It’s not about perception or idealism, it’s about customers

Posted in design, mobile on February 9th, 2012 by Jeff Bacon – Be the first to comment

If you’re choosing which mobile platforms and devices to support based on what you think is “cool” or what devices are used in your office, you’ve taken the first step down the path of failure for your mobile project. But you can take comfort in that fact that the support group for people who have taken the wrong path on their mobile projects, is well attended. Whether you’re building the “next big thing” or extending your successful business into mobile, the most important consideration is not what device you have, or what the cost is, it’s what devices your customers have. Spending less money on the wrong mobile platform is not the way to have success.

To choose the right mobile platform for your app or service, you first have to ask some tough questions:

Who will be using it? Who are your target customers in the mobile space — and are they different from your non-mobile customers?

If you have an existing service or retail business you are adding mobile to, then you should have a good idea of who your current customers are. It’s then important to cross-reference that set of profiles with the profiles of mobile users — and of mobile users on different platforms. iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and other mobile users don’t all have the same demographic profiles. If you are trying to retain your existing customers whiel they are mobile, you need to pick a platform that matches your current demographics. If, on the other hand, you are looking to expand your existing customer base, or create a new one, it’s best to decide on a few customer profiles of people you’d like to target and then match that against the profiels of people using the different mobile devices. Don’t forget that the mobiel platforms vary geographically in their marketshare and customer base so make sure you’re looking at mobile users in the market you want to target.

How will people be finding out about your mobile product? And what’s the best way to maximise that discoverability?

Throwing an app up on iTunes and hoping people will find it is a receipe for failure. Getting your app visible in front of a lot of people is one of THE critical considerations for the success of your product. If all your marketing is about digitial, then maybe review sites are a good place to look for visibility. If you’re focusing on local markets, then local media or retail signage might be a good plan. There’s no “one right way” to market your mobile product or service, there’s a variety of tactics that may or may not apply and picking the right ones is important. Don’t discount the need to have some of that work take place within the application itself which must be decided upon during the design phase of your mobile app not when it’s ready for release.

When will your customers be using your mobile product?

On the go? While sitting at home? While at work? Many people have multiple mobile devices these days and use them for different purposes. Maybe that business professional has a BlackBerry they use during the day and an iPad they use at home at night. Knowing when someone is expected to use your product will help scope in or out some platforms that may or may not make sense.

Having a million random people see your app is far less valuable than having the right 100,000 people see it. If you can target the right mobile platforms fromt he start, you can increase the chances of getting right to your target customers from day 1, and keep your costs of development managable.

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A Sideways Glance: Playbrains has a new take on a platformer

Posted in bitHeads, Playbrains on January 16th, 2012 by Jeff Bacon – Be the first to comment

[Republished from the World Gaming Executives Magazine Issue #2]

Playbrains’ innovative new platformer ‘Sideways: New York’ has won rave reviews since being released in October.On a normal day, strolling across the rooftops of New york City, graffiti artist Nox notices that someone has tagged over one of his pieces. When going in for a closer look, Nox gets sucked into a vortex and enters into the unique realm of Sideway. So begins your great adventure in Playbrains’ new Playstation 3 game ‘Sideway: New York’.

Disclaimer: Playbrains is a subsidiary of bitHeads

Launched on October 11th to critical acclaim, and live on Steam now, Sideway takes you on a unique adventure merging a 2D platformer experience into a 3D world. Trapped on the walls in paint form, Nox must navigate through a world that brings a new perspective around each corner. There were over 25 people involved in the production of Sideway and Jeff Bacon for WGE:MAG’s sat down with a few key members of the Playbrains team to talk about their experiences working on this unique title.

Where did the concept of navigating a 3D world in a 2D platformer come from?

Adam Pilkington (Content Lead): The core concept came from our friends at Fuel Industries, and it was our job to immediately identify what’s cool and unique about the concept and present this to the player as soon and as often as possible. We wanted to hit the player with our visual hook immediately, within seconds of starting the first level, the player wraps his character around a corner and enters our world. Within a minute or two, he’s introduced to the rooftop mechanics, and how orientation affects gravity. The goal was to set the tone early, to show the player that we can do things most other games can’t.

“While at its core, Sideway is a platformer, we challenge players to think about 2D and 3D space at once and to take advantage of limits in one space to achieve progress inthe other.” – John Harley, Game Designer

John Harley (Senior Game Designer): “When Fuel approached us with the character and concept i was really excited. in modern development there are too many pressures to reduce risk which flatten creativity to standard formulas. The opportunity to twist the norms and challenge the player’s sense of space and gravity was instantly obvious. Nevertheless we invested a solid chunk of time in preproduction into discovering how much puzzle and combat we would be able to mix into the parkour platformer Sideway came to be.

Wrapping gameplay around walls and rooftops gave us a lot of room to explore different game styles, but we really wanted to challenge the player with kinetic feel. While at its core, Sideway is a platformer, we challenge players to think about 2D and 3D space at once and to take advantage of limits in one space to achieve progress in the other.”

How have the previous games you’ve developedinfluenced Sideway?

AP: On ‘Madballs in Babo: Invasion’ I learned the value of gameplay rhythm; it’s important to give the player time to breathe between the key situations of a level, whether it be encountering an enemy or finding a new power. The moments in between are just as important as the marquee events, and the former can be leveraged to add more impact to the latter. Hopefully Sideway’s level design reflects this.

“If we were to repeat the project, I would spend more time upfront, analyzing the capabilities of the 3rd party engine, and giving level designers and artists better parameters within which to work.” – Preston Jennings, Producer

JH: In our last console title, we went a little overboard with design and depth; for example having multiple experience bars for every character and weapon in the game. in Sideway, we were more judicious about where to spend time enriching features so that we could spend more time on the features that everyone sees – Sideway powers are unlocked with pickups instead of using a currency system. Another example would be co-op support; in the previous game we supported 4 players over the network, whereas in Sideway it’s been tightened to 2 players and same screen only. This let us apply a lot more dev time to the single player experience, and it shows.

Preston Jennings (Producer): Sideway uses a large assortment of 2D graphics to display anything from signs posted on the wall to fully animated 2D characters moving around the world. To do this effectively, we employed an art pipeline that had been established on a previous iPhone gaming project, ‘Zoo Toss’. The art team would create their 2D assets in Flash and through careful use of metadata tags, the animation frames would be exported and packaged using our custom built tool. We also chose to use Scaleform for the Ui system, this was because in ‘Madballs in Babo: invasion’, we had created the entire Ui system from scratch. Ui screens would tie up a developer for quite a bit of time and often the art team would require changes to get the sort of pixel precision they needed in the game. Using Scaleform for Sideway helped us to speed up some of this process and the pipeline from source art to in-game screens became more accurate.

What’s the biggest change you would make to the game if you had to do it all over again?

AP: With Sideway’s unique hook, it took the level design team a little while to get the hang of the mechanics and find ways to employ them; given a second chance, I think we could explore the 2D/3D relationship even further.

PJ: Near the end of the project, we spent quite a bit of time optimizing the frame rate of the game. Unfortunately at this point the levels had been mostly completed and so the development team was left with finding creative ways to squeeze out as much performance as possible. if we were to repeat the project, I would spend more time upfront, analyzing the capabilities of the 3rd party engine, and giving level designers and artists better parameters within which to work.

How has the game been received?

Paul Winterhalder (Executive Producer): It’s been awesome! From the first reveal at Comic Con and all the reviews since, it’s been amazing to hear all the great feedback from people. I especially like that we often hear from people that they were walking by the display at Comic Con and the art style really caught their eye. Once they played it, they just had a blast and their expectations for a typical 2D platformer were turned on their heads as they explored the game. One editor at IGN called it a “hip-hop Mario game” which is a great, quirky, description. The whole team here is really proud of what we’ve accomplished and looking forward to our next big project… after a well deserved vacation of course.

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Mobile Multitasking is all about Planning and Design

Posted in design, mobile on December 5th, 2011 by Jeff Bacon – Be the first to comment

When building a mobile application, there are many considerations that either don’t apply, or work quite differently than on a PC. One of those is how multitasking (or the mobile equivalent) is handled.

From the perspective of a designer, multitasking in its current form has been around on PCs “forever” — which means at least long enough for everyone to have a common understanding of what it means to multi-task on a PC. When you say “multitasking” to a PC person, the general concept envisioned is having many applications running that are either minimized or sharing screen space. It’s easy to switch back and forth (alt+tab on windows) between them and they are all running all the time so each is instantly available as soon as you switch back to it. This works well and is practical because of a number of key factors that separate PCs from mobile devices:

1) Large Screens – PCs have always had large enough screens such that it has been practical for multiple applications to be shown on-screen at the same time. Half (or less) of the average PC screen is plenty of space for most applications to display their content comfortably, leaving lots of room for other applications to run in the periphery.

2) Lots of Memory – the average PC today has more runtime memory (RAM) than the entire storage space available on the typical smartphone had until the last couple of years — and even then it was mostly the iPhone shipping with a small hard drive inside, other mobile phones didn’t tend to have the same available space. More memory allows more applications to keep their data available in real-time.

3) Power – when active, each running application is using a little bit of the CPU. Since mobile processors are much more limited in their performance than their desktop counterparts, less applications can share the CPU and run effectively. Power also refers to electrical power. For years smartphones COULD have included super fast and super powerful processors which would make multitasking a breeze… but you’d end up having to keep your device plugged in due to the battery technology not keeping up (kinda takes the ‘mobile’ part of mobile phone away).

4) Real-time reactions - most people would not be happy if their mobile phone periodically, and silently went into a state where the phone application could not be loaded in time to take a phone call and therefore they missed the call. Traditionally, PCs have not had these real-time responsibilities. We’ve all experienced our PC suddenly start chugging away on something and be unresponsive for a period of time. If our phones do this, we miss calls. The primary responsibility of mobile phones has always been to make and receive calls and the entire phone architecture is built around making sure that ability is not compromised — at the expense of decreased multitasking abilities.

Each mobile platform has taken a different approach to supporting multitasking capabilities and it’s important to understand how each impacts your application’s functions and how a user’s behaviour and expectations on each platform also alter how you are designing your mobile application. read more »

Should You Need a License to Use a QR Code?

Posted in design, mobile on November 29th, 2011 by Jeff Bacon – Be the first to comment

How much time does it take to use a QR Code? See and recognise the QR Code (1-2s), pull out your phone (2-4s), unlock your phone (2-3s), find the camera app (2-3s), launch the camera (4-7s), line up the QR Code (2s), decode the data (1s), launch the service based on the data in the QR Code (3-5s), consume the content. That’s 15-25 seconds. Sounds like not much but sit there looking at your watch/clock for 25 seconds. That feels like a long wait. After waiting for that long, what value do you want from the QR Code? How many times will you give up that 25 seconds in the store for something useless before you simply stop bothering to scan QR Codes. Bad value for time spent could kill QR Codes before they take off — or worse, just after they take off and everyone’s already invested in them.

Essentially, a QR Code is a glorified bar code. You can see one on left there with the bitHeads’ logo in the center. If you scan it with your QR Code reader, it will take you back to our website. I’m breaking my own rule here as that’s not a very useful application for the QR Code. In time, I will have that code show up on the mobile view of the site so if you are reading the article on your mobile device and someone beside you wants to see it they can just scan the code on your phone’s screen and their browser will launch them directly to the article. That’s mildly useful as you don’t have to share any of your personal information with the other person and they can still get the link to my article.

Currently, you see QR Codes used in advertising. Often the scan of the code directs you to a website for the product you are looking for. BlackBerry App World generates QR Codes for directly launching the BlackBerry App World application to that product’s page if you scan it with a BlackBerry. Developers and publishers can use this code on their advertisement to make it easy for potential customers to directly link into the App World product catalogue rather than having to manually search.

You’re starting to see some movie or TV ads that use the QR Codes and link to trailers or clips of the show. That’s probably a worthwhile use for the codes as the user gets additional content they can see on their mobile even after leaving the ad behind (i.e. at a subway station or bus stop).

These are fairly useful uses of QR Codes but there are some examples that are not. There’s a great and humorous blog post here that talks about a case of not thinking things through when using QR Codes. In that example, scanning a code on a piece of clothing at a store linked to a video clip related to the clothing. Is that really useful information? Or is that the most useful information that you could get via a QR Code scan? What about linking to a page that identifies other similar clothing sold at the store or clothing that matches what you’re holding. “Check out this shirt that matches those pants.” That’s useful information.

When marketers are looking to incorporate new ideas and especially when they tie into leveraging the mobile device most people are carrying around, I’m fully supportive — in fact I strongly encourage it. But if QR Codes are used in ways that don’t provide value for consumers, they can easily get a bad rap as useless. This harms everyone that wants to make good use of QR Codes and could kill them before they even get a chance to take off.

(article re-published from BaconOnTheGo.com with permission)

Mobile Software isn’t Designed on Paper

Posted in design, mobile on November 25th, 2011 by Jeff Bacon – Be the first to comment

Traditional software design process, at least using the waterfall methodology, involves a lot of up-front requirements gathering, collecting these requirements together to create a workflow, adding a user interface that makes sense and putting it all together in a structured design document. The result is that developers can reasonably estimate the time it will take to produce the software from the fixed requirements, budgets can be pretty stable, and time frames are reasonable to hit. When it comes to mobile software, a number of problems creep into this process.

1. Mobile software isn’t designed for one platform, but many. Usually targeting only one is not a recipe for success. Even iOS is not really one platform as there’s significant differences between the capabilities and expected user experience on an iPhone 3GS and an iPad 2 or iPhone 4S. Each mobile platform has peculiarities and caveats which are difficult to fully capture in a long requirements list.

2. You can’t design a truly accurate mobile interface for all platforms in Photoshop. Ok, so what I really mean is you can’t do that cost-effectively. For simple apps, sure, but the UI is more difficult for complex applications and when you need to cross platforms and show multiple screen sizes… well, it can be done but all that time and money you spend worrying about having accurate mockups could be invested in actually producing the software UI (given a basic framework being designed) and then making tweaks.

3. You can’t replicate the experience of using mobile software in a simulator. Sure, the developers can code and testers can test in the simulators, but ultimately you need to try it out on the mobile devices you are targeting to get a true feel for how the interface behaves. Experience will allow you to get closer to what you know works and doesn’t with less iterations, but until the app is actually running and in people’s hands, there’s a good chance things will need to be tweaked. read more »

Nokia and RIM are getting similar bad press, but the realities are much, much different.

Posted in BlackBerry, mobile on August 9th, 2011 by Jeff Bacon – Be the first to comment

Nokia and RIM are both undergoing radical transitions that will change the core technology they have been built on for years — Nokia to Windows Phone 7 and RIM to QNX. The end goal for both companies is to have a modern, robust and attractive platform that will carry them through the next decade of mobile innovation. While their end goals are similar, and the bad press keeps piling on, the path to salvation for each is radically different.

When Stephen Elop took over at Nokia, people figured there’d be change. He was a new type of leader for the company and one with strong ties to an industry giant: Microsoft. When he announced Nokia’s intention to move to Windows Phone 7 as its primary operating system on phones, he did so by going “cold turkey” on Symbian, Meego and any other operating system Nokia may have been working with. He essentially said “we’re moving to Windows Phone 7… now. So get on-board”. It’s commendable to be so definitive and not leave any possible shadow of a doubt that this was the plan and that if you were planning on working with Nokia past 2012, you better be working with Windows Phone 7. The impact was, well, impressive. I’m not sure any other statement or direction change has pissed off so many partners of one company… ever. Resellers felt betrayed and carriers were annoyed that Nokia was saying to them that for the next year, they should be peddling phones that even Nokia was saying were shortly to be out of date and not supported by the company. The resulting (effective) boycott of Nokia phones from prominent marketing positions at carriers and resellers tanked Nokia’s marketshare about as fast as Nokia closing up shop would have.

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How to Leverage Mobile for Customer Engagement: Part 2: Location Based Services

Posted in design, mobile on July 28th, 2011 by Jeff Bacon – Be the first to comment

Many business could take advantage (or better advantage) of Location Based Services (LBS) by understanding how location is or is not relevant to a customer in the context of the nature of the business with the customer. Some businesses just aren’t that suited for direct use of a person’s location in a way that adds obvious value, others should be leveraging it to the max but may not understand how or why.

To start, a brief review (in my words) of some of the facets of LBS and then we’ll delve into how and when these can apply to some business examples.

Wikipedia defines Location Based Services (LBS) as:

an information or entertainment service, accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the geographical position of the mobile device

I would say that’s actually a fairly narrow view of LBS. I will define a LBS as:

any service or activity that utilizes the geographical position of a person to generate or alter the service’s interactions with that person

The massive benefit of leveraging a mobile device with LBS is that the device itself can (usually) contribute the location of the person without the person having to do so manually. When you remove a manual step from a process, generally the usage of that process increases — such is the case with location discoverability and LBS.

When a service uses a person’s location, there’s a decision to be made about the scope of the person’s location that is relevant. Think about if I called you on the phone right now and asked you: “Where are you?”. What would you answer? Would you say ‘home’ or ‘work’ or ‘in my car’ or ‘Ottawa, Canada, North America’ (where I happen to be right now)? When you’re thinking about leveraging LBS for your business, you need to think about what scope of an answer you need from a person to add the value to your service/business to meet your primary goals and what kind of answer you would like from a person to add accessory value or meet secondary goals.

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How to Leverage Mobile for Customer Engagement: Part 1: Check-Ins

Posted in design, mobile on July 24th, 2011 by Jeff Bacon – Be the first to comment

So you’ve got a business, a successful business, but you are always looking for ways to stand out amongst your competitors. Traditionally, your marketing department runs the standard stuff (TV ads, mails out coupons, limited time sales, seasonal promotions, etc.) but you’re hearing all about mobile these days and wondering if and how mobile can help your business. Maybe your marketing team has a ‘mobile website’ (which someone defined as a site that can be viewed on an iPhone — which pretty much all sites can) but hasn’t really seen and effect from it, maybe you even have an app that lets your customers find your closest store or you have a Twitter account with a few thousand followers. Your marketing team thinks they are getting on the mobile bandwagon but does anyone there really understand WHY you should be on the mobile bandwagon and HOW to use mobile to enhance your business? Or are they just checking off buzz-words because everyone else is and thinking they are adding value.

It’s not easy to determine how different mobile and social services can fit into your business and how that can maybe even revolutionize how you communicate with customers but there are a few things you can look at to help decide what aspects of this new world you need to move on — before your competition does. read more »

Mobile isn’t a gold mine, it requires work and planning

Posted in mobile on June 15th, 2011 by Jeff Bacon – 1 Comment

Vision Mobile’s Developer Economics report is very revealing. Amongst the interesting information in it, is a section on developers’ preconceived notions about their expected revenues in mobile. Not surprising to those of us who have shipped many mobile products, most developers are not jumping for joy over the revenues they’ve made on their mobile apps. In fact, more than many are quite disappointed. Is that a function of bad apps, or unrealistic expectations? read more »

Is Amazon the dark horse of mobile?

Posted in mobile on June 13th, 2011 by Jeff Bacon – 1 Comment

The first large, successful computer companies were hardware manufacturers. IBM, DEC, HP, Apple, etc. It was a new field and the pace of technological change — and the differences between one hardware generation and another — were substantial enough that just upgrading the computer’s hardware gave people significant new functionality and features. Over time, the practical differences in the generations of new hardware decreased to the point where many people didn’t get the extra functionality in a single hardware generation — they got it by updating to the newest version of their software packages. Ultimately that’s where the largest tech companies have generated the greatest profits, and why Amazon might be able to slip in the back-door of mobile and usurp the incumbent giants of the industry. read more »

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