Usability Notes - by Chris Baker

Kids' usage of parents iPhones

I have just come across research from Greystripe about how parents let their kids use the parental iPhone. Parental iPhones are key for developers of  apps for younger children, who are unlikely to have their own machine. (The typical iPod touch user is a teenager or young man, and the typical iPhone owner is a middle-aged man, according to demographics I reported in an earlier post .)

The research "How Moms use their iPhones" Includes a survey of how the kids use Mum's phone (or "Mom's" since this is US data). 59% of Moms let the kids use their phone. Of these, 41% had bought games for the kids, and 20% had bought educational content. As regards age of the children, 29% of the moms had children between 0 and 4, while 43% had children between 15 and 17. The survey also covered the role of iPhones in shopping (use of the phone to make or email shopping lists, or to locate stores or compare prices and download coupons)

 

Thanks to @ruhanirabin whose tweet alerted me to these results!

More smartphone developers choosing Android, but iPhone still ahead (Flurry data)

Smartphone developers choosing to include the Flurry usage statistics tool in their apps tend to contact Flurry early in application development. So Flurry have a leading indicator of what app developments are getting underway. They have used this information to produce a lot of interesting stats about the smartphone market, in what they call the "Smartphone Industry Pulse (July 2009)"  Data from Flurry features in my last post , but I also wanted to discuss their data on projects getting underway for Android and for iPhone.

In the first half of 2009, the number of Android projects incorporating Flurry increased - Android projects made up 10% in January, up to 20% in June (over 200 projects started in June). Flurry have this rather striking graph:

This graph looks pretty alarming for Apple, until one also knows that the total number of smartphone apps was increasing dramatically over this time. The following chart shows the number of iPhone projects - rising from 200 in February to just over 1,000 in July.

(The corresponding Android graph is available on the the "Smartphone Industry Pulse (July 2009)" post of the Flurry blog, along with much other interesting data).

Some thoughts about this:

First the caveat - these data are only about projects that include Flurry (possibly the pattern would be different if we had data about all the apps that don't plan to track usage)

Secondly - loss of market share by Apple is probably inevitable now that other players are in the market big time.But since when was Apple about market share? I see them as a sort of computer  Bang & Olufsen - making highly designed, high quality and expensive stuff for the part of the market that likes it, and leaving other companies to scrap over the mass-market.

Lastly, I wonder how many of the Andriod projects are apps that are ALSO being developed for iPhone. As far as I know it is difficult and risky to develop the one app for multiple platforms (technical issues, and Apple are said to be sniffy about passing any app not built with their SDK ). So developers may be forced into running twin projects, just we we used to do in the late '90s to develop desktop apps for Mac and PC.

I have unhappy memories about developing for the cranky PowerMacs of that era!  You could use file extensions that had profound powers on the Macintosh OS. On a good day that was excellent, but on most days you ended up with a gang of file extensions fighting each other like a sackful of cats until the OS keeled over. To make things more frustrating, patches to the OS would suddenly declare a particular file extension persona non grata and uninstall it. That happen to one of my projects just before it was about to launch. Hence the joke of the time - "Q. What does MACINTOSH stand for? A. Most Applications Crash, If Not, The Operating System Hangs." [For balance I should say that the counter-joke wasn't bad either: "Q. What does MICROSOFT stand for? A. Most Intelligent Customers Realize Our Software Only Fools Toddlers ] All that put me right off Macs until quite recently - and should remind me to be a bit patient with strictnesses Apple might want to impose about use of their SDK.

One more thing - if you include Flurry on an Apple application, do you have a MacFlurry? ;-)

eBooks second most active smartphone apps category: Flurry

Flurry provide a usage statistics service for smartphone applications, collecting data when the application is downloaded or used. As a result they have interesting data on the state of the smartphone market.

Eyecatching for me is the chart in the "Smartphone industry pulse July 2009" showing that customer use of eBooks is rising quickly and is second only to games:

The data probably underestimate the situation, as far from all eBooks will have Flurry embedded in them.

In another analysis "Mobile apps: Models, Money and Loyalty" Flurry have also looked at how frequently apps are used, and how likely users are to return to them after 90 days. That suggests that books are used intensely (maybe 10 times a week), but are not used much after 90 days. The customer has finished the book by then, presumably.

For the technically minded, Flurry describe the technical workings of their service thus:

Flurry Analytics places a lightweight agent into an application, so that performance data are tracked, logged and reported back for analysis. This information is confidential and available only to the developer to analyze in aggregate. Individual user data is not identifiable. Developers are provided a wealth of metrics around usage behavior, any custom event they choose to track and technical information about the device, firmware version, carrier and more.

Demographics (age) data for iPhone and iPod Touch users

I've finally found some demographic data for iphone and ipod touch users. The data come from a survey done by Admob and comScore, as published on the AdMob blog  and reviewed by BusinessWire (which has figures not included in the blog post). The survey was in the first half of 2009 (presumably in the US, though this is not stated). I was after age data, which gives me this chart:

 
iPod touch ownership was highest among the 13-17 years age group (46%) falling sharply after age 25 (23% of ipod touch users were 18-24, 12% were 25-34 and 12% 35-49. After that it's single figures). iPhone owners are older - only 6% were 13-17; 20% were 18-24; 27% were 25-34; 31% were 35-49. This is pretty much what one would expect:  iPod touches are cheaper and can be bought for a one-off payment (no ongoing mobile phone bill). So they are a possible (generous) Christmas or birthday present. In the UK at least, you still have to sign up for some hefty costs to own an iphone. So probably another case of "you can tell the men from the boys by the cost of their toys" as a friend of mine used to say. Speaking of men and boys, >70% of the owners (of both iphone and ipod touch) were male.

For other data (income, how mobile usage compares with usage of other media) check out the original article at AdMob

These data may go some way to explaining an interesting observation from "Just Another iPhone Blog" - "Do Crap Apps have legs?" The author comments on the curious popularity of "Crap Apps" - (applications that are trivial and/or  puerile).

Pains of moving online from print - What went wrong at Rocky Mountain News

The Rocky Mountain News was Colorado’s oldest newspaper, founded in 1859. It published its last edition in February 2009. John Temple, the last Editor, has a fascinating article on what he thinks went wrong and what lessons publishers can learn from the paper's demise, especially in Rocky Mountain News' attempts to move online. In a nutshell, he thinks that the web operation suffered from being though of as something that had to serve and make revenue for the old "core" (print) product, and which got saddled by practices, rules and mindsets of the print publication. Fascinating and sometimes painful reading for print publishers trying to manage an online product as well.

How to find promising keywords for Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns

How to work out which words to choose when optimizing your site for search engines? Once you have decided which words to use, you can buy advertising that will appear on search engine results when your key terms are typed. And you ensure that your copy contains these words (within reason - search engines are sophisticated  enough to penalize sites that simply list all the likely terms). That should make it more likely that customers find your site in search engine results. But none of that is likely to be effective if you are choosing to describe your content using words that your customers don't use.

The excellent Marketing Sherpa have interesting results showing what SEO practitioners think works. Here's a chart, (reproduced with MarketingSherpa's permission) and from their series of Benchmark reports. Interesting that the most useful tactics may well be the easiest: analyse your server logs or usage stats service (e.g. Google Analytics) and any search function that you have on your site:

Cannibalism! Pirates! Beautiful Princess!

Just have a guess - how may professional conversations do you think I've had about cannibalism since I joined the publishing industry in 1993?

Can't give you an exact number, but the answer is much more than zero. Not that publishers are prone to having a barbecue with someone from Marketing roasting on a spit - the conversations I am recalling are a risk of introducing electronic as well as print formats. "Cannibalism" is shorthand for this concern: "What if start publishing electronic formats as well as print, and the only outcome is that people switch from one format to the other, giving us no additional sales, but the additional costs of making two formats?"

A number of factors mean this is not simple to sort out. The market might include:

• Customers who will only buy one format and would certainly have bought print if that was all there. Any sale of an electronic format is at the expense of a print one
• Customers who buy both formats (when I worked at OUP during the late nineties, we were pleased to find a good number of customers wanting both the printed Oxford Textbook, and the CD-ROM. One was for searching, the other was for long reads, and for having impressive spines on the Consultant's shelf)
• Customers who will only buy the publication in electronic format (and buy a rival publication if yours is only available in print). Publishers tend to feel they are protected from this at least a bit by the "Content is King" argument - i.e. competition is perhaps more likely to be about who has the best textbook, or best story, rather than format being the key feature. Some other factors may apply, though: in some markets (e.g. business reports) the customer needs the information NOW and will settle for a second-best product if that is all that is available within the deadline.

To further confuse the picture, electronic formats can easily be made into products that have no direct print equivalent. For example, what was once a printed book can be amalgamated with other content into a bookshelf or library, or it can be disaggregated into smaller pieces of content to be sold individually.

The differences don't stop at Production, either -  if you have electronic formats, new sales channels and marketing oportunitiesbecome available - for example it becomes much cheaper to offer a free sample or trial subscription. You can try to sell via affilliates. Electronic formats are cheap to store and distribute and so it may be practical to keep a "long tail"  of publications in electronic format beyond the point where it would be uneconomic to keep stock in a warehouse. Also to distribute them to markets where it would be uneconomic to ship paper products.

Want more reasons to be confused? - add the prospects of piracy (arguably easier when he digitally-pirated copy is the same quality as the original, rather than a grotty photocopy), and the debate about whether piracy is a dead loss, or whether Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy (for all but those products where the "obscurity" problem has already been solved; and for whom the pirates are now parasites only).

Hey, cannibals and pirates all in one post! Basically, we're never going to sort this out by a priori reasoning. There are too many unknowns for that - it's about as likely as me working in a Beautiful Princess into this post, so we can rescue her from the pirates and cannibals and then live happily ever after.

Oh, all right then, just for you, I'll finish this post in the style of a Choose Your Own Adventure book...

The track leads up to the sheer cliffs, and with the pirates and cannibals closing in, you and the  Beautiful Princess draw  your swords and stand back to back determined to sell your content dearly.
"You'll never eat me alive!" she shouts at the cannibals
"And I'm not going to be Jolly Rogered!!" you challenge the pirates.
[One moment - aren't Beautiful Princesses meant to be grateful and supportive and not to flare their nostrils sarcastically? ...]

• Do you assume that the cannibals are not a significant threat? To see data from O'Reilly (computer book publisher) see Does Digital Cannibalize Print? Not Yet.
• Do you think that the pirates only want to impose progressive taxation? See Tim O'Reilly's thoughts on the matter.
• Do you think the existing model of copyright is breaking down? See Content, Cory Doctorow's essays on the subject (informed in part by his experiences of routinely publishing a free electronic version of his science fiction novels).
• Do you grab the Princess's hand and jump into the sea (this being what you do in stories like this when at the top of a sheer cliff, just as you climb into the ventilation shafts of a Secret Base)? Go to X
• Or do you want to fight the lot of them? Go to Y
  

Dispatch from the Browser wars

When developing websites, it is useful to know which browsers your customers will be using. The best guide is your own usage stats, but if you don't have those, or want to see how your customers compare with a wider sample, StatCounter publish figures based on "aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites." They have a nice graphing tool you can use to look at the browser war in different areas and over different time periods.

Worldwide, 19 May- 17 June Statcounter has IE7 still ahead  (just under 32%) with Firefox 3 close behind.


Firefox is ahead of IE7 in Europe (36% to IE7's 27%):

IE7 has a bigger share in North America (38% to 28%)

IE8 has yet to get above 10% (has just reached thsi in North America, yet to get to 8% in Europe)

How people find a blog

eMarketer have an interesting survey "Blog Reading is a Free Floating Affair" studying how people discover blogs. The study (survey of about 200 respondents) showed that 67% followed links from other blogs. Recommendations came second at 23%, then search engines 20% then blog search engines at 5% (multiple responses were allowed).

One hypothesis from this might be that blogs are read by blog people who search them out in blog-ish fashion. This is also a possible conclusion from the data about the popularity of the Dilbert blog and newsletter that I reported a while ago. If so this would be something you'd want to consider before making a business blog - do you /do you not want to appeal to blog readers?

But I'm not convinced that the data justify eMarketer's subheading "Thinking of promoting a blog through search? Don't bother. ". Most of the respondents in the survey were finding blogs for entertainment (66%) and for personal interests (43%); with only 33% finding blogs for education/information and 12% for work or business (multiple responses were allowed to this question). It may be that they were looking at a lot of blogs that were run by individuals. And getting links from other blogs is probably the easiest way for individuals to spread the word about their blogs. There are several factors to this:

• Comment and trackback features allow a blog owner to make their own inbound links from other blogs (to an extent, at least)
• There is often an easy-to-find person behind the blog - in my experience at least, emailing that person (I liked your blog and have written about it/linked to it) is quite likely to get an interested response, and perhaps a link  (like this link to me, one of my first, I think). Getting a link from other kinds of websites can be much more of an effort ("when the webmaster gets around to it")
• Blogging seems easily to lead to posts along the lines that "I read this on the web and I think it is very true/complete tosh because..."

By contrast, you have to bother to register for search engines, or be kindly linked to from a page that already gets visits from robots. I wonder how many individual bloggers would find it useful to run paid ads on the engines?

So the survey data may reflect the ways in which many blogs find it easy or convenient to form links (or what happens when someone concentrates on writing their blog and doesn't make any real effort to market it). I'm not at all sure it shows that search doesn't work. My own blog typically gets more referrals from organic Google listings than from any single other source (that is Google is less that 50%  of referrals, but is the biggest single slice of the pie. I should say that I do not expend much effort and no money at all in marketing my blog, it being mostly for my own professional development.

Shopping cart abandonment benchmarks

In this article I review some choice statistics about shopping cart abandonment rates from a talk by Anne Holland of MakretingSherpa, Etail Speech Take II: Three Ways to Lower Shopping Cart Abandons Based on MarketingSherpa Research.

Anne's talk is data from the  Ecommerce Benchmark Survey, January 2007 – a survey with 1,923 respondents. Across all those respondents, average shopping cart abandonment rates were 52.1% in 2006 (i.e. 52.1% of customers who entered the shopping cart system never made it to the checkout). This was an improvement on 59.8% in 2005. As usual, the average of these things is not much of a benchmark in itself - the results for 2006 fell into a normal curve where the high end of the normal range was 80% abandoned carts and the low end was 12.5%. This presumably reflects the fact that we are not always in the industry of "businesses who sell things using the Internet"  - sometimes we are, but there are a lot of concerns specific to a particular sector: buying a car or a computer from a website may not be the same thing as buying a book or CD. To give a practical example, if you are concerned with a site that has a 50% abandonment rate, you don't necessarily know whether you are doing well against your competitors with their 80% rate, or are a real slouch against their 12% rate.

The survey respondents were asked what new improvements they were trying and what worked best. A top tactic for big sites was to introduce a "bill me later" feature - 17% of big ecommerce sites had done this in 2006. MarketingSherpa have a case study with Newegg which in various "bill me later" features were taken up by 10% of customers. But these customers were the big spenders, with much bigger shopping carts than average.

The next way to improve was (once again, as in the 2006 report) by testing the shopping cart. Once again, this was the thing that most respondents reported as being most effective to get a return on ROI. Apparently small or subtle changes, such as changes to the text on buttons could turn out to be important. Coming second and third (again as in 2005) were improving internal search, and improving site copy. So these look like good areas to review in a shopping cart improvement project.

Tactic number 3 was to send email(s) to customers who had abandoned carts (of course you can only do this if you have their email addresses and the relevant permission to use it). 73% of respondents said this was an effective   improvement. A case study with Limoges Jewelry showed that the technique could be effective even if the emails were a simple generic one (rather than a customized text): Limoges found this got a 28.77% conversion  (though this was only reached after a few months)