application design Archives : Global Nerdy

One of the tricky things about helping developers build for a platform that has yet to be released is that it’s a tabula rasa. There’s no history, which is both blessing and curse: we developers get to make that history, but at the same time, we’re working in the dark. There are no examples to emulate and no best practices to follow – it’s just us and whatever user interface guidelines there happen to be (which, in the case of Windows Phone 7, is the Windows Phone UI Design and Interaction Guide).

That’s why I’m glad that Microsoft is building WP7 apps like USGA Shot Tracker, a gorgeous golf scorekeeping app that practically announces to developers: “This is how you do it. This is how you write a usable, beautiful, truly Windows Phone 7 app.” Here’s a video of USGA Shot Tracker in action:

Give the app a look, and also make sure you check out the article on Long Zheng’s blog, istartedsomething, which includes images of USGA Shot Tracker’s screens.

Keep an eye on this blog, because I’m a couple of days away from starting an ongoing series on well-designed WP7 apps and how you implement them. I’ll take a closer look at USGA Shot Tracker and other apps, going through them with a fine-toothed comb in attempt to learn as much as possible from them, and share that knowledge with you.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Building Apps People Need (and are willing to pay for)

If you’ve taken a psychology course or have leafed through a user experience book, you’ve probably come across a diagram of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:

Dan Zambonini of the web development shop Box UK took some inspiration from it and wrote an article titled Web App Business Models: User Needs and What People Pay For. In it, he writes:

As customers, we have a finite number of needs that we’re willing to fulfill by parting with our hard-earned cash. If you’re planning a web application that can’t build a business model around one or more of these needs, you may face difficulties generating sustainable revenue.

He breaks down people’s needs into the following categories, with an explanation of each one:

He also looks at how much people are willing to have different needs fulfilled. For example, people are willing to pay geometrically increasing prices for increasing comfort. Consider the 15x price difference between “cattle class” and first-class tickets on an airplane (even though both depart and arrive at the same times), or the 27x price difference between a bargain-basement pillow and a down-filled one:

Entertainment, on the other hand, is a different beast. According to Zambonini, across the wide array of entertainment options from games for their mobile phones to vacations in the tropics, people are willing to pay the same rate: $5 an hour…

He categorized the top 100 U.S. sites by the needs he listed — here’s how they break down:

Pie chart showing breakdown of top 100 US websites by needs fulfilled: Entertainment (30%), Wealth (20%), Education (14%), Esteem (11%), Time (10%), Belonging (6%), Survival (6%), Comfort (2%), Scarcity (1%)

Naturally, such categorization is subjective and had to be drastically simplified, with each site being slotted into a single category. Sites about food were put into the “survival” category, even though a top 100 site on food would probably cover things like gourmet food and wine, which could arguably be put into the “entertainment”, “comfort” and even “esteem” categories.

He closes the article with a series of questions that you should ask about your application, such as “Does my app allow the user to do something more quickly?”, “Does my app allow the user to express their creativity?”, “Does my app provide entertainment for the user?” and so on. Your should be able to answer “yes” to at least one of these questions, and better still, you should be able to explain why.

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