Websites are not applications (...usually)

One of the increasingly blurry lines in the online world is the concept of websites vs. applications. Since the rise of the iPhone and its app store (and the corresponding app markets for platforms such as Android and Blackberry), the word "app" has rapidly spread into the mainstream. This is largely a distinction of marketing -- an "app" is really no different from what we've previously called "programs," "software," or even "games." But it also has started to overlap with the definition of "website."

For example, think of something like Google or Facebook -- these are websites. But they can also function as applications -- tools that you use often. And indeed, both have released "apps" for platforms such as the iPhone. But whether you use them in "app" format or "website" format, they function pretty much the same. The primary difference, really, is that an app is catered to the particular device you are using (although, with browser detection capabilities, a website can cater itself to your device as well).

The problem with this increasing overlap is that a lot of companies are misunderstanding what it means to have an "app," and they don't think about why other companies even have (or need) apps in the first place. I suspect a lot of people see the "social media" revolution and the increasing dominance of smart phones, and think they need to get in on it -- Make an app! Integrate with social media! Create user profiles and personalize based on each individual person! It's a marketing mantra that seems sensible -- reach your customers where they are rather than forcing them to come to you. So if Google and Facebook are websites, and they have apps, if I have a website, I should have an app too, right?

Well, no, not necessarily.

The fact is, most websites are NOT social media hubs or tools. Most websites are standalone pieces that people may visit once in their whole lives, or perhaps once every few months or so at a maximum. You might visit a furniture website when shopping for a couch and never come back. Maybe you need an exterminator and find them online, and then you never need them again. Perhaps you're going on vacation and check out a spa online at your destination, which you might never visit again. These are websites that deliver value at the time you use them, but you're not going back again very often (if ever). You're not going to make that exterminator's website your home page. You're not going to download the spa's app. And you're probably not going to set up a personal profile at a furniture studio's website.

But what about your favorite pizza delivery place? Your bank? Your favorite local clothing store? You might visit all of those places often, and would benefit from apps, profiles, or other long-term connections. Here's a few questions to ask yourself before you start thinking you need to be investing in these alternate methods of customer connection.

1. Do you provide a service or sell things that people tend to purchase frequently -- and can they make those purchases online?
If yes, you might benefit from an online profile that lets customers save their payment info and other preferences. You might also consider a simple mobile phone app that does the same thing.

2. Is there a useful (free) tool that you could provide online or via an app that your customers would use often and find valuable?
If yes, then you might benefit from providing an app or online tool. For example, I worked on Tide's "Stain Brain" website and app -- it gives tips for removing small stains on the go, which keeps Tide in the customer's mindset without requiring them to pay anything to use the app.

3. Does your business interact with the community in a way that engages people in a non-customer role (e.g., you sponsor a charity event with participants who aren't necessarily customers)?
If yes, then you might benefit from branching out via a stronger social media presence -- people are happy to support a cause by posting about it on Facebook or sending messages on Twitter to ask their friends to donate or help, and your name gets out there in the process.

If you can't answer yes to any of the above questions, there's a good chance you may not be in need of apps, social media, and user profiles. Any of those avenues done wrong can actually harm your image -- a useless app ends up looking like little more than an ad taking up space on your phone, a Twitter feed that is never updated just looks like you don't care about your business, and adding a user profile for a site you may rarely visit just frustrates the visitor and may serve as more of a barrier than a convenience.

So while everyone is shouting about the next wave of "customer enablement," keep in mind that it's not just whether or not you have an "app" -- it's a matter of whether or not that app (or profile, or Facebook page, etc.) actually offers any value to your audience.

Predicting the future

Recently I've been reading or watching a few different older sci-fi works, and I'm particularly intrigued by how they believed the future would be, and how wrong they frequently were.

Paper
In Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (1968), there are numerous references to carbon papers and onionskins -- in fact I don't think there is any reference to anything resembling a modern computer with an interface. And yet in this same book, which is the inspiration for "Blade Runner," there are androids that are so nearly identical to humans as to require bone marrow samples to determine if they are human or real. He was able to envision a future with complicated thinking robots, but not a future in which something more permanent and flexible than paper existed. (Obviously paper is still used, but could you imagine if the entire record of a criminal only existed on a photocopy somewhere, and not digitally stored?)

Televisions
Watching "Aliens" (1986) and the later, rarely remembered TV series "Earth 2" (1994-95), I am struck by how they both failed to foresee the death of the old cathode-ray monitor. Thin LCD and plasma screens have already well outpaced old-school TVs, and new OLED screens are so thin as to be pliable. It's also interesting to see how whenever "static" or a weak signal is depicted, it is shown through the screen turning fuzzy or lines running across the screen, as one might experience with a weak antenna. Well, as anyone with digital cable or even online video watchers may know, when you get a crappy video, you see pixellation and possibly missed frames.

Gadgetry
Whether it's the phone in "Aliens" (dialing via sticking a plastic card into a slot) or the VR "gear" in "Earth 2" (a bulky headset with awkwardly swinging eyepieces), a lot of sci-fi failed to predict things like Bluetooth (which is little more than an earbud) or even simple speed-dialing. And interestingly, nearly every piece of sci-fi seems to have thought that video-phones would be the way of the future. Well, the technology has been around for quite some time, and it just never took off. Why? Because we multitask, and if we're talking on the phone, there really is no need to also see the person. We might be doing the dishes or driving or doing some other task. We just don't really need or want that most of the time.

So what are we getting wrong now?
There are undoubtedly a number of things that will begin to look foolishly short-sighted in our current predictions of the future. I think of the standard keyboard and wonder if that will die -- will we continue typing this way at all? Will "typing" even exist as communication? I'm willing to bet that we'll soon be seeing more and more examples of mind-controlled interfaces. I'm not talking anything magic here, but just complicated systems of interpreting electrical impulses in the brain. This may not be any time soon, but when you set something far in the future, it's worth considering.

There's also something I've been reading about lately -- devices that are essentially real "transformers" -- objects that can become other objects. Essentially a collection of "nano-machines" that can rebuild themselves based on the user's need. I don't know the limitations of this, but it wouldn't surprise me to start seeing self-reconstructing devices within the next 20 years.

But, hey, in the 1960s they all thought we'd be taking rockets to the moon for vacation by now. And boy were they wrong.

So I got an iPhone

I'm not really a gadget-head. As a diehard skeptic of, well, everything, I typically meet any new gadget with the question "why would I need this?" And usually there is no compelling reason.

But after spending months with a phone that repeatedly shut itself off upwards of ten times a day, sometimes mid-phone call, I was ready to switch, and decided to just go ahead and plunk down the dollars for an iPhone. I'm so happy I did.

I knew that it would combine my phone and MP3 player into one device, which I liked. I also knew it'd allow a few more things, namely web browsing. But I didn't realize the extent to which its app store would make the device an all-in-one EVERYTHING. I can play video games, control my desktop from the phone, update my Facebook status, listen to radio stations... it's pretty cool. (I should note, for the record, that lest this read like an Apple ad I am sure that similar smartphones like the G1 and Blackberry Storm are capable of doing many of these things as well.)

But as I was browsing reviews for good apps and downloading them on my laptop, it struck me as odd that I still have to actually attach a wire from the laptop to the iPhone. A minor problem, really, but it got me thinking about the future of computing and the whole concept of syncing. We are moving further and further away from a hard-coded "this machine does this" mindset to a software-driven wireless world where you can do anything from anywhere from any machine. We've already moved past some of the typical physical limitations of the world -- I haven't bought a CD in 2 years for example, yet have bought tons of music. Virtually every piece of software people get these days no longer requires a box with a disc in it, and can be just downloaded online. And as hardware limitations decrease to the point where, in all likelihood, we are just a few years away from pretty much every new computer can do pretty much everything, the actual machines we're on may reach a point of irrelevance as well. Imagine going up to any computer anywhere, logging in with some password, and having all of the same data and programs available to you anywhere. Services like this already exist, but this is by no means universal.

We're going to just all have our own "clouds" at some point soon. An amalgamam of files, programs, software, data, etc. that requires no physical anything except for the data storage facilities of the providers.

Not to get all sci-fi on you, but this basically means there will be two versions of any of us. The physical being, and the data identity. Some people find that scary, I find it fascinating.

And to me the most interesting part of all of this is that it happens so quickly and seamlessly. Just imagine ten years ago, the whole concept of your whole world reachable by one device in your pocket was probably hard to fathom. But it has happened, and is getting more dramatically omnipresent every day.

Which is just. So. Cool.

Desiging for iPhones

At my last job, for quite some time the place was abuzz with the word "mobile." Mobile apps, mobile this, mobile that. Every client wanted to have some sort of mobile aspect to their sites, and they threw the word out often with little regard for how mobile would be used and whether their visitors even had any need or desire for it.

Somewhat oddly, this seemed to have largely been triggered by the launch of the iPhone, which doesn't actually require any special "mobile" version -- it can access sites just as any computer can. Some folks internally thought that, as things continued moving in a "computer in the palm of your hand" direction, the distinction between mobile and desktop versions of sites would become a moot point.

But a year after the iPhone launched I think it's clear that you can't just plan for the iPhone version of the site to be the same. I don't own an iPhone myself, but I remember using a friend's iPhone last summer to check my Gmail. The process was clunky, and although Google tends to have fairly lightweight sites, it still was rather slow, probably due to the AJAX going on. Recently I borrowed a friend's iPhone and realized that Google had created an iPhone-specific version of Gmail, which showed a marked improvement. I've seen other sites create iPhone versions with far less success -- Fandango tries to get it right, but their decision to spread showtimes for a single movie theater over multiple pages, rather than just keeping them on one scrollable page, was a serious misstep ("scroll fear" really needs to be ditched completely) -- it made me have to memorize showtimes from one page to the next if I wanted to compare multiple movies, and slowed things down by requiring the iPhone to load multiple pages.

All this got me wondering about what sites are worth making iPhone versions available? What sites are users most likely to visit when a regular computer is not available? A few things come to mind -- email, maps, movie times, cafes and restaurants -- the sorts of things where you might want to get a little information about a place while you are out and about.

I don't have any statistics to back those things up -- they are based on guesses and about the kinds of things I think people might want to find when not near a computer. But I think it's important that whenever a company is looking at their own website that they think strategically about what their iPhone users might need. Do they really need an alternate version of the site? Can you design your site in such a way so that it works without needing separate versions for the iPhone? Are there particular tools that iPhone users may be more apt to use (i.e., a Starbucks.com iPhone visitor may need a store locator but not care at all about company info)? And since, to my knowledge, iPhones still do not support Flash, are you making sure to have your site available in a non-Flash version?

I'll be curious to see how sites evolve as the iPhone age soldiers on, and if the upcoming 3G iPhone will have any design ramifications. It is key, however, to remember to view any new web aspect -- whether it is iPhones or social networking or RSS feeds -- in light of your particular company's needs. A poorly executed (or unnecessary) implementation of features often do far more harm than leaving those features out and waiting until there is a clear need for them.