Digital Ecosystems
With the amount of new mobile and digital devices that are on the market today, many companies are trying to jump on the “app” bandwagon. This is a natural response, from both a marketing aspect and a business perspective.
Marketing wants to take advantage of exposure in the latest trend channel, and business sees new opportunities to reach their customers and provide additional pipelines of potential revenue. The main issue that I constantly see lately is that the decisions to try to provide a presence of your company in a certain digital environment or platform is narrow sighted and many of these companies are losing sight of context, usable purpose or utility and do not consider all of the channels that make up this digital ecosystem to distribute content and services through effectively.
Making an application for the sake of jumping on the “app bandwagon” isn’t going to provide the returns that most would anticipate, especially when it is so general, there is no context on how it relates to your business. Some companies believe that even if their app provides some form of entertainment, like a basic puzzle game, that it is valuable to their customers and will provide a venue for branding, advertising and exposure that customers can absorb. This can backfire, especially if the application turns out NOT to be valuable to the user. They will not only likely discontinue using the application, but your company’s face is now associated with an application that is collecting dust or has been deleted. Offering an application that provides entertainment isn’t bad, but provide solid context on how it relates to your business and features that can help connect users to your brand.
Utility is strongly related to my previous point about context. An application that does nothing more than associate your business with an app is practically useless. It needs to provide the user with some functional value.
For instance, if your business is a ski/snowboard related, you could provide a user with a variety of features in an application. I’m going to throw out a hypothetical and simple scenario. One option would be to provide a ski or snowboard game, where the user can ski down the run and hit jumps to score points. That’s not a bad idea, until the user becomes bored of the game due to low budget and poor strategy and the user decides moves on to something else, because the app provides nothing else to the user that is truly valuable other than brief entertainment.
Now, the obvious feature set would be to provide the user with snow reports and weather conditions, a feature that not only possibly draw the user back to the app in the future, but really DRIVE the user back to check the conditions, because that is what the user wants to know, plus the data constantly changes and updates. On top of that, a map of the resort would be another valuable feature that would serve the user with some purpose. The entertainment or game side can be useful, say the user is in the lodge having a beer and wants to kill some time, but still experience the sport. Give the user something that other apps cannot or do not do very well. The ski reports and maps are obvious choices in this case, and although they would be useful, there is so much more that can be done. You can take these features to the next level like Vail Resorts’ EpicMix mountain, mobile and online experience.
This system allows tracking of your movements with RF receivers throughout their mountains from RF chips in your season pass, calculating your achievements, days on the mountain, locations, vertical feet traveled, history and more. It also allows you to connect to others and share your stories. They added an incentive/reward pin system for accomplishments, which in a sense is a game, but unlike the one noted earlier, this feature really engages the user in a real world experience and crosses over into a game. This is one aspect of gaming mechanics that can help your app succeed and keep your users engaged, even if it is not a game.
A solid understanding of the various channels that your content and services will thrive in is key to being able to provide the user with the appropriate data during the appropriate time and on the appropriate device.
This model has already been in practice with businesses that have online sources, television, radio and possibly print. A major issue is distinguishing between the content and mediums of presentation. Some online sources simply mirror exactly what was printed, yet the online space is interactive and you could provide the user with so much more content and enhance the experience with visuals such as animations and slideshows that cannot be accomplished in a print format.
Centralizing your data is another important factor. This is NOT A NEW concept, as many businesses and sites have been doing this with a simple database and then pulling the desired data/content as needed to present on the intended device or medium. This makes it exponentially easier to manage content even though you may have several outlets. It is important to decipher which parts of that consolidated data should be distributed to which device and how to present it.
Simply resizing your content to fit on an iPhone doesn’t really mean it is optimized for iPhone. And the dataflow should not be viewed as a waterfall or pyramid distribution system, where many models have a primary source of content and then it deltas outward to various portal types with minimal adaptation or tributaries that feed downstream. Info and content should also be able to feedback upstream and/or laterally to other distribution points, so that when content is added or optimized mid-stream, it could also be used elsewhere in the system even back to the source, especially when that other outlet evolves.
Utilizing the hardware of specific devices like a smart phone, allows you to provide more features and present content that is catered to a user on the move. Geo-location to help a user find out where they are, and where they need to go can be a very valuable feature for a mobile device app. Tapping into the accelerometer allows for unique experiences that would only suit a mobile user, like scrolling content by tilting the device due to being on the move and having limited interactions or tracking speed of the user who is on the move. These are things that would not really benefit someone at their desk, but are great for the mobile world.
Flipboard for iPad is a really great example of an app that can adapt and restructure content for the device that it is on and the interactions the device allows. Most of the content that is pulled from Flipboard already exist somewhere on the web, but Flipboard reformats and presents it to the user in a very intuitive manner that takes advantage of the iPad’s touch screen, interactions and resolution.
One blog post is not going to cover all aspects of the digital ecosystem and can’t guarantee to make your business successful, but with some better insight to the platforms, research, and user experience considerations, you can take the correct steps in understanding how you can propel your business in the right direction with your interactive content. These are just some thoughts I had recently.
