During peak periods of internet use in the US, Netflix constitutes 33% of all downstream traffic, which means content that goes into the device instead of out. That’s more than Google’s YouTube (14.8%), BitTorrent (5.9%), Apple’s iTunes (3.9%), Amazon Video (1.8%), and Facebook (1.5%), among others. Netflix isn’t as dominant in mobile internet use, where it has just 2.7% to YouTube’s 31%, but that’s the next battleground.
Bandwidth is a good metric to watch because it arguably measures the depth of attention commanded by these big media companies. Facebook obviously controls a large share of internet use, but the content it serves isn’t as rich, or bandwidth-heavy, as YouTube or Netflix. In theory, the richer media should ultimately translate into more revenue.
Kadir's Blog on Everything
From Max Rudberg’s ‘If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it’
[Clear, Rinse, and Solar] These apps have chosen to reduce details to achieve a minimal UI, but in the process the UI has also become harder to use. Unfortunately a UI walkthrough is quite an inelegant way to explain the core functionality of an app. It can be a frustrating obstacle before you can dive into an app, and you have to remember all of those new ways of using it once you get in.
Clear, Rinse and Solar have minimalistic theme and the gestures are hidden. Without walkthrough, users will have hard time using the application.
I think walkthroughs are not bad as long as you provide in-context message and highlight features that are key for user experience. On the other hand, you have work to do if you hide your key feature and it requires a walkthrough to learn. Users just rush through these screens and don’t have patience to read and / or remember.
I have done a mix of few things to highlight features / usage during first run:
- Full screen walkthroughs before signup (more or less marketing) and during first run (highlighting features) to educate the user about the app and key features. Also, it is a great stalling technique if you want your app to do bunch of things in the background and be ready when users finish the walkthrough.
- Overlays that highlight features / controls in the screen. These work best if you have custom icons, hidden gestures and actions that requires user to click on icons. However, many apps cram a lot of hints rending it useless. If you are providing an overlay, it should highlight key features and rest should be left for the users to discover. One of the culprits is iPhoto for iOS app.
- In-context highlight based on the app state. If you are Dropbox and if a folder is empty, then provide a hint to help users upload files.
There is no clear formula - it depends on your application and UI. It is not bad if you have a walkthrough - make sure that your UX is not totally broken if user skips it.
Payment services have very small margin - traditionally 2.75% per transaction. Not many businesses can survive with that margin; cost of acquiring new users, fluctuating transaction volume from small vendors would make it hard for any company to survive.
VeriFone exited from mobile payments. Square was one of its main competitor who focuses solely on mobile transaction business. Paypal, MasterCard, Groupon have other line of businesses.
Should Square pivot?
Just like Bergeron suggests, Square has started to shift its focus toward providing other services. For instance, it would like consumers to visit its mobile app to discover new local restaurants and find offers and discounts. A recent partnership with Starbucks, in fact, is designed to help lift consumer adoption of its mobile app. Rather than use the standalone Starbucks application, consumers will be encouraged to pay for their lattes with the Square Wallet.[1]
Entering credit card information on mobile / tablet is painful. However, Square has a beautiful form.
As soon as the full credit card is in place, the text field zooms to a small size, showing just the last 4 digit (nice privacy and use of space). In place of the large text field they place others for the date, CVV/CIN/whatever you care to call it, and zip. As you fill in the info, you are moved on to the next field. For the date a nice “/” is placed in there for you.
More about these forms from Tristan, Co-Founder of Square
- Type in a purposefully incorrect card number and the field will shake and turn red. Deleting a digit to retype it will reset the red color and switch it back to black as you re-enter.
- If you type in an AMEX card, I group the digits the same way AMEX groups them on the front of your card, by 4, 6 and 5 digits rather than just by groups of 4.
- When you switch to the CVV field, it *doesn’t* flip to the back of the card for AMEX, it just crossfades because AMEX puts the ‘CVV’ on the front as 4 digits.
- If you type the wrong # of CVV digits for an AMEX card (say the 3 on the back) the CVV field shakes and turns red to indicate it’s the wrong length.
- It is impossible to enter an invalid expiration year — things like trying to enter an invalid month (say 15) won’t let you type, and trying to enter an impossible year (say 09) will not let you type either.
- ZIP lets you type A-Z so you can enter in canadian postal codes, but defaults to 0-9 since our primary use case in the USA right now.
Flurry redid a similar report they published three years before. It is pretty interesting to see the categories in different quadrants but not surprised at all.
It shouldn’t affect your app but knowing where you are should help you monetize better. If you are publishing a personalization app, it won’t make sense to have in-app subscription. Rather, you would charge for download.
Another titbit
Compared to Flurry’s 2009 analysis, 90-day retention rates have increased from 25% to 35%. Additionally, frequency of use has decreased from 6.7 in 2009 to an average of 3.7 now.
Last week I finalized the behavior and this week we implemented this feature in our apps. We did not invest a lot on the artwork like Polor but we have few ideas on how to make this and couple of other features rich.
Usually you don’t get a visual cue about these features. You can argue that these are nice-to-have and users can totally live without but they are great candidates to add a bit viral-ness to the app.
Pull-to-refresh isn’t the only socially-transmitted functionality. In years past, it’s how I’ve seen people learn about drag-and-drop in applications. It’s how they learn about special keys, like F5 for refresh or F1 for help. A lot of functionality has been transmitted from one person to the next, socially.
We have a term for that now - Socially-Transmitted Functionality.
- When people talk about mobile, they always bring up fragmentation. But if fragmentation is so important we have to look at it in detail. We have to break it down more.
- Mobile phones are made of two things: hardware and software.
- Hardware: phones used to be all kinds of form factors but today they have converged on black rectangles.
- Development: there are at least 12 operating systems on the market, each with its own development requirements. This makes transferring code between OS quite difficult. In mobile operating systems, fragmentation is an issue for developers. But is it an issue for designers?
TV no longer commands our full attention. In a typical day 77% of viewers use another device while they are watching TV. Because of this, a business’s TV strategy should be closely aligned and integrated with the marketing strategies for digital devices.
Makes me think that there could be a platform play here; what if you could help business continue the conversation from one media to another? Especially from TV to your tablet / smartphones?
I think Shazam is trying that with ads on TV asking users to use Shazam to find new content but it is not spontaneous. By the time they reach for the phone, it is gone or you lose the user.
I think more smarter way is to use integrated experience which could drive the user from one device to another seamlessly - more like a hybrid of into_now with Amazon Kindle’s X-Ray. If the app or device knows what you are watching, it could show you an accompanying sponsored ad or continue an ad that started in the TV to a tablet or mobile which could lead you to a campaign or potential time-based discount.
As more companies see their audiences shift to mobile or begin as mobile-only users, they don’t have a lot of time to make the transition to mobile themselves.
Lot of companies, like Twitter, are using their web to drive traffic to mobile or direct their search traffic to mobile first. One problem though is that companies like Facebook, Zynga, etc. haven’t figured out how to make more money out of their mobile apps.
Couple of years back, mobile was a watered down web client in terms of feature set. However, now mobile is becoming more immersive than web with the experience.
I didn’t expect this but then is amplifies why Facebook is scrambling on mobile strategy and the status of their stocks. Also, Twitter generated more ad revenue through mobile devices than web.
Other big story is Pandora generating more revenue than Twitter and Facebook; they are also estimated to make more ad revenue than Twitter and Facebook next year.
With revamped iOS devices, Facebook is already getting more users on their mobile devices; it would be interesting to see whether that translates to higher monitory benefits.
I am digging around to get hold of worldwide mobile revenue and mobile vs web ad revenue split between companies.
