apps should allow users to achieve key goals with as few finger taps as possible.

Exit Strategy NYC’s extremely simple interface asks only three key pieces of information:
1) What subway line are you riding? (tap the line’s icon)
2) What subway station are you going to? (tap the station)
3) What is your direction of travel? (tap ‘uptown’ or ‘downtown’)

The app then shows the platform diagram for this station. Three taps — that’s it! In and out in fewer than ten seconds. Compare this to the Tube Exits interface design (Tube Exits is the London equivalent of Exit Strategy NYC.) The user has to tap over a dozen times just to get the same information!

One of my favorite apps, Foursquare, took a step backwards in their latest update. Previously you could check in with two taps: once on the venue, and once on the ‘check-in’ button. Easy Peasy. But the latest update added an additional step after the ‘check in’ button. This change added no functionality, only friction.

If you’ve ever played the Settlers of Catan iPhone app, you’ve seen another worst case scenario. Users must tap a tiny “Continue” button every time the next player’s turn comes up. It’s unnecessary and it’s frustrating.

Using an app with poor tap economy is like trying to run a marathon in the ocean. You exert much more effort and get nowhere fast. There’s too much friction. Tapping is mentally taxing, especially when it lands users on an entirely new screen. The user must review this new screen, then figure out which elements are interactive, then decide which one will help achieve their goal, and then tap again! Each additional screen/tap shoves one more roadblock between the user and their end goal.

The best services let users do more by doing less. This makes users feel powerful. Have you ever used Amazon’s one-click checkout to place an order? If not, please try it. It’s thrilling to use! Similarly, Griffin’s iTalk app features a giant ‘record’ button that feels magical. With a single tap, the user can start recording because the app picks smart defaults and stays out of the way.

The only time having an extra tap makes sense is when the alternative is worse: a cluttered user interface. Good UIs balance which elements are shown and which are hidden. Consider Facebook’s decision to add the grid button in the upper left corner:

Economy [of taps] is always a motivating factor, but the grid adds an extra tap [because you need to press the grid button] versus the full-time tab bar. This was a compromise I felt was necessary. There’s always that balance between screen clutter–adding tabs–and the number of taps.

-Joe Hewitt Quoted in Chris Dannen’s iPhone Design – Award Winning Projects

At the heart of many apps is a single core goal that your users hope to achieve — repeatedly. For Exit Strategy NYC it’s retrieving information. For iTalk it’s recording audio. For Foursquare it’s checking in. For Amazon it’s purchasing items. Don’t make your users run in the ocean. Remove as much friction as possible. Let them fly in the sky! The quicker the user can perform their goal, the better they feel about themselves. And the better your product makes them feel, the more they’ll fall in love.

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Embrace Google Maps/Transit

Google transit gives point-to-point directions using public transportation for over 400 cities.  The service especially shines on a mobile device.  Google maps on my iPhone was an indispensable part of navigating the city, helping me figure out exactly where and when to catch the buses.  I’m amazed by the number of people who don’t know their iPhone (and Android and some Blackberry phones) can do point-to-point train/subway/bus directions while incorporating the schedules too!

Get a Bike

Public transportation is great, but renting/borrowing a bike is a must.  Yes, it takes cajones to hop on and conquer the streets of a foreign city, but biking is without a doubt the best way to learn a new city.  You’ll cover much more ground than walking and avoid the headache of parking a car or waiting for public transportation.  Basically, you’ll get more done with your limited time.  And since bikes have zero variable cost, they strongly encourage exploration.  So go get lost on a bike! (but bring along your phone with Google Maps of course)

Connect with the Local Community

A few days before embarking, I asked the Austin Yelp community for suggestions of places to see and things to do.  “NYC Eliter Comin’ to Austin” garnered over 70 super helpful tips like: “6:30pm tuesday is the start of hippy hour at the continental club with the lovely miss toni price.”  Several of Austin’s fantastic Yelp members even sent me personal notes welcoming to the city.  If you weren’t already aware, I’m a big fan of Yelp and find it far and away the best source of hyperlocal information.

See the Heart of a Neighborhood

So you’ve picked a neighborhood to explore.  Great, but where exactly should you start?  Use Yelp to figure out the main commercial streets in a neighborhood!  From the homepage just click ‘search’ (leave the search box blank).  Then filter the list by “Most Reviewed” and maneuver the interactive map around your destination neighborhood.  Red pins will help call out the main streets!  Around the UT Austin campus, Guadalupe Street stood out as the clear winner (see picture on left).  This feature also works really well from Yelp’s fantastic iPhone app.

Find Must-See Popular Hotspots

Again, click ‘search’ on Yelp.com and leave the search box blank.  Setup the filters to sort by “Most Reviewed.”  This will show all Yelp listings in that city ranked by popularity.  For Austin, that includes Home Slice, Uchi, Guero’s, Polvo’s, and the flagship Whole Foods Market store.  In NYC, this list features Shake Shack, Magnolia Bakery, Ippudo, Pommes Frites, Katz’s Delicatessen, Grimaldi’s, Lombardi’s, and the Chicken & Rice Halal Cart at 53rd/6th.  You could certainly do worse as a tourist…

Find Weird Local Stuff

Most people know Yelp for its restaurant and bar listings.  But their ‘Local Flavor’ category has some seriously cool stuff.  Austin’s Local Flavor included the Cathedral of Junk, a massive three story structure created from decades of junk.  And my insider knowledge of the Bats Under the Congress Avenue Bridge seriously impressed the locals.  In San Francisco, this category led me to the Clarion Alley Murals and also the Seward Street Slides which turned out to be tremendously fun.

Bookmark Now, Retrieve Later

Bookmark places on Yelp.com that look interesting (you’ll need a yelp.com account to do so).  Then, from the Yelp iPhone App you can view those bookmarks on the go.  Best of all, the app shows your bookmarks ranked by proximity to your current location!  This is phenomenally helpful.

Log your Trip and Get Local Recommendations

I checked in on Foursquare at every place I went, despite having no Austin friends using the service.  Why?  Because afterwards I can view a minute by minute log of my trip on the history section of the Foursquare website! Equally cool, foursquare provided me great local recommendations.  Checking in at a random grocery prompted “Go to Green Mesquite and eat BBQ with friends!”  The tip was left by fellow NYC Foursquare user and friend Lee Semel and Green Mesquite was right down the block.  His trip to Austin occurred eight months prior but the virtual breadcrumbs remained!

Keep the Community Involved

Each night I updated the Yelp Forum with my accomplishments.  I also laid out my plan for the following day.  This united the Yelp community around my adventures and was really fun.  “You’re doing more things than most Austinites do in a year” wrote one Yelper. Seeing my plans even spurred Riki M., a former Brooklynite herself, to join me at the Cathedral of Junk.  The kindness of a tight-knit online community like Yelp is amazing.  Riki brought with her the Austin essentials: beer and bug spray.  And our mini picnic was fantastic — albeit buggy.

More Tips?

Since my trip, I’ve discovered plancast, which may prove very useful.  Readers: are there other tech tools I should be taking advantage of? Leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.  Thanks!

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(This is the first in a two part post. Part one contains a profile of a startup.  Part two contains numbers and analysis related to that startup.)

Mobile Spinach is a small and ambitious Bay Area startup focused on the mobile coupon space.  The company is still at a very early stage — seed funded and looking for funding.  Earlier this month I had the pleasure of talking with co-founder Anthony Vitti.  We had a great discussion about the difficulties of effective marketing for local businesses, and Anthony laid out his vision for Mobile Spinach and the opportunity he sees.

Mobile Spinach’s offering for consumers is a compelling one: “Get exclusive deals and mobile phone alerts from our Tastemakers who hit the streets to find you the best deals when, where, and how you want them.” Think local trend-blog meets social-shopping meets mobile-couponing: Thrillist meets ThisNext meets Cellfire.  Whereas existing coupon services like Cellfire and 8Coupons focus on product discounts (Save 25c on toilet paper!!), Mobile Spinach focuses on deals from local lifestyle businesses: Shopping, Night life, Events, Travel, Dining and Food, Arts and Music, Gyms and Spas.  One of their co-founders runs a contemporary San Francisco lifestyle brand called Artificial Flavor, so they’ve got experience with fashion trends.

With Mobile Spinach, you receive deals only from the Tastemakers you’ve chosen to follow.  These folks are the site’s power users — aggressive well-connected individuals who introduce their favorite local businesses to Mobile Spinach’s service and get special deals for their followers.

Mobile SMS couponing requires a light touch.  Consumers don’t want to be interrupted with advertising that’s not relevant to them.  Mobile Spinach understands this very well: “Less is more” says Anthony.  Relevancy and customization are crucial to Mobile Spinach’s vision of an empowered consumer who is able to “dial down” the service as needed.  Besides using Tastemakers as filters (so consumers only receive deals that match their taste), Anthony suggested that consumers will be able to make further customizations like electing to receive coupons ‘only on Tuesday nights’ and ‘only from nearby restaurants.’

For these local businesses, Mobile Spinach helps them engage local consumers and market themselves effectively.  According to Mobile Spinach, there are very few ways for small to medium business owners to get noticed — traditional media, SEO, and SEM all have high costs and questionable efficacy.  With Mobile Spinach, 500-1000 SMS messages are typically sent for a campaign and the company reports double-digit response rates.  The company also reports getting double digit CPM rates for their mobile advertisements.

For Mobile Spinach, tastemakers act as sort of a crowdsourced marketing effort as they spread the word about the service to their friends.  More importantly, they bring local businesses onboard to advertise with Mobile Spinach — and receive a 20-30% commission.  These tastemakers, combined with a traditional in house salesforce, are designed to make the service scalable.  Anthony envisions having 20 tastemakers in each of 30 cities across the country once the service expands to full size.

Mobile Spinach has a nice vision for a social-recommendation local couponing business.  Furthermore, Mobile Spinach shows sensitivity and insight into the typical issues plaguing SMS advertising.  But can they make the numbers work?

Well, let’s do some back of the envelope calculations…

(continue to part two)

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No, this isn’t some kind of bestiality confession.  I’m talking about Aardvark — a 15-person San Francisco startup made up largely of ex-Googlers and backed by $6 million from top investors.  Like many relationships, this one started with a friend’s introduction.  In February, Omar Christidis had been waxing poetic about Aardvark — ‘vark for short — and soon I was begging to be set up.  A friend of Aardvark’s founder Max Ventilla, Omar was an early member of the service and gladly passed on an invite.

Unlike most online services, Aardvark’s focus isn’t on their website.  Instead, Aardvark lives on your buddy list. Like a good friend desperately in need of a social life, its green ‘available’ dot glows brightly 24/7.  When you IM a question to Aardvark, it goes digging for the answer.  First the service analyzes and categorizes the question, then — and this is the real magic — it routes the question to an ‘expert’ who responds, usually in a matter of minutes.

Does it work?  Hell yeah.  My first challenge posed to the service was to ask it something local.  After all, how many early aardvark users could possible live in my neighborhood?
me:
What’s the best bar in boerum hill, brooklyn?

aardvark:
Got it. I’m sending your question to someone who knows about *going out*
[6 minutes later]

aardvark:
(From Naomi/F/Brooklyn,NY, Re: *going out* )
I like the Brooklyn Inn on Bergen and Hoyt maybe. no food. just booze. local.

Wow, I was impressed. Not only was there another Aardvark user in my neighborhood, but she was online at that moment.  And helpful!  A day or two later, Aardvark posed its first question to me from a user in State College, PA asking “How much is your iPhone monthly bill?”  Aardvark sent me the perfect question and I was able to give an answer accurate to the penny…being helpful felt really good!

I continued to use aardvark over the next few weeks, asking progressively harder questions.  And each time, it stepped up its game.  One time I sent Aardvark a chunk of Objective C programming code — a bug had stumped my friend and I and also stumped the readers of a popular programming site.  Sending it to Aardvark was a last resort and pretty much a joke. But less than five minutes later, Aardvark sent back a one-line response that solved the bug. My question had been routed to Colin Barrett, creator of Adium (a popular aim/icq/msn messaging client) and master of all things Mac programming related.  We had a back-and-forth conversation through aardvark, and exchanged contact information which came in handy later.

At precisely this moment I realized Aardvark was much more than a simple ‘question answering service’.  It was an expert network.

Have you ever heard of the Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG)?  I hadn’t either until a friend started working there.  Essentially GLG connects corporations/investors to experts on very specific subject matters.

Perhaps a corporation is considering launching a new product that’s outside their core expertise.  They have questions and concerns about the launch which require an expert opinion.  They pay GLG gobs of money to play matchmaker.  GLG sorts through its database of 200,000 experts and sets up an interview/consultation between the the expert and the corporation. It’s big business. GLG’s 2008 revenues were $284 million.

Essentially, Aardvark is GLG for the little guy.  Or it’s GLG for the ‘long tail’ of questions.  Over the past few months, I’ve used Aardvark to consult with experts on all sorts of topics, not just to ask simple questions but to have entire discussions!  In addition to getting coding help, I’ve had hour long conversations about mobile micropayments with the Senior Mobile Product Manager at a major social networking site.  I also found a very helpful PR expert who discussed in detail with me how best to do press outreach for an upcoming project.  I’ve even used aardvark to have questions answered by lawyers and doctors.

Categories of Questions Asked (source: vark.com blog)

The key to Aardvark’s success is threefold:
1)  Intelligent routing. When aardvark asks me to answer a question, I’m happy to help.  I know aardvark isn’t wasting my time with irrelevant queries.

2)  A great network of ‘experts.’ The quality of Aardvark’s answers is only as good as the quality of its users.  Aardvark was started by a group of ex-googlers and as an invite-only service it has spread through real-world networks attracting a very impressively credentialed userbase.  Aardvark’s ‘refer’ feature is also brilliant.  I don’t know the answer to every question Aardvark poses to me.  But I probably know someone who knows the answer. Using the referral feature, I can pass the question to the right person.

3)  A gift economy and a feedback system.  Like Wikipedia or Yelp, users contribute to Aardvark because they have benefited from the service and want to give back.  Also, Aardvark encourages it’s users to type “thanks” in response to a useful answer and being helpful and getting thanked feels good.  (“thanks” also works as a feedback mechanism to help Aardvark identify its most helpful users and route questions better.)

As a former sociology major interested in social networks and information flow, I find Aardvark absolutely fascinating.  As an enterpreneurial person working on several projects and needing answers to dozens of questions, I’ve found the service to be priceless.  To monetize the service, Aardvark plans to fold in targeted advertising.  Should that not pan out, I have a feeling they could do just fine by creating a premium paid expert advice service.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts about Aardvark and the emerging social search space.  And if you want to sign up or add me as a ‘friend,’ do so here.

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(Source: Sahrizvi on Flickr)

In my life, biking serves three purposes:  A form of exercise.  A convenient way to get places.  But most importantly, biking is my preferred means of exploring a city. I cover much more ground on a bike than on foot, which means I’m more likely to stumble on interesting things:  street festivals, outdoor concerts, interesting architecture, quirky stores etc.

Bikes differ from taxis and subways in one very important way: they’re free. Without a usage cost, there is zero risk to exploration and experimentation.  And therein lies the parallel to web development and the open source software revolution.  The internet we know today could not exist without the free web development technologies (apache, php, mysql, etc).  It’s only when failure has no ‘cost’ — that creativity can truly flourish.

Would you ever hire a taxi to drive around in circles until you found something interesting?  Of course not.  But thanks to biking, I’ve witnessed some incredible sights.

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For a good example, check out this screenshot of the description for ‘Wobble• Bikini• Fun.’  The app’s developers have cleverly included the names of all the top applications and terms like ‘fart’ and ‘weather’ so that their app will show up for any of these search terms and get more traffic and downloads.  In other cases, I’ve seen descriptions that ‘also recommend these fun apps’ and then proceed to include the name of every top application.  Very smart.

Let’s also talk about the name of this app for a second: ‘Fun’ is part of the name…brilliant!  Guess what the top search result for ‘fun’ is?  You guessed it.  As long as they’re going this route, why not just name the app ‘fun• naked• girls• inside’? By the way, this 99c app is the #5 best selling paid application as of press time (or clicking ‘post’ rather).

One last thing.  Notice the final line of the long paragraph:  “And – people of both sex will love it.”  Isn’t the grammatically correct term “sexes”?  And wouldn’t writing “both genders” or “guys and girls will both love it” say the same thing in a less awkward way?

Alas, these clever developers have realized the power of the popular search term “sex.” This app ranks third for a search of “sex”  — right behind the official Sex and the City application.

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The seatback video screens were especially cool, providing easy ordering of Food, Drink, Movies, and TV — all with the swipe of a credit card!  One function in particular caught my interest: chat rooms

Yes, chat rooms. You can now chat with other passengers on your flight! Please tell me that Virgin has adopted a 20% free time policy (a la google) and this is some engineer’s half-baked idea.

Quick Statistics Question: What’s the probability that two or more of the 150 passengers onboard are going to:
a) Want to chat online with other passengers. (the keyboard is a mini handset thing and don’t most people hate talking to strangers on flights?)
b) Log into the chat system at the same time?

Answer: Pretty slim.

Indeed, the chat room remained empty the entire flight.  In addition to the main chatroom, there are TV channel specific rooms.  For example, you can watch CNN on half the screen, and chat about it on the other half.  The further segmentation achieved by having a chatroom for each channel basically guarantees that no two passengers will ever stumble into the same chat room.

I can’t help but wonder if first class got their own exclusive chat room, with rich text formatting and emoticons enabled.

The only way this chat system would work is if a group of friends traveling together prearranges to use the system.  On a side note, a friend and I actually set up a Bonjour wireless network on a trip home from Taiwan last summer, and we used iChat to hold a midair video conference and chat session — it was really fun.

What other social media ideas are they planning?  Perhaps an on-board social networking site?  “Hey 23A, Remember that time our plane took off?!  That was awesome – lets share our memories and photos!”  Or a LAN game of Quake?  “8C, I totally fragged you.”  Or a polling app?  “Should the crying baby in 14F be thrown overboard?  Yes/No/Maybe.”  Maybe a dating app a la AirTroductions.com or FlyBuds.com? “Seat 19B SWM ISO BBW 40DD: Hey 9F, lets take the virgin out of virgin airlines.  Meet in the bathroom in five?” How about a Trivia Game pitting the bourgeoisie in first class against the economy class proletariat?

The possibilities are endless!  But seriously, I don’t mean to discourage or make fun of Virgin Airlines.  I genuinely hope they continue to innovate and experiment with on board technologies and look forward to seeing their progress on my next flight.

One other small complaint about the system.  Virgin, if you’re going to install touchscreens in the backs of seats, please crank up the touch sensitivity to make sure it’s a touch-screen and not a press-screen.  My seat rocked every time the woman behind me jammed her finger into it.  Unfortunately, she was playing scrabble or something requiring lots of screen manipulation.  What’s the word score for A-N-N-O-Y-I-N-G?

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