It starts innocently. One day you find yourself replacing Apple Maps with Google Maps when it becomes available. Or maybe you fall in love with a new email application. You find, after not really using the default calendar app that there are more robust options out there.

And soon, after a few months, you find that nearly all of the apps that came with your phone have been replaced with similar options from third-party providers: Mailbox, Chrome, and Spotify now sit on your home screen instead of Mail, or Safari, or iTunes. Instead of Notes, you use Evernote. Forecast gives you the weather, and Sunrise tells you where you need to be. When it’s time to take a photo, you open Instagram first.

That might change though, with the introduction of iOS7.

Not for all applications, of course. Heavy Instagram users will continue to be heavy Instagram users, thanks in part to the community aspect of the product. Google Maps will be the app users turn to for getting around, at least until Apple can promise us that its alternative won’t end up getting you lost. And those of you who have become dependent on Evernote are unlikely to move their notes over to the default Apple app, skeuomorphism or no.

But Apple has updated the core functionality of some default apps just enough that they might start winning users over again. In particular, updates to Mail, Safari, Calendar, Weather, Camera, and Photos could make them not just useful, but the application that users turn to first.

That starts with design, and in part with the way that Apple’s apps are made to work seamlessly with the core functionality of the OS. The new Weather app blends seamlessly into the background, while Calendar offers a beautiful new way of managing your day. And the updates to Apple’s Safari web browser looks to make it a fantastic upgrade over the previous version and a formidable alternative to Chrome.

Many of the new features that were added to Apple’s core apps steal borrow heavily from competitors already on the market: It’s no surprise that the addition of gestures in Apple’s Mail app, which Mailbox revolutionized, might be a reason for you to switch over. Introducing Instagram-like filters into its default camera app is one way to keep users engaged if they don’t plan on sharing those pictures with with friends. Adding group photo-sharing features in its Photos app could keep users from adopting apps like Cluster, which are designed to simplify the process of grouping together certain moments based on time and location, and allowing friends to contribute to them. Oh yeah, and with iTunes Radio, you just might think about canceling your Pandora or Spotify subscription.

Of course, it all depends on how well these new apps actually work, and if end up being as cool and as useful as advertised during the demo. Let’s not forget that Apple Maps was introduced to rave reviews during the WWDC keynote last year — and then people actually tried to use it.

It’s quite possible that the new design of these apps will just be window dressing, and those third-party apps will continue to be better than the default options. It’s also possible that, even if Apple’s own applications take a big step forward, they can be leapfrogged over the course of the next year, between now and WWDC 2014. For now, though, it looks like Apple has learned from what its third-party competitors app partners are doing, and the result looks pretty sweet.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A new real-time web analytics platform Spinnakr is launching out of its closed beta today, accompanied by a seed round of just under a million from Andreessen Horowitz, 500 Startups, Point Nine Capital, Sand Hill Angels, and others. Though analytics is already a crowded space, Spinnakr’s product is offering something different – it’s bringing the intelligence of a data scientist to all web publishers, while also offering tools allowing its customers to immediately take action on the insight provided.

Spinnakr was founded a year and a half ago by former college debate rivals, Adam Bonnifield and Michael Mayernick. The two had built some of the first online targeting systems used in politics, including fundraising tool Giv.to, which helped them raise millions for political campaigns over the years.

Deciding to get out of politics for what they believed were even bigger opportunities in data analysis, the two decided to focus on how they could use their expertise to build a new kind of web analytics service.

“If you look at the way analytics products are built…they’re built for people who want to do data analysis,” explains Bonnifield. “Even Google Analytics is even too complicated for the average person to get value out of,” he adds. “There’s always been this assumption that you need to ask a human being to sit between the customer of the data and the data itself, and do all this analysis on it to understand it. So we thought, what if we tried to build a system that would just automate all that analysis?”

With Spinnakr, they did.

The web analytics product provides the insights and the recommendations, and it even enables you to take action to respond to its suggestions based on trends it’s spotting. Like other real-time web analytics systems, Spinnakr can help spot things like traffic spike, search queries leading users to the site, and other important events that even human eyes might miss.

However, instead of putting these into a dashboard that others have to sit and watch to glean an understanding of what’s happening on the site, Spinnakr’s “insight engines” track events, rank them by importance, then drop the data into a feed that looks something like a news feed. Plus, if the trend or event the system spots is urgent, it can alert customers via email or through notifications in a web browser extension.

Then there’s the really clever bit — Spinnakr also helps customers take action on its recommendations. Using the same bit of code that helps it with the web analytics and tracking, the system also lets customers immediately manipulate the content on their website to address the event or trends, even catering to a specific kind of searcher with a custom message.

You may have seen things like this before — like when a blog greets visitors with a “welcome Google Searcher!” message, for example. But Bonnifield explains that Spinnakr’s system is platform-agnostic (while those other messages are often crafted via WordPress plugins), and it can also do much more.

“It’s quite sophisticated,” he says. “Not only can it drop in messaging along the top, it can also let you choose headlines or place content into the body of the website. And all of that can be controlled easily with our visual editor.”

The system can target anything you want, whether it’s changes in visitor loyalty or the geolocation of visitors. It can spot an influx of job seekers for example, those being directed from a particular traffic source or site, or any other specific info you indicate. It also leverages the trends across its network of users (currently 150 million visitors) to generalize conclusions more quickly.

Spinnakr has been running a closed beta over the past six months with some 200 companies, ranging from small startups and blogs to large content sites, including music.com, for instance. Its waiting list, in the meantime, has grown to around 3,500. Today, those users will begin to be let in along with any others who sign up. Pricing is still being tweaked, but the company is offering a free level of service to entice users to give them a chance, then will charge on a monthly basis by number of visitors.

With the new funding, Spinnakr is growing its now six-person team and further developing the product, though Bonnifield didn’t want to delve into specifics on the latter. What he would speak to, more broadly, are other things he expects the company to launch sometime later this year.

“Right now, people still think of the website as a dead, static document – as this thing that just sits there. And then they use tools like Facebook and Twitter and other platforms to do their connecting with their audience. We see that changing,” he says. “We see a rebirth of the website to be more contextual, more fluid, and more conversational. The other things we’re working on are an extension of what we’ve already built…where you’re thinking of the website as a community and less as a document.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s been a little over a year since Google started teasing something it called “Project Glass.” The futuristic, wearable computer that would change the way that you interact with the world was nothing more than a series of rumors for months before it was “formally introduced” in April 2012. Not known for hardware and not having a current bonafide physical device that was popular among consumers, many opined that this was Google’s way of begging for attention. It might have been, and it definitely worked.

In thirteen months, Glass has gone from Star Trek fantasy to reality. It’s been quite the whirlwind of activity.

The “wearable computing” age is upon us, and it’s been widely reported that Apple was working on a watch, therefore many assumed that Google was working on a similar device to keep up. This was clearly not the case and Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin took special interest in the Glass project and has been leading the charge going back to when prototype weighed around eight pounds in August 2011.

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane, as a lot has happened over the past year in Glassland.

It’s real(ish)

The video from Google itself got sent people’s imaginations into overdrive. It was called “One day…” and gave us a glimpse into the life of a daily user of what Google had up its sleeve. We now know that the “One day…” reference had more to do with what the product could become, not what it would be in its first iteration:

The user experience in this video is aspirational, at best, as the current iteration of Glass is more of a compliment and utility to your day, rather than the augmented reality “enhancer” as this video demonstrates. Still, the elements that make Glass handy are all there, taking calls, getting directions and taking pictures from a new point of view.

Immediately after the video, and public admonishment that the project was real, the press wondered out loud if Apple should compete and that other companies should stand up and take notice. We also now know that the rumored final name for the device, Google Eye, isn’t likely. Good thing, because it sounds way creepier than Glass. We’ll get to more “creepiness” later.

It was clear that Glass was getting a lot of attention, both positive and negative, from the start. Even Jon Stewart did a parody about them.

OK, now they’re really real(ish)

Before Google’s I/O developer conference in 2012, Sergey Brin started showing Glass off to folks like Gavin Newsom. This is the first time that we found out that Glass had a trackpad that would let you scroll through its UI, even though we didn’t know what that UI looked like yet.

Even Google CEO Larry Page got into the act, wearing his pair at the Google Zeitgeist event in London. Was Page making important company decisions without us knowing, using his futuristic eyewear? Probably not, but it was cool to think about.

Holy crap, they’re really really real(ish)

At Google I/O 2012, developers sat in the Moscone Center not knowing what to expect from the company that has been using its advertising business to fund all types of cool projects. After all, who would have thought that a search and advertising company could actually pull off something like Gmail? Or a web browser? And now a driving car? A pair of glasses? Crazy talk. Well, on June 27th, 2012, Google fed into that crazy talk with…a crazy stunt.

The man at the helm of Google X and Project Glass, Sergey Brin, pulled off a stunt so memorable, that many of us in attendance still don’t fully understand what we saw.

Brin jumped out of a zeppelin wearing Glass, and participated in a live video Hangout the entire time:

After that, a bunch of people hopped onto bikes and drove into the keynote auditorium. The audience looked at one another, as if to say, “Did this just really happen?”

It was indeed Google’s “Apple moment.”

After Brin took the stage, we were left to wonder if he would then go into full Oprah mode and tell us all to check under our seats for a pair of Glass that would be our very own. Nope. At I/O 2012, the “Glass Explorer Program” was announced, and the first 2,000 attendees that wanted to pledge to pay $1,500 for the opportunity to develop apps for the Glass platform, could.

There was no date given for when the device would be shipped, but nobody cared. These things were real(er). Think about it, developers signed up to pay $1,500 for a device that they had never even touched. I was one of them, and even I felt silly. There was something about the cadence that Google had been marching to up to I/O that year that felt right.

Bloggers got to try Glass on for a few seconds, but didn’t get to do anything with them. The hypefest was on. Our founder, Michael Arrington, had a fun, and grounded, thought after the announcement:

“I can imagine in a couple of years we’ll all be wearing these at events. Then a couple of years after that maybe we’ll look back and think we all looked like idiots.”

Perhaps.

They’re real(er)(ish)

After I/O, Google started communicating with its Glass “Explorers” about all of the device happens, introducing its skunkworks team along the way. Those who joined the program at the conference would get to participate in Hangouts, attend conferences and get exclusive news on Glass. In retrospect, Google set itself up for people to start making fun of those clamoring for the device, whom are affectionately/unaffectionately referred to as “Glassholes.” You see, whenever something is only available to a select group of people, those not inside of that group tend to lash out a bit. Sure, there are those who think that Glass will never amount to anything, but those on the fence had no choice but to attack. It’s kind of like high-school.

As the months went on, the press flirted with Glass, as more and more Googlers starting wearing them on campus. Stories about Microsoft’s “Glass” plans and a reminder of Apple’s wearable tech patents were peppered in, too.

In late 2012 and early 2013, Hackathons were announced, Brin rode the subway wearing Glass and its API, dubbed Mirror, was introduced at SXSW.

OK, Glass. You’re real.

In April, a group of heavyweights in Silicon Valley announced a partnership called “The Glass Collective.” Developers who wanted to build things for Glass, without ads or any means to make actual money, could visit either Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz or Kleiner Perkins, and if their project was interesting enough, they could get funding from all three.

It was at that event that Google Glass team member, Steve Lee, let it slip that developers would soon be receiving invitations to pick their pair of Glass up from Mountain View, Los Angeles or New York City. They could have them shipped, but that’s no fun. Glass was officially real.

In just a few days after that Collective event, the first pairs of Glass for developers were coming off of the production line, the Mirror API guidelines were posted, its companion app for Android was released and full specs were released for the first time.

This “moonshot” that Google had been cooking up in its super-secret X Labs were going to see the light of day, outside of Google’s campus’. People just then started to realize that certain folks would be meandering around town with cameras on their face, and focused solely on how the device would affect them…the ones not wearing the device. The ones not in the “club.” A quick search for the term “Google Glass privacy” shows the same story written by hundreds of reporters, most of them never having worn the device.

I was able to pick up my pair of Glass on April 17th, and it’s interesting to see what the device really is in its current state, as opposed to what we saw in the video released last year. We did a “day in the life” video, showing what I was seeing on the display:

While it’s not as “pretty” as Google’s first teaser video, the elements are all there. In its current state, Glass is a utility that allows you to do some of the things that your smartphone does now. The difference with Glass is that you can do these things hands-free, quicker than before and in a less socially disrupting way.

What’s next for Glass?

For a period of time, we’ll see the same types of stories about how creepy Glass is. At this year’s I/O, none of Google’s executives wore the device on stage or while walking around the Moscone Center. It was its way of turning the “lens” onto developers and saying “It’s time to make this yours.” Still, we heard about people wearing Glass in the bathroom, as if to remind us that not everyone is ready to feed into the hype of the device.

It’s hard to argue with the point that the Glass platform is the most interesting one for developers to iterate upon since Apple’s introduction of the App Store. For the first time in years, these developers are getting a chance to re-imagine their existing services, or build new ones, for a brand new device. Glass isn’t perfect, and will only be as good as the apps that are developed for it.

During this year’s I/O, Twitter, Facebook and a slew of others announced their own Glass apps. The Facebook app is great, while the Twitter app will need more work. As I’ve continued to wear the device while I’m not at the computer, I’m finding myself trying to get away from all of the crazy and unnecessary notifications that I get on my phone and desktop. The Twitter app, for example, sends me mobile updates that I’ve subscribed to, @ replies and direct messages. This simply won’t fly, and Glass users are going to need more granular controls for what pops up on their display. It’s early though, and these are good learning experiences.

No matter what you think about Glass, you have to admit that the past year has been a good one for Google and its fancy, futuristic device. From a secret pet-project to developer-only playground, it will be fascinating to see what happens next in Glassland. There’s no telling when the device will be available for everyday consumers, but I can guarantee that it won’t be until developers have had ample time to explore the possibilities. I do know one thing: If you’re really worried about being spied on by someone wearing Glass, don’t be. You’re not that interesting.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

An upcoming update will bring a web browser, email and update store app to Barnes & Noble’s super affordable Nook Simple Touch line of eReaders, which will begin rolling out June 1 according to a source close to the matter who wishes to remain anonymous. The 1.5.0 update was created in response to the positive critical and customer response to the recent Nook tablet update that brought Google Play to B&N’s Android-powered devices.

The Nook Simple Touch and Simple Touch with Glowlight will be receiving the over-the-air update starting next month, and this marks the first time that Nook’s entry-level readers get official access to web browsing capabilities. Amazon’s competing Kindle devices have shipped with an “experimental” web browser since the Kindle 2, but have not offered an email client on anything except for the Kindle Fire tablets.

Making Nook hardware a little more flexible for users is a good way for Barnes & Noble to help counter flagging sales of dedicated Nook hardware, which were shown to be weak in recent quarterly results. Nook weakness probably ended up prompting the bookseller to offer promotional giveaways with on-hand inventory.

When B&N announced that Google Play would be coming to Nook tablets, I praised the decision as a key step in helping the company position them as affordable, fully-featured Android tablets, as opposed to just glorified eReaders that could do a bit more than most. The Nook Simple Touch is still pretty focused on eBooks, but as an email triage device and basic browser, especially for text heavy content, it probably becomes a lot more attractive to an audience that mostly wants books but would like a little more general use value as well. Especially for older buyers, I imagine a simplified device with a cheap price tag has the potential to carry appeal over a much more expensive full-fledged tablet.

Will a browser and email client be enough to right the Nook ship? Probably not on their own, but B&N is at least expending effort in the right direction to combat flagging consumer interest in dedicated eReader devices.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google just reminded developers that they can use Chrome as the default browser for their apps and easily switch back and forth between app and browser. With x-callback, Google says, developers can open links in Chrome and once the page has loaded, Chrome will show a link back to the original app in the top left corner of the screen. This should make it much easier for developers to allow users to support Chrome in their apps.

Currently, Google says, developers have two options when they want to access web content from their apps: they can create their own in-app web browser frame – using Apple’s own WebKit browser, of course – or by sending users away from their apps to a browser.

Once users are in the browser, though, chances are, they won’t come back, so Google’s scheme will surely help to ensure that users remember what app they were coming from in the first place.

To get started, developers have to download the OpenInChromeControllerClass and add it to their projects. The class will check if Chrome is installed and, if that’s the case, you can start sending links to Chrome with x-callback enabled.

Given that Chrome is essentially just an app on iOS, it can’t be set as the default on Apple’s operating system. That’s obviously a problem for Google, because apps will always open links in Safari by default. Because of this, users have little incentive to switch to Chrome because they’ll always be forced back into Safari anyway.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Inventure-backed Froont has launched in public beta today with a web-based tool that aims to make it easy for designers to create, prototype and share responsive website designs, without the need to code. Using a visual, largely drag ‘n’ drop interface that creates responsive CSS/HTML on the fly, it aims to replace the somewhat arcane process where a designer hands off a Photoshop mockup for a developer to interpret. In fact, Froont offers the potential to leave developers out of the design (and even prototyping) process altogether, which in some cases may be a very good thing.

Responsive web design — where a single version of a site is designed to adapt in size and layout depending on the device that it’s being viewed on — is particularly in vogue right now. And with the proliferation of various types of mobile devices (smartphones, tablets etc.), alongside the traditional desktop, it’s easy to see why. A responsive approach to web design offers an attractive solution to reaching as wide an audience as possible without necessarily degrading their experience, even if it does make some compromises.

But the old way of designing websites, and the traditional division of labour, doesn’t necessarily scale well if you’re jumping on the responsive bandwagon. Trying to represent a responsive design in a series of static Photoshop mockups to show how a site will adapt when viewed on various screen sizes involves quite a lot of compromise. One solution is to have the non-coding designer work hand in hand with a front-end developer to prototype their Photoshop designs in HTML/CSS, thus making them viewable as is and to get a feel for how the responsive design will work in practice. This approach, however, can involve a lot of unnecessary back and forth as the design gets lost in translation.

Instead, Froont wants to hand control back to designers by letting them visually create working responsive designs that, because they are built using HTML/CSS and hosted in the cloud, can be viewed and shared instantly in a web browser, on any device being targeted. And when it’s time to hand off the design to a developer, instead of a static PNG file or something similar, in theory they’re given “nice, clean HTML/CSS or the ‘face’ of the website already made,” says the company.

The tool itself, though only in Beta, appears to be quite easy to get to grips with without being overly restrictive. It’s primarily WYSIWYG, employing a palette of tools and lots of drag ‘n’ drop, making it easy to add text, import graphics and tinker with typography and layout. Obviously, the aim here is to create a responsive design and in this respect Froont has some nice touches, such as a sliding ruler at the top of the page that adjusts the targeted screen size on the fly, instantly updating how your design changes as it responds. You’re also able to set “break points” to denote when the layout of your content shouldn’t simply reflow as the target device’s screen size differs but should change all together.

Although there are lots of visual web design tools that target different stages of the process or a finished site entirely, in terms of tackling responsive design at the initial HTML/CSS stage, Adobe’s Reflow probably comes closest. The main difference, says Froont, is that its tool runs in the browser, which means that its output can be shared instantly with team members, clients or developers for feedback and testing. Also, however subtle a difference, Froont isn’t so much aiming at simplifying coding but providing better tools for design.

Froont’s team of six is spread across San Francisco, Finland and Latvia. The company is founded by Sandijs Ruluks (designer/CEO), Andris Silis (CTO), Anna Andersone (operations and marketing) and Eli Altman (PR), and originally graduated from the Finnish accelerator Startup Sauna, giving it an avenue to raise €100,000 from Finnish VC fund Inventure. Froont also appears to at least be a partial pivot. The same team is behind the content management system Berta, which although described as a side-project, is still operational and I’m told is profitable.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: David Lieb is co-founder and CEO of Bump, creators of the popular app that lets people share contact information, photos, and other content by bumping their phones together. Bump has been downloaded more than 130 million times.

It’s been hard to ignore the massive shift in the last decade toward simple products. The minimalist design aesthetic pioneered by Dieter Rams in the 1960s on alarm clocks and toasters was popularized by Apple and Google in the 2000s on iPods and search boxes. Soon after, Web 2.0 took over, yielding big buttons, less text, more images, and happier users. Startup accelerators and design gurus popped up proselytizing “simplicity!”, and the rapid growth of mobile in the last 5 years has created an almost strict requirement for simple products that work on our new small screens and increasingly small attention spans. Some of the most popular products today (Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram) all have simplicity of design and experience at their core.

This Ain’t Is Your Grandma’s Internet

So why did this happen, and why mostly in the last 10 years? Some say that good design simply lags technology and design has finally caught up. Others point to the evolution of our devices and our environments; definitely a major factor.

But I believe the high order bit is even more straightforward: It’s only been in the last 10 years that technology products have reached the mass market. The market size of the entire broadband internet in 2000 was 50 million people; today it is 2 billion people; in a few short years with the shift to mobile it will be more than 5 billion people. This mass market is comprised mostly of people who sit in the middle of the tech adopter bell curve, and since they aren’t product designers, computer programmers, and tech bloggers, they require an even higher degree of simplicity.

“Simple” Isn’t What You Think

But “simplicity” comes in many flavors. We can make products simpler by optimizing along a number of vectors:

• minimize number of steps in the flow
• minimize time required
• minimize number of features
• minimize elements on each page
• ….

But the most important, and often most overlooked, is Cognitive Simplicity. This is an idea that slowly emerged as my company, Bump, tried to understand exactly why Bump is so popular, especially in the non-tech crowd. We believe product builders should first and foremost minimize the Cognitive Overhead of their products, even though it often comes at the cost of simplicity in other areas.

Cognitive Overhead

There isn’t yet much written about cognitive overhead in our field. The best definition on the web comes from a web designer and engineer in Chicago named David Demaree:

Cognitive Overhead — “how many logical connections or jumps your brain has to make in order to understand or contextualize the thing you’re looking at.”

Minimizing cognitive overhead is imperative when designing for the mass market. Why? Because most people haven’t developed the pattern matching machinery in their brains to quickly convert what they see in your product (app design, messaging, what they heard from friends, etc) into meaning and purpose. We, the product builders, take our ability to cut through cognitive overhead for granted; our mental circuits for our products’ patterns are well practiced.

This is especially pronounced for mass market mobile products. Normal people already have to use more of their mental horsepower to cut through cognitive overhead, now imagine the added burden of having to do that while on a crowded bus, or in line at Starbucks, or while opening your app for the first time while eating dinner with a friend and texting another. This isn’t 1999, when your users were sitting in their quiet bedrooms checking out your website on a large monitor while waiting for their Napster downloads to finish; they are out in the real world being bombarded with distractions.

My, What Big Cognitive Overhead You Have 

To illustrate the difference between generic simplicity and cognitive simplicity, let’s look at a couple products that, on the surface, might be regarded as being simple to use, but rank in my book as some of the most cognitively complex products of late.

QR Codes –  Designed to check the simplicity boxes of speed, ubiquity, and small number of steps, QR codes really dropped the ball on cognitive overhead. “So it’s a barcode? No? It’s a website? Ok. But I open websites with my web browser, not my camera. So I take a picture of it? No, I take a picture of it with an app? Which app?”

iCloud / PhotoStream –  When we heard Steve Jobs preach the utopian future where all of our photos and data would be seamlessly synchronized among all our devices, we smelled the Apple simplicity we’d all grown to love. But in practice, iCloud is rife with cognitive overhead — it only backs up your most recent photos, it works on certain select apps but not others, you have to create an icloud.com email account for it to sync your mail and notes but not everything else. Oh, and it works on new iPhone and iPads and Macs running OS X v10.7.4 or later, but not your PC or Android tablet. Try explaining that to your mother.

Cognitive Simplicity Winners

So which products really nail cognitive simplicity? Here are a couple examples:

Shazam — An app that magically hears what song is playing and tells you what it is? Seems pretty complex, and what’s happening under the covers actually is. But Shazam does a phenomenal job keeping the user’s cognitive burden low. They force people to press a button to “start listening”, show real-time feedback that shows the app is hearing the sounds, and it buzzes when a result is found. Shazam could have made the flow faster or fewer taps, but it would come at the cost of cognitive simplicity.

Nintendo Wii –  In most ways, the Wii was far more complicated than its game console peers in 2006. It used accelerometers and IR blasters and detectors that required setup and calibration, and it was a departure from the mental model most people had for video games. But the payoff was a system with low cognitive overhead — you swing the controller to the left, and the little avatar on screen swings his racquet to the left. And voila, toddlers and grandparents alike suddenly became gamers.

Could Go Either Way?

Finally, a couple of my personal favorite daily-use products that could be argued either way. What do you think?

Dropbox –  I love Dropbox. All of my stuff is in my Dropbox; Dropbox is on all my devices; so all my stuff is on all my devices. Pretty cognitively simple. But there are certainly some potential cognitive hurdles, or, perhaps better put, cognitive activation energy required before reaching the low cognitive overhead state. Is Dropbox a folder on your desktop or a cloud-storage website? Oh and it’s a program to install on my computer too? When do things get backed up? Did it work?

Facebook –  Facebook started out with very low cognitive overhead — it was a digital version of the paper facebooks that already commanded high engagement and retention of college kids. Question: Has Facebook’s cognitive overhead increased or decreased as it has expanded to the mass market? What cognitive hurdles have arisen recently that weren’t present in the past? Should this worry Facebook?

How To make Cognitively Simple Products 

Make people work more, not less.

Put your user in the middle of your flow. Make them press an extra button, make them provide some inputs, let them be part of the service-providing, rather than a bystander to it. If they are part of the flow, they have a better vantage point to see what’s going on. Automation is great, but it’s a layer of cognitive complexity that should be used carefully. (Bump puts the user in the middle of the flow quite physically. While there were other ways to build a scalable solution without the physical bump, it’s very effective for helping people internalize exactly what’s going on.)

Give people real-time feedback.

If your user has to wonder, “So, did it work?”, you’ve failed. Walk people through using your product like a magician leads the audience through an illusion. Point out the steps along the way, or whatever magic your product is providing could be lost to the user.

Slow down your product.

We’ve all heard stories of Google’s relentless quest for search result speed, but sometimes you need to let your user understand and appreciate what your service is doing for them. Studies have shown that intentionally slowing down results on travel search websites can actually increase perceived user value — people realize and appreciate that the service is doing a lot of work searching all the different travel options on their behalf.

How To Know If You’ve Succeeded

Test on the young, old, …and drunk.

The very young and the very old are even more sensitive to cognitive overhead, as their brains aren’t accustomed to the sort of logical leaps our products sometimes require. Grandparents and children make great cognitive overhead detectors.

When you can’t find old or young people, drunk people are a good approximation. In fact, while building Bump 3.0, we literally took teams of designers and engineers to bars in San Francisco and Palo Alto and watched people use Bump, tweaking the product to accommodate.

Ask your users/customers to repeat what your product does and how it works.

Let people use your product, and then ask them to tell you what it does. They’ll think you are crazy for not knowing already, but what you hear can point to cognitive hurdles you’ve missed. One technique that scales that we use at Bump is to show a one question survey to a small fraction of users inside the app right after they are done bumping, asking “What is Bump for?” or “How do you use Bump?” The answers help us eliminate cognitive hurdles that remain.

There’s never been a time when cognitive simplicity matters more. As the mobile wave continues over the next 5 years, the world will see arguably the most rapid deployment of any new technology in our history. Products that are truly mass market will need to simultaneously target the Silicon Valley early adopter and the kid riding on the back of a motor scooter in Thailand. Which products will win, and which will lose? My money is on those that focus on cognitive simplicity.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“Distributing a desktop browser is hard and expensive (especially if you don’t have an operating system or the world’s most trafficked website to promote it)” says Rockmelt, so today it announced it will soon stop supporting its social browser. As consolation, existing users (and those with TechCrunch’s invite link) can access the private beta of its new site that ports its content feed apps to the web.

Rockmelt was founded in 2009 with an ambitious mission: to reimagine the web browser for the social era. As an alternative to bookmarks, the left and right edges of of the Google Chromium-based browser housed a buddy list of online friends to chat and share with, and a stack of icons for your favorite sites and social networks that displayed counters for how many times they’d be updated since your list visit. The idea was to relieve you of having to manually check your Facebook, Twitter, and bookmarked page for new content in an endless loop.

Losing The Browser War

Users who picked up Rockmelt had strong engagement with tons of clicks to these app edges each day. But it just couldn’t seem to make a dent in the marketshare of Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox. Meanwhile it was burning money trying. Luckily a formal product development partnership that some believed was a pre-cursor to an acquisition helped the startup raise a $30 million Series B from a A-list investors Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, and First Round Capital.

By October 2012 it only had 4 million registrations, and decided to refocus on a new concept, that content should be delivered to you rather than hunted for, and a new medium, mobile. It launched Rockmelt For iPad and later for iPhone, which fed social updates from friends and posts by sites you subscribe to into a Pinterest-style masonry grid of visual tiles. This apps harnessed the strengths of the small screen, offering a laid-back content browsing experience where you never have to type. While they didn’t rocket to the top of the charts, the team tells me they have hundreds of thousands of users that are highly engaged.

In the end, Rockmelt realized it had lost the browser war. While it knew gaining traction for a desktop browser would be tough, the team writes it didn’t foresee it would end up spending 50% of its development time on keeping Rockmelt up to date with the latest build of Chromium, the open source browser framework Rockmelt piggybacks on. So today it confessed “at some point in the next several months we will end-of-life the browser. Well before that point comes, we will give you plenty of notice and help you transition all your stuff like bookmarks.”

But The Mobile Battle Has Just Begun

Rockmelt refuses to die though. Ditching the browser was more like cutting off a gangrenous limb than suicide. Now it has a new mission “to help people navigate the web better”, co-founder and CTO Tim Howes tells me. He explains that at first the web was navigated through URLs, then portals, then search, until now where there’s “much more of a lean-back experience where our friends curate content for us.”

Rockmelt been championing that shift on mobile, but today it unveils a web version of its content feed apps. Howes explains that at first. You can watch a quick demo of the new Rockmelt.com private beta below, or use this special invite link for early access courtesy of TechCrunch.

Once you connect your social accounts, you’ll get a big grid of tiles displaying headlines and images for stories piped in from your Facebook and Twitter contacts plus Pages, accounts, and websites you follow. The endless visual stream is sleek and  snappy, as co-founder and CEO Eric Vishria says the site “pushes the limites of HTML5 and JavaScript”. Click one and it opens in a “web view” when possible — a quick-loading stripped down version of the destination site overlaid on Rockmelt.

The main feed is solid for reading all your favorite content in one place, but doesn’t help you expand your tastes. Luckily there are the Explore and Popular feed. Explore lets you choose from dozens of categories to see stories from a curated list of relevant publishes. So if you click Tech, you’ll see updates from TechCrunch, Wired, The Guardian’s tech section, and more without having to individually subscribe to them. Vishria describes the Popular feed as a “visual Reddit” where you can see the top stories as determined by engagement from Rockmelt users. There’s a Friends feed and search option to, and at any point you modify your set of subscriptions.

If you’re a news junkie or are constantly looking for entertainment/education/distraction, you might enjoy Rockmelt.com and its iOS apps. The mobile versions both got a big update today that’s supposed to make them twice as fast plus adds more color, @mentions, hashtagging, and a pictures feed.

The question is whether Rockmelt can uproot our web browsing behavior. Many people have entrenched patterns of clicking their bookmarks and scanning their dedicated social feeds. While Rockmelt might be a bit more efficient and visually appealing, it’s current direction might not be quite groundbreaking or viral enough to attract a large audience. It’ll need one so that when it eventually starts monetizing (I’m guessing through sponsored content tiles), it can make enough money to stay afloat and eventually pay back the $40 million it’s raised.

For now, though, it’s reassuring to see the startup admit failure in the browser market but persevere. And as we move into the tablet and smart TV era, turning the web into a laid-back channel to be watched could get people to finally sit up and take notice of Rockmelt.

Use TechCrunch’s invite link to check out Rockmelt.com, and download RockMelt for iPad or iPhone

Google recently killed a newly discovered feature called Google Now Topics, which apparently wasn’t quite ready for primetime. The feature appeared to be a useful, if perhaps a little creepy, means of revisiting your past web searches performed using Google Search through a visual, Google Now-like interface.

“Topics” was discovered over the weekend by the folks at the unofficial Google-watching blog, Google Operating System. When it worked, you could visit the URL “https://www.google.com/now/topics”; from your Android device in order to see a card-style user interface that displayed your past searches, broken down into various categories. Beneath a title and lead image, the text prompted you to “continue your research” and “explore now.”

Being a regular user of Google’s My Search History, I liked the idea that there was going to be an appealing, mobile-friendly format to delve into my past Googling. But it was a little shocking to see all of my search history laid out on one page like that, I have to admit. All at once, I had a visual image of just how much Google really knew about me.

But as I’ve long since traded my privacy for free services (Google’s and otherwise), I quickly found I could stomach the reveal.*

*Note, not my screenshots below. 

Unfortunately, just as quickly as Google Now Topcis appeared, it was gone. Soon after the blog post went up, the page began to 404. Requests for more information and a better explanation from Google have also gone unanswered.

We have to assume that Google was just kicking the tires of a yet-to-launch addition to the increasingly useful Google Now passive search functionality, which ships on phones running the latest version of Android.

Although today, Google Now is more focused on delivering you up-to-the-minute info, like flight delays, weather, traffic reports, restaurant reservations, birthdays, and more, it’s easy to imagine it morphing into a more fully fledged, “lean-back” search service that offers Topics as an alternative to typing on mobile phones’ small screens. Or maybe even more, given Google’s plans to bring Google Now to its Chrome web browser.

Yes, I’m really sorry that I didn’t take a screenshot of Google Now Topics myself (the one time I don’t!), but others did. All I can say is that I can confirm that this did work at one point, and hopefully it will again soon.

Image credits: Google Operating System; Oh and this googler, who didn’t get the memo that this was all hush hush. 

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It takes a lot to stand out at a trade show the size of Mobile World Congress. But here’s one device that caught my eye today: an e-ink smartphone. Unlike Yota Phone, the Russian startup that’s using e-ink as a second screen to augment the back of a powerful high end smartphone in a bid to stand out in the uber crowded Android space, this prototype device has just the one screen. A single e-ink screen on the front of the device — so it’s a true e-ink phone.

It’s also a true smartphone. There were two prototypes on show at Eink‘s stand, both with a 1GHz chip inside and one (the white one) with a 3G chip in it. The other had Edge connectivity. The phones run Android but, as you’d expect, the OS has been simplified with a custom UI that strips back the functionality to focus on the applications that make sense for a fully e-ink smartphone — such as a reader app, a dialer and email. The UI also includes a web browser since certain types of webpages can be viewed on an e-ink screen. It won’t support video of course but text-based sites can still be read.

The black prototype device (pictured below) also includes a backlight for reading in the dark. Both screens are capacitive, but as you’d expect with e-ink the refresh rate can be a little slow. Ghosting on the screen from past renders can be removed by shaking the device. The technology can support both portrait and landscape orientation so the e-ink smartphone could be turned on its side to switch the orientation to more of an e-reader sized width. Both devices felt incredibly lightweight.

Why do you want an only e-ink phone? Price for one thing. Battery life for another. Not to mention visibility in bright sunlight. Put all those factors together and this could be the perfect device for some emerging markets where electricity is at a premium. The prototypes are proof of concept at this point but Giovanni Mancini, director of product management for E-ink — the company which makes the screen — said the Chinese OEM which has made the prototypes, Fndroid, is talking to telcos and could launch a device this year.

So how much would this e-ink smartphone cost? Mancini said the device maker would set the price but in his view it would be comparable with a feature phone price tag. A big theme of this year’s MWC has been smaller mobile players — from open source OSes like Firefox that are seeking to drive openness and accessibility and drive down the cost of devices, to mobile veterans like Nokia focusing afresh on building smarter feature phones to target cost-conscious users in emerging markets. So it’s interesting to see companies toying with the idea of an entirely e-ink smartphone to cut device costs while preserving key smartphone functions such as access to the internet and email.

Click to view slideshow.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch