Product Design, Technology and Innovation.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Part 1: Where are all the App Tinkerers?
It seems I can’t travel anywhere in the San Francisco/Stanford/San Jose area without seeing the inane “Follow us on twitter!” signs or “Check out our iPhone/Facebook App”. Sorry Philz’s Coffee, I’m just not interested in your iPhone App.
The thing is they’re not entirely wrong. Counting each person per platform as unique, I would estimate there over half a billion potential followers/installees to be had, and wherever that many people aggregate, businesses will come.
I’m not specifically interested in how Philz can generate more value through its iPhone App, but I do think there are a lot of interesting problems to be solved, and since all these platforms are relatively new, the books are truly yet to be written.
That’s why I wonder why more businesses, particularly those interested in “human-centric innovation” aren’t playing around with these platforms. In particular, I wonder where are the Design Consultancies.
Since Design Consultancies are businesses literally built around “better understanding the user/consumer/customer”, it stands to reason that they should be interested in developing applications, building expertise, and gathering data that is otherwise difficult to obtain. With Facebook it is particularly important to own your own applications because it is against their Platform’s Terms of Use to store any personal data for more than 24 hours, making all but short term analysis against the rules.
So the opportunity that they’re missing out on is not to develop their own brands, but to 1) build expertise in building meaningful and useful applications for future clients and 2**) mine data from application users to better inform and fuel their own studies of user choices and preferences
In terms of the value of this expertise and knowledge, and given their relatively large resource pools, one wonders why they’re not doing more, developing more proactively and prototyping in the internet’s fastest growing area.
I guess the real question for me is, with all these mundane usages of social media permeating our lives, why aren’t more designer and design firms toying around in the vast playground of social media?
*One partial exception here is Frog Design, they have developed at least one iPhone and Facebook Application to my knowledge, both of which have garnered a fair number of users. I however am not privy to how they’re using this success.
http://www.tuaw.com/2009/07/08/everything-old-is-new-again-frog-design-does-an-iphone-app/
**For more data mining techniques and how to extract meaning from large data-sets, see my brother’s site http://blog.smellthedata.com/
