Searching for Best, Sacrificing Good

By Krista Chacko:  

I recently attended a seminar presented by a portfolio fund manager, and I heard something for the first time: for the sake of best, we sometimes have to sacrifice good.  I’ve heard similar themes before, but this time it stuck.  Partly because I think it applies to mobile,  partly because I believe it applies to life. Far too often it is easy to become distracted by all the good things (opportunities, ideas, technology, etc.) that we miss the best opportunities, ideas, technology, etc.

In mobile, it only takes a simple search in the app stores to be swamped with puppy apps, games, calendars, note taking apps, photo taking/editing apps, etc.  The literal number of apps themselves is overwhelming and each comes at a cost—time, money, etc.  Time to investigate, read reviews, and download the app.  Time to learn the app and time spent using it.  Sometimes the app even requires some coin.  When surveying apps, do you ask yourself, “When will I use this?”  or “What will this replace?”  or “What am I giving up for this app?”  For me, I downloaded three different tasks lists before I asked the last question.  In using these apps, I was “giving up” the list magnetically attached to my fridge and a pen.  I then realized that I don’t want to give up my paper and pen.  What is best and what is simply good?

Further, digging into apps, some are so functionality heavy that it takes three years to determine how to use it.  For example, there are note-taking applications that allow doodles, snapshots, highlighting, voice recording, and, the almost afterthought, text entry.  When determining the functionality to build into an app, consider the cost—your or your client’s time and your or most likely, your client’s money. Are the features profitable?  Are the features supportable?  Does your target audience really need this feature? (If it’s one more filter in your photo app, please ask this very valid question.)  Does your audience really need this app? (If you are making an app for cute puppies, please ask this question.) Finally, look honestly at (all) the features you are building: what is best and what is only good? 

Ultimately, I realized that I have the option to say “yes” to every opportunity/idea that comes my way: project, hobby, sports leagues, dinner with friends, networking over coffee, etc. However, each activity or inactivity (games on my phone) has a cost—time, money, etc. It is a learning process to evaluate what are the fewer, best opportunities/activities and what are simply the good opportunities. If I do a few activities and saying “no” to good options, do I leave myself in a position to do them better?  Am I missing the best opportunities because my schedule is so full of good activities?  Am I growing relationships or learning new concepts in this activity?  Will this relationship (i.e. networking), activity (i.e. softball), or opportunity (i.e. high-rise herb gardening) matter to me in 5 years?  10 years? Am I choosing what is best or satisfying myself on the good?  Am I willing to make some sacrifices?

Comment below with your own thoughts or additional questions. 

Cloud vs. Device Based Payments

By Nate Ley:  

At the beginning of this year, I attended AppsWorld North America in San Francisco, CA. While there, I heard a presentation focusing on cloud vs. device based payments from Capital One’s Vice President of Enterprise Mobile and Emerging Channels, Toby Russell. Over the past few weeks at client sites and amongst colleagues the discussion around this – and particularly the mobile payments landscape, has been prevalent and engaging. It seems high time I inscribed some of Mr. Russel’s thoughts here.

To start, he pointed out four common misconceptions:

1. The core of the payments ecosystem is drastically changing. It’s not. There will still be bank accounts and lines of credit on the backends. The rails in which we get to those backends will also be the same: The Visas, The MasterCards, etc. The reality is more that our front ends will change – the terminals in which we start the payment workflows and the means of starting those workflows will change.

2. Terminals at retailers are hard to change. Again, they’re not. Two percent of merchants are enabled for contact payment or NFC (Near Field Communication). That number may seem deceiving, but Russell made the following claim: That 2% accounts for close to 125 merchants, and those 125 merchants represent nearly 80% – 90% of the volume of transactions in the United States. The point here was, You really don’t have to drastically change the infrastructure to represent the majority of transactions.

3. The physical credit card security model is more secure. Debatable. Russell argued that essentially this security only revolves around not losing your card.  A better model is that of a secure element model – let’s put authentication on the phone. Basically it means moving to a cloud model. Under this idea, transactions would use encrypted single use tokens and credentials. After the transaction is complete, the tokens and credentials cease to exist – potentially making authentication theft and fraud less likely. For Russell, this is the smarter model. It boils down to software replacing hardware and it provides for faster and smarter transaction information. The unfortunate rub? The payment industry isn’t currently built for this.

4. The mobile wallet has to look like a wallet. It doesn’t. This one may seem the most obvious of the four – at least in terms of thinking about the concept of a physical wallet. The idea though, is that our phones can be our wallet. They are connected devices. They can make backend calls to servers and request the necessary information. They can store rewards and incentives and as they become “smarter” they lend themselves more and more to producing value-adds for both retailers and consumers.

Russell believes the current payments infrastructure is one of Edge vs Centralized. The cloud model would allow us to begin moving towards centralization and it is starting to make the most sense due to the nature of our phones as connected devices. Unfortunately this cloud/secure element model is complex and it relies on cooperation, business and industry negotiations and technical complexities to even begin implementing (which of course hinders the ability to distribute new technologies at velocity.

To finish the presentation, Russell posed a question, answered it and offered up a few predictions.

The Question: What are we really solving for?

The Answer: We need to create value within the core payment. Mobile payments should be used as a platform for a broader salesforce initiative.

The Predictions:

1. The core payments ecosystem won’t change. We will need to solve for: What is the best way for phone to talk to terminal in a cloud based system?
2. We will move away from the edge. Software will become security. This will create an even more open environment for app developers which in turn will help create value-adds within the payments structure.
3. Competition will be around consumer trust and value-add. How do we draw people in? How do we incentivize a transaction for the consumer and the retailer? How do we make the process easy and rewarding?

Geeky Policy Wonks Rejoice

By John Wanek:  

The words innovation, entrepreneurship, and discovery are not exactly synonymous with government; but, a recent order from the feds may very well lead to some of those things.

Geeks, policy wonks, and basically everyone else should be excited about the White House order issued last Thursday, May 9 which mandated that all government data going forward should be open to the public and machine readable. Dylan Tweney of VentureBeat appropriately called it "The geekiest thing that the feds have ever done."  What's more, the policy was actually drafted on GitHub, the web-based hosting service for software projects and revision control.

The order will unleash a treasure trove of data for technologists to change the world.  The possibilities are endless, allow me to explain why.

Government data is proven to be immeasurably powerful

In 1983, a Korean Airlines flight carrying 269 people was shot down after going into the USSR's prohibited airspace.  This event led President Ronald Reagan to issue a directive making GPS freely available for civilian use since better navigational tools could have prevented the disaster.  President Reagan issued the order guaranteeing that GPS signals would be available to the world for free once it was operational.  Initially, the highest quality signal was reserved for military use until President Clinton turned off what was called selective availability when the U.S. military was able to block enemy use of GPS where national security was at risk.  Long story short, the public has access to GPS signals today.

As we know, making GPS signals freely available for civilian use led to unprecedented innovations, and not just in aviation.  Think about every useful app that you use on a mobile device, I'm willing to bet nearly all of them rely on GPS tracking to provide helpful, contextual experiences.  Google Maps, Yelp, Uber and almost all of the applications developed by Solstice use GPS to enable location-based features.

The U.S. Government also released weather data in a similar fashion.  Weather and GPS data support tools that are everywhere, leading to an industry valued at over $90 billion (Project Open Data).  These are just two forms of government data that has been released to the public, the most recent order intends to unleash much, much more.

The possibilities ...

The new data available from federal agencies spans industries that are ripe for innovation; including, health care, education, energy, public safety, global development and finance.  Unleashing private industry and allowing ordinary Americans to tackle the problems that face these industries is a huge development, and very exciting.

The following two examples were outlined in a TechCrunch article by Gregory Ferenstein.  For one, the Simple Energy Mobile App plugs in to San Diego's open data smart grid so that San Diegoans can compare their energy uses to their neighbors.  In one pilot, the total energy reduction was 10% for the city. Second, the Info/Law Harvard Privacy blog estimated that opening up private health care databases could have saved an estimated 90,000 unnecessary heat attacks and 25,000 deaths if researchers had access to a larger dataset with which to identify possible negative side effects from a now defunct drug Vioxx.  (The open data order maintains that no privileged, personal, prohibited by law, or related to national security/law enforcement would be released.)

Business impact

Everyone from established enterprises to entrepreneurs should be excited about the release of this data, mainly because the most recent order "has more teeth" than previous attempts, as Ferenstein puts it.  The order essentially places the burden on federal agencies to explain why they haven't released a dataset, which is meant to propel data to the public faster.  The instructions to agencies are as follows;

Under a presumption of openness, agencies must evaluate the information contained within these systems for release to other agencies and the public, publish it in a timely manner, make it easily accessible for external use as applicable, and post it at agency.gov/developer in a machine-readable format.  

Moreover, the official Digital Government policy document mentions the word "mobile" 105 times and seeks to "do mobile "right" from the beginning" with a sound governance structure supporting mobile development.  Let me speak for Solstice Mobile when I say that this focus is as important as it is exciting.

Let's get to work!

With that being said, let's solve some critical issues facing our country with the power of this data.

Follow @ProjectOpenData

Access the tools on GitHub

View the Official Policy

Is Mobile Making Us More Productive?

By Kelly Manthey:  

A recent article published in the Wall Street Journal by Dennis K. Berman (@dkberman) grabbed my attention. The author opens with these words. The visual of this actually made me laugh out loud:

"Imagine you woke up each morning, strapped a keyboard, monitor, Wi-Fi receiver, desktop computer, camera and stereo to your body, and ventured clumsily out the door.  Of course, you're already doing it. You're using a smartphone, and today that thin slab has roughly the same computing power as the powerful desktops of 2005." 

Mr. Berman is challenging the fact that we have all this power tethered to us 24x7 yet the productivity gains are on a much smaller scale, that we aren't wholesale eliminating people-intensive jobs because of mobile.  He points out that while the technology may exist, changing people's behaviors and adoption of new ways of doing things is much slower.  

I completely agree that mobile isn't making making us more productive on the macro level just yet, however, all of the micro or task level productivity gains are nothing to sneeze at either.  Here are my observations:

At the personal level 
Mobile has enabled me to completely eliminate the need to set aside time each week to manage my household finances.  Balancing a checkbook....what's that?  I'm doing everything through my smartphone on my Citibank and Mint applications. And on top of that, I'm doing it when I have idle time - waiting in line, commuting on the subway, etc.

Shopping, connecting with my doctor, and scheduling appointments are all things I am doing from my phone when I have pockets of time.

At the enterprise level 
Two big areas we, Solstice Mobile, are seeing as ripe for mobile productivity gains are content distribution and sales meeting preparation.   

We are building tablet interfaces that sit on top of enterprise content management systems to allow access to documents on the go.  It's much more than basic mobile reader access to files.  We are enhancing and improving the customer relationship management process through more targeted and engaging content.  

Here is a use case:  Imagine the financial services relationship manager that walks a customer through his portfolio performance documents via a remote controlled iPad.  No more paper printouts or PowerPoints and projectors, but rather a couple of ipads connecting to secure and visually rich content.  The preparation time for the relationship manager is cut in half by simply accessing files that already exist in a more visually appealing display.  If an up-sell opportunity arises,  centrally managed marketing materials can be accessed in a secure way.  These documents can be shared real-time saving not only on follow-up time, but also speeding up the sales cycle by capturing the moment.  Beyond these documents there is also the ability to expose important information about a client from CRM applications, as well as, industry specific news feeds in one central location.  We are seeing the game of relationship management change through the use of graphically rich sales productivity tablet tools. 

How are you seeing mobile being used - is it a productivity killer thanks to games like Angry Birds and social media use on mobile?  Or, have you experienced the use cases for productivity gains at work or in your personal life?   
Tell me your story in the comments below.

Google Glass, Designing the Future

By Greg Cullen:  

If you have a love of technical/product innovation, you are probably very excited about the Google Glass platform coming to life.  Just the concept of Glass has had a profound impact on today’s mobile application design and is leading the charge for Contextual Computing.  Glass is no longer just a concept; non-Google people in the Explorer program began receiving their devices over the last week.  In this blog I will layout some of the important high-level feature concepts for the platform: Timeline, Subscriptions, Locations, Contacts. 

The primary user interface of the Glass platform is a concept called Timeline.  A Timeline is a collection of pages called Timeline Items that you can imagine being a stack of cards.  Each Timeline Item contains time specific information that stack next to one another with the most recent Timeline Item/Card being on top.  Timeline items last for up to 7 days on the Glass device.  The Timeline Items can be packed with rich features like multi media, action items, ability to pin a card, embedded html, and bundles of cards.  I could write an entire blog on this topic alone so I’ll save the gory details for a future write up.

Locations are used to initiate Timeline Items within a specific location.  An exampleLocation Timeline Item usage is a gift card application that displays a user’s active gift cards when entering into a store.   Is this a good application for Glass?  Possibly, but what happens if the Glass user is an employee at the store and shows up for work everyday?  Should Glass pop up the card information each time?  What if the Glass user runs by dozens of stores in their daily exercise routine?  There are many unique situations to think through when designing a Contextual application.

Contacts are fairly obvious.  Just as you do with an Android phone today, you can select a Contact to send an email, sms, voice message, etc. 

Subscriptions are not for users to subscribe to your Glass application.  In fact, Google has not yet announced how the Glass users will find available Glass applications.  The official Google functional description of Subscription, “allows you [the application] to subscribe to notifications that are sent when the user [Glass user] takes specific actions on a Timeline Item or when the user location has been updated.”   This is more of an advanced topic but a sample usage of this feature is to allow Glass users to “share” a picture with a Subscription application like Evernote. It is essentially the “share” concept that you know on Android today. 

Outside of Timeline, Subscription, Location, and Contact, another unpublicized but powerful tool is the use of QR codes.  I can see you rolling your eyes now.  I know, QR codes are so 2011, but hear me out with this one.  Since Glass has no keyboard, it is really difficult to input non-natural voice based information.  To solve the Use Cases that want keyboard entry, Google created a mobile phone application called “My Glass” that allows you to enter utility information (like wifi setup) and generate a QR code with the entered information.  Since taking a picture of the QR code is as easy and quick as touching your head, it makes sense to use QR codes to get information to Glass.  Just imagine trying to enter by voice some of the crazy wifi security codes out there. 

We’ve covered some of the core glass features.  Here are some suggested approaches when developing new Glass applications (called Glassware):

• Start small with fully thought through user scenarios.  The ‘scenarios’ being the environment in which the features are being consumed (driving, running, shopping, etc.) and NOT only within the confines of the application itself.  This is critical for the longevity of your Contextual application.
• Mobile and Glass are strongly coupled.  Everyone wearing a Glass device has a smartphone on them.   Mobile and Glass usage scenarios should complement each other. Design end-to-end experiences with mobile and Glass holistically; preferably implemented by the same development team.
• Let go of the past.  Assemble a team with an open mind and view towards this new age of application development. 
• Don’t think of this platform as a glorified mobile notification system.  It is not.

Glass is the first platform that positions Contextual Computing as the primary delivery model.  In future blog entries, I’ll dive deeper with some of the concepts introduced here.  Regardless if you end up liking the device or not, Glass is reshaping the way we approach application design.  Glass is a blank canvas ready to be painted on.  Get out there and create something beautiful!

Mapping Multichannel User Experience through Various Touch Points

By Angelique Rickhoff:  

As a [user] I want to [complete this task] so I can [do something I need to]. Oh…did [I] also mentioned that I [already interacted with your brand on my laptop earlier] because [I was at the office]. [I] then [further interacted with your brand on my tablet while watching TV] so I could [catch up on Project Runway].

If actual users wrote user stories, they might look something like this. The reality is users are accessing your brand at multiple touch points. To create a meaningful user experience, your team needs look beyond a single device and consider the whole contextual journey your users are taking. The reality is users are likely using more than one device, and sometimes more than one at a time.

An Experience Map for a Museum Visitor
Consider for a moment that you were designing a mobile app for a museum. Let’s walk through what a typical user journey might look like.

Pre-visit
The user was likely exposed to the museum in some way. Perhaps they saw a friend liked a post from the museum on Facebook on their phone while waiting for the train. They could tap through to view the museum's social media spaces to see more of the museums posts. If they saw an event that interested them, they would likely tap through to the museum’s website. When the user arrived at home that evening they may move to laptop or tablet to further plan their visit with their family.

Visit
The day of the visit, it is likely the user will need navigate to the museum either by car or mass transit using their phone. If they have not yet purchased tickets, they would need to stand in line and make some decisions about what attractions they wanted to see for the day and what packages are appropriate for them using box office interfaces. They will then need to navigate the museum, using likely using a combination digital way finding and paper maps. They may want to share photos during their visit or note areas of interest using their phone or tablet. They will engage with interactive screens through out the museum, likely using museum provided tablets or touchscreens.

Post Visit
If the user enjoyed their visit, they may look for opportunities to visit again accessing the museum’s website on their phone or tablet. They may look up more information on things they saw. If they really enjoyed or disliked the museum, they are likely to post an online review on the museum’s social media site using phone, tablet, or laptop.


Considering this user journey for this museum visitor, you may already be seeing opportunities for building better connections. Perhaps the user can access a saved museum itinerary across devices and share with others. Think about ways they could utilize their own device to customize their museum experience on touchscreens across the museum. The museum could use this opportunity to push relevant information to the user’s device including items for sale in the gift shop that are related to exhibits they accessed digitally. Whatever features you choose to include, your goal should be to create omni-channel design and flow that supports the users, as it is them that are truly mobile. Add the following user story to your upcoming projects to keep that target in mind.

As a [user] I want to [access your brand consistently on multiple devices] so I can [seamlessly integrate your products into my life.]

Decoding The Matrix

By Lewis Lancaster:  

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

I’m sure most of us have watched or have a general idea of the concept of the Matrix movie franchise. The basic plot involves humans battling against machines to regain control of Earth. Most humans or the “enslaved” ones live in a computer simulated world or “The Matrix”.  If you are a lucky computer hacker (i.e. Neo) you can be tapped by Morpheus and be given a choice, take the blue pill and remain enslaved or take the red pill and free yourself from the oppression of the machines.

If you are observing The Matrix from Earth, via a series of computers, it exists as a bunch of numbers on a screen. These numbers are meant to be read and decoded to reveal the existence of people, places, things, as well as the important characteristics of those people, places and things.  Those who have taken the red pill are able to reinsert themselves into the simulation by hacking into The Matrix, and due to their understanding of the simulated world, they can then decode and manipulate it to become almost superhuman.

The convergence of big data, mobile computing and cloud technologies now presents opportunities for more people than ever before to start to decode their own Matrix. It also presents more opportunities for your business to uncover use cases and develop applications and functionality that can allow your customers to seem superhuman.

So how do you start to uncover these use cases?


Talk to your users

There are multiple ways you can interact with your users. If you have an existing application, going through the comments of your existing feedback mechanism is a great way to see the sometimes candid feedback about your application but also a great way to see what type of feature requests/wishes users have submitted.  Another method to gather feedback is to schedule focus groups or face-to-face meetings with your users to discuss issues they are facing and uncover innovation ideas that can help with those issues.  For example, if you have users that are in the field, schedule a ride along to get a first person view of their day-to-day activities.  This will provide the opportunity for you to observe the characteristics of your users and pinpoint use cases for how technology can help them in their everyday activities. Of course the breadth of engagement may vary by organization, but it is important to get the voice of your users incorporated into the improvement of your mobile products.


Think outside the box

Yes I know it is cliche and the "box" may not be clearly defined, but at the rapid rate in which technology is progressing many of the ideas you can drum up may become a reality sooner than you think! You can enhance the thinking process by scheduling an innovation session with others in your organization where you can brainstorm ideas and discuss possible new applications or feature ideas for existing products.

Here are a few suggestions for your innovation session:
Have everyone bring their ideas to the session, list them out, then prioritize the ones you may want to discuss further during the session. It may also be helpful to provide some teaser ideas beforehand to help get participants' minds rolling in the right direction. These teaser ideas should be constructed in a way that pertains to your organization but they should not provide too much structure, such that participants imaginations are capped beforehand or they feel shy about providing their own suggestions. No matter how you choose to structure the session it should allow for everyone to participate and provide ideas from their own perspective.  I guarantee your time will be well spent and valuable next steps to pursue ideas or further discussions will be identified.


Invest in innovation

You can have innovation sessions, talk to your users and speak in generalities about what you want to do with those out of the box ideas, but if you do nothing with this knowledge then you will have missed opportunities for your product(s).  So how can you ensure those ideas don't fall by the wayside?

Invest...  Dedicate time and money to developing prototypes, testing ideas with your users, and most importantly, ensure you are able keep a balance the allows for innovation but also demonstrates value to your organization. Some of your ideas may turn into great applications or features, but many will not.  This is OK because the experience and lessons your team will have learned allows for greater strides to be made in iterating on your next innovation idea. When you discover that first feature or application that gives your team that "ah-ha" moment and makes your users seem "superhuman," the resources spent to get there will be well worth it.



Take the red pill

The PC as we know it is on its way out and user expectations are rapidly evolving. There are many new technologies such as sensors and wearable computing devices that can push the limits of your innovation and be incorporated into your roadmap. All of this means the time to invest in mobile technology is now; not only because your competitors are thinking about mobile and contextual computing, but because the way society interacts with machines and data is evolving everywhere. 

The choice to implement a mobile strategy is one that depends on your organization's situation. If you choose to wait to invest and uncover your users' superhuman use cases, you should ensure that choice is something that makes sense for your organization.  As for me...I'm taking the red pill.