to marketing: this does not mean value to YOU, for them to buy your stuff – it means value to the purchasing end user!) The “Free cells” included have little meaning or purpose for my real life. They do cost airtime to update the data, so free implies free use of the widget interface, I guess. I am interested in about 2-3 of them, and only because I want to try to use this software. The free cells are:

Baseball
Basketball
Call Log
Football
Inbox
News
Stocks
Realtone (aka “Give Us Money”)
Rodeo
Weather

I cannot remember the last time I was away from home and thought “Boy! I sure wish I knew the RODEO standings right now!” Alltel has got to be kidding me. Providing virtually no value, while attempting to obtain my money and taunting me with more valuable “for purchase” cells doesn’t make me want to use Celltop at all. (The ringtones cell is second in the list of cells the user sees, and those “fun” ringtones cost 3 times the amount one pays at iTunes for an entire song, about the cost of a loaf of bread or 1/3 the cost of a complete CD. Parents, you’ve been warned!)

This is not Frog Design’s problem, unless they also proposed the marketing plan for this mobile application, but unfortunately for them, it does impact the entire user experience. The technology “partner” in this case has made business decisions that directly impact a user’s interaction with the design. (Update 6/28: I did find an article that indicates Celltop’s design was revenue-driven, so none of this is an accident.)

More cells are available for purchase, and I’m not sure if prices vary, there’s a flat fee, or heaven forbid, yet another monthly fee. Some of them would be nice to have, if for no other reason than to amuse yourself at the airport or when the electricity goes off due to the many Midwest storms we have lately. The other night I was stuck looking at the different times on the World Clock… not too amusing. However, the “Mind Reader” cell so I could probe the inner depths of my family’s secret thoughts (hehe) or perhaps a game, or that Fortune Teller cell (“Madame Know-it-all, when will the lights come back on???”) would have been nice to have during the dull hours of no electricity. Amongst the incredibly male-dominant cells of sports that aren’t being played right now, the rodeo and news and stocks I could care less about, couldn’t they throw a girl a bone? Recipes, horoscopes, cute shoes for sale… something?

Apparently not, and between the data connection errors, somewhat questionable usability, and the blatant attempts from Alltel’s marketing to get more money from me, the entire experience leaves me with a displeasurable taste in my mouth. A potentially good idea, but not executed well technologically, strategically, or idealistically, unless you believe the press releases. And I don’t mean to bash marketing attempts here – a large part of what I do is meant to directly or subliminally sell the product I am designing. It is my goal to help companies make money, so the money can flow into employees pockets, and into the economy and benefit many others than myself or the company who has hired me. But I try to be honest with clients when I see them putting their needs before the users, because it is my job to be an evangelist for the people who use the systems I help create.

Celltop is nowhere near being ready to compete with the interface of the iPhone, in my opinion, despite what some reviews say about it being a lower-cost alternative. I just wish, as an Alltel customer, it met some of my needs and made my way-too-expensive LG Scoop more than just a very costly device that texts and calls people. I prefer using the regular interface for texting and my call logs anyway, vs. Celltop, which I have to specifically launch in an extra step, and then wait for data to update to be able to use a cell. There are some Celltop cells I might like to own in the future – Search and Moviegoer are of actually real-world value to me, and their inclusion as freebies would have spun this entire experience in a different direction. It might have been nice if they let users choose their 5 free cells, so that every one of them could have provided benefit to the user, as opposed to give me a whole lot of nothing for “free.”

In conclusion, I’d just like to remind any marketing folks out there that we users are not stupid. We know the difference between asking us to pay money for valuable services and a money grab. It annoys me to see things like the Celltop button being placed in the position of the left softkey, and then making that choice unalterable by the user, while the right one can easily be changed. I am going to assume that is another bad marketing decision, because before they shoved Celltop onto our phones, I had selections on the left and right side that made sense for ME, as a user who wants to get to frequently used functions quickly. That decision resulted in taking away a highly valued feature from my phone. Users remember these things.

If you’d like to learn more about Celltop’s design, here are a few links:

>> Frog’s Case Study
>> Usability Study on Celltop
>> Little Springs Review
>> Video Review of Celltop
>> User-Focused or Money Machine? The BizDev View of Celltop’s Design

Update July 3, 2008:
I found a forum thread where someone offers a hack for altering the Celltop softkey so you can change it. Try it at your own risk… I haven’t yet.

Today I took a few minutes to do a brief redesign of one of the mobile applications we looked at, for USAA. I want to make it clear, that neither Barbara nor myself have done any work on the USAA site or mobile application. She is a customer of theirs, so we had the opportunity to examine the interface superficially and only briefly discussed it.

THE CORPORATE BRAND
At first glance, I wasn’t overly impressed with the mobile application Barbara showed me. It is functional, but very plain. As someone who believes that the brand and user experience are strongly intertwined, I wondered what the site design and USAA branding looked like, so I visited the http://www.usaa.com/ to check it out. Wow!! I fell in love with the simply elegant typography, the color palette, effective use of white space and generally effective navigation. (I didn’t look too closely at the information architecture – today’s focus was visual.)

The web site fits the image, the style, and the level of sophistication you’d expect a large, national, financial brand to portray. I found it very peaceful to peruse, and they had some nice usability components that would help a potential customer research their offerings and make at least the decision to call them to see about becoming a member.

LOGGING IN
In comparison to USAA’s corporate site, I don’t get the same experience when launching the mobile app. So I did a quick redesign to show how I would have approached this design and created the same brand experience in the small space, as they offer in the large, unlimited one.

It was surprisingly easy, because the web site contains some wonderful graphics in a special section promoting the mobile service. By the way, the presentation on the site is designed as part marketing/part tutorial, and it provides an excellent service for users. The mobile app itself seems pretty easy to use and understand, but it lacks the delightful branding that makes the USAA site such a pleasant environment. Here is the login screen, looking much more like the login section on the site:

All the functionality is still there, except one component. I don’t think it is a good idea at all to enter a user into something without their permission, such as they are doing with each mobile login. I didn’t know what this contest is about, so I searched the site (as they said to do, for the contest rules) but couldn’t find the information. The reality is, if I had been doing this project, I would have tried to talk Marketing out of this approach by explaining the how this introduces a negative message to the user, or I would have handled it in a way that feels more advantageous to people than intrusive. I eliminated it from my login screen completely.

HOME IMPROVEMENT
This is a very quick effort to redesign the home screen at a purely visual level, repurposing their existing site graphics, but I think it has a lot more personality and appeal. Given time and money and a real job redesigning this, the effort would be a lot more impressive, but I think you will see my point here.

Utilizing these well-designed, iconic images already on the web site sends a message of professionalism that says “Our company is second to none. We offer style and class. We take no shortcuts, etc.” It also gives the application a little bit of an interactive feel, much more so than the plain, dry text links offered currently.

(The little “hand” over the green icon should not indicate that this is a touch interface. I just realized I am so used to designing software prototypes, I put that there as an indicator of the visual cue when an option is selected – on this type of mobile device that would mean using the center key to move up, down, left or right to hop from one icon to another.)

This brand exercise only took me about an hour. Of course, the images aren’t as perfect as they would be if I worked with their designers and had the original art. I used the largest size device screen, but would have no problem scaling down the images and altering the layout, yet still maintaining some branding for smaller size screens – the smallest of which is about 128×128 pixels.

As the postage stamp industry has proven, there is nothing so small that you can’t align beauty, detail and spareness of clutter if you feel it’s important. Fresh ID is founded on the principle that branding is a key ingredient in the overall user experience of a system. It should not be ignored simply because we have a significantly smaller canvas on which to paint!