UICraft: Why Facebook’s New ‘Stickers’ is Stupid Yet ‘Sticky’

Following Path’s step, Facebook recently introduced a sticker feature in their messaging experience. Stickers are a glorified version of ‘emojis’ which user can send to their friend while chatting to express emotions. It usually comes with a package of different expressions/emotions. All Facebook’s current stickers are free to download, but the ‘Free’ tag could very quickly become ‘$0.99′ like most Path stickers do.

 

Image via:　phandroid.com

Stickers are no new creation by Facebook at all. A bunch of Asian messaging apps and services have already embraced it for some time. This whole ‘cuteness’ thing might seem silly, yet before you shout ‘stupid and cheesy!’, let’s not forget all the ‘stupid’ videos that got millions visits on YouTube. There is something behind all these ‘stupid yet popular’ fads. Most of them share one treats: They play very well to your emotion. And emotion, my friend, is usually our weakness. That is what’s behind all these impulse purchasing, all these ‘my brain tries to say no but my body screams YES’ moments, all those ‘this is so stupid but I just can’t stop laughing’ videos.

This is also why some  apps are successful in creating attractive experience. Enter ‘Clear‘, the highly successful to-do app with flat and simple visual but powerful physics and interactions. By swiping the item right, user can mark complete the task. Swiping left is delete the task, pinch open to add an item and pinch close to fold the current task list. It might sound simple, yet it’s physics is so great that when you are doing all these simple operations, you feel like you are manipulate a real object, you are throwing the completed task away like throwing your empty can of Coke to the dump. It relates to your feelings and emotions.

I still remember when the first time Apple released iPhone and introduced multi-touch, people are instantly amazed by the interactions without rationally knows why. Like Steve Jobs once put it in his keynote when demonstrating a multi-touch feature :” I can play this all day!’. As human-beings, we are sophisticated, we use our brains, we developed science. But most of the times, we aren’t that smarter when it comes to our emotion. We fall in love, get hurt, heal through it, and do it again. That just how emotion works. It is sticky and always comes back. No wonder after Path first announced their Stickers and In-app shop, they said the first week it brings in more money than all the money the company has ever earned before. No wonder Facebook is following suit.

Related articles

• Facebook’s iOS Messenger app gets all sticky (soshitech.com)

People Are Walking Away from Theaters and It’s OK

Image Source: mamadrama.com

Less and less people go to theaters nowadays. Ticket price is hiking so do the gas price. More ‘long tail’ contents like PSY’s ‘Gungnam Style’ are pulling people’s attention here and there. What I observed is a role shift of the theater from ‘main-stream-cheap-no-brainer’ choice of weekend entertainment to upscale-expensive-optimized-experience once several months. Why? Because cheaper substitutes emerge, with Netflix, Hulu, etc. on the service side and smartphone, tablet, smart TV, LTE on the hardware side. And content is shifting from a mass market dominating ‘hit economy’ to a more commoditized ‘long tail economy’, leading by the prevalence of Youtube, Vimeo, and thousands of user created contents.

Old business case needs  retooling and new models need to be invented.

Forgive me if I’m being too dramatic on this, but like Charles Dickens put it:

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’.

Long Time Coming : Netflix dump Microsoft’s Silverlight for HTML5

Due to Microsoft Silverlight’s lack of support in the future, Netflix is moving their platform to HTML5.

Stick to an out-dated, poorly supported and proprietary plug-in isn’t the way to gain edge on competition.  Netflix has been making great progress on creating its own exclusive contents like House of Cards. They are right on their way to the goal of ‘becoming HBO sooner than HBO become us.’ This move away from Silverlight to the more mobile-friendly HTML5 shows that they haven’t forgotten their technical origin during the transition. 

I look forward to any UI/UX innovation they would bring to us with the introduction of HTML5. 

Thoughts On Recent Attack on Apple from China State-Run Newspaper

Recently, Apple got attacked by Chinese government owned media a lot. Here’s my perspectives:

Firstly, Chinese consumers pretty much know the governmental media’s true color and that their claim against Apple is all lying or twisted. The recent scandal ’820 Event’ speaks it all. (more details here: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/03/16/apple-weibo-china-cctv/)

Secondly, government itself also knows what they are saying is bullshit. A lot of government officers, their children, family members use iPhone and they won’t use it if the service is bad. They just has an agenda and a marching order.

Lastly, over time, Chinese netizens have already developed a habit of interpreting whatever government media claims reversely. If the media claim someone is bad, then that someone must be actually good! So all the ‘attacks’ in effect are good PR for Apple.
Read more at http://macdailynews.com/2013/03/26/china-slams-apples-empty-and-self-praising-response-to-warranty-complaints/#gWutMWgbWaC3ohvh.99

Related articles

• Chinese frown upon media attack on Apple (worlditnews24.wordpress.com)

T-Mobile’s Recent ‘Un-carrier’ Move: Pretty PR to Cover ‘Cheap Prepaid’ Label?

Recently, T-Mobile made a lot of noises on their ‘Un-carrier’ campaign. You can do the math yourself, but after some thorough calculations, the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) is not so different from other domestic carrier’s offerings. Yes it’s cheaper, but not 1 and 10 cheaper, more of a 8 and 10 cheaper. But why would T-Mobile bother to make a big deal of this ‘un-carrier’ thing instead of promoting the ‘cheaper’ part of their new plans? In my opinion, it’s a smart and subtle PR play to promoting ‘cheap’ without damaging their image. The carefully planned campaign serves three purposes:

1. Hiding the ‘Cheap Prepaid’ Label

T-Mobile recently merged with MetroPCS, which is a sizable prepaid carrier. T-Mobile itself bet pretty heavily on prepaid too. Acquiring MetroPCS will definitely strengthen the prepaid part of their business, even pushing their entire business to that direction. BUT, and this is a big ‘but’, T-Mobile will NEVER allow themselves to be labeled as ‘cheap prepaid carrier’. Call it pride , call it denial, they want to remain their ‘top-tier’ image at all cost, even when their entire business is slipping deeper and deeper into the ‘prepaid’ zone. By demanding other top-tier carriers to ‘stop the bullshit’, they picture themselves as the savior, offering a way out of others’ ‘contract tyranny’. They are not being cheap, they are actually freeing the end users from the ‘2 years contract’ shackle and charge less doing so! All the public attention will be on whether the 2 years contact is a good thing or a rip-off, instead of whether T-Mobile is finally go ‘prepaid’. Smart move!

2. Severing ‘cheap’ label from ‘Prepaid Model’ and rebrand it as ‘Freedom for User’.

Everybody knows it, nobody wants to admit it. In US cellphone market, ‘prepaid’ equals ‘cheap’. It suggest inferior service, fewer choices on high-end smartphones, and bottom feeder ‘dirt-cheap’ handsets. The thing is, this is only the case within US market. In Europe where T-Mobile’s mother company is, and most of the Asian countries, prepaid model is the main stream, comes with the best quality service package and top-of-the-line smartphones.  If T-Mobile could change people’s perspective on prepaid and stop them from thinking ‘prepaid’ as the synonyms of ‘cheap’, it could fundamentally change how the carrier game is played in US market, and T-Mobile is the best positioned to play the new game. It’s a long shot, but it’s also a big shot.

3. ‘Financing you Phone’ avoid upfront big payment, yet leverage people’s purchasing habit.

For those people buying a new iPhone 5 and don’t want to pay the full price upfront, T-Mobile offered a 2 years financing plan that user can get the phone with $99 down payment a $20 monthly charge. It might sounds like the same ‘2 year contact’ with what other carriers is offering, but there is a big difference. The bank not the carrier  is offering the financing plan with credit check, which users in US has long developed trust with. People feel way more comfortable getting into a loan situation with banks than carriers. Comparing to a 20 years $1000/month home mortgage, a $20/month 2 year one is hardly a thing! By offering the financing plan, T-Mobile avoids the downside of big ‘day one investment’ for prepaid model, but still remains in safe distance with the ‘2 years contract’ model which they so fiercely claiming against.

Summary

I have to say this is very well-played by T-Mobile’s PR team. How well or how fast people could accept the ‘prepaid’ model as the new main stream remains to be seen, but it’s good to see one of the top-tier carriers making a strong first step to this direction.

Related articles

• The tether in T-Mobile’s no-contract plans (marketwatch.com)
• Prepaid or postpaid?: The fight for your cell phone dollars (Smartphones Unlocked) (newspaperfree.wordpress.com)

Apple Adopting Flat Design? Yes, Please !

 

There’s report that Apple’s legendary design master Jonathan Ive is leading Apple’s iOS user interface toward another direction: ‘flat design’.

This is really long time coming!  It’s about time we get some fresh air on iOS UI. And Apple shouldn’t let Microsoft steal all the thunder with Metro UI. I just can’t wait to see Apple’s interpretation of flat design!

 

Related articles

 

• Jony Ive Pushing for ‘Flat Design’ in iOS 7 Amid Greater Hardware-Software Design Collaboration (macrumors.com)

 

Some thoughts on Google Keep

Google announced the new note-taking service Google Keep today. 

I gave the web version a try. The UI looks very minimalism, using it is easy too. There aren’t many features to begin with though. It looks like just a lite, new service Google want to put on their cloud. Google didn’t mention whether they have bigger vision on the service, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

Some thoughts from a product design point of view:

1. Don’t have an ecosystem.  Take Evernote as an example, they have Chrome extension ‘Web Clipper’, Outlook plug-in, apps on all major mobile OS, PC/MAC software and a web-app. Making note taking available everywhere. Google Keep only have Android and web-app, kind of lacking still.

2. Multimedia support. Currently  it only supports text and photo.

3. Notes organization. I noticed that Keep lets you give a color to the note, and display the notes in ‘List’ view or ‘Grid’ view. Other than that, pretty much nothing. Maybe Google never really think about scaling? Or they want to position Google Keep as a lite note-taker instead of an information management tool?

3. Note sharing. Without sharing, Google Keep is likely to lose the biggest demographic of note taking: students. There are plenty of opportunities that Google could embedded Keep into their social media ecosystem. Share on G+ for one, follow friends/celebrities notes for another.

Obviously the service is still in its infancy. It will be interesting to see how it evolves. Hopefully it won’t be like Google Reader at least.