5 Interesting Features for Retail/Hospitality Mobile Apps
Posted on | December 14, 2009 | 3 Comments
Drill down to a product page on Walmart's iPhone app and they make it easy to consult your friends advice via Facebook.
Every mobile application targeting a retail or hospitality use case seems to have the obvious features: finding business locations, contact information, product/offering information, and in some cases user reviews/ratings of what’s being offered. These apps amount in many ways to a repackaging of the merchant’s existing website as a native application for the iPhone or Android mobile device. At the same time, there are also a number of interesting features that go beyond this basic “we gotta have an iPhone App too” mentality, and are beginning to utilize the mobile platform in new and interesting ways. In what follows we highlight five such features that we’ve spotted recently in one or more free applications in the retail/hospitality space.
1. Integrate the experience with the customer’s social graph. You would think this would be obvious these days, given the rate at which major brands are staking out their outposts on the latest social media frontiers. Yet, very few apps in this category integrate with the customer’s existing social media channels. GAP and Walmart are two notable exceptions to this. Once you’ve drilled down to a product detail page, Walmart’s iPhone app (dedicated to their consumer electronic offerings only) suggests you ask your friends on facebook (or via email) for advice.
GAP's StyleMixer App let's you beam a potential new outfit up on your FB wall to get reactions.
The GAP’s StyleMixer iPhone app goes a step futher in that you can dynamically configure an outfit (see next point) and then share it via GAP’s homegrown social community, Facebook, and/or email addresses.
2. Assist in non-trivial product configuration/selection. Ever try to order pizza over the phone with a room full or car full of hungry adolescents all telling you their topping preferences at the same time? Not to worry, Pizza Hut’s iPhone application is a well-executed example of using the mobile platform to quickly whip together a precise order with a lot of non-trivial detail. There are other good examples of this same concept being used in retail to assist customers in product selection. Both Target’s and BestBuy’s iPhone applications provide novel gift selection wizards that let you quickly select an appropriate gift for that hard to please mother-in-law. As we already mentioned above, GAP’s StyleMixer iPhone app let’s you assemble a new outfit, complete with accessories, and then share it with your friends via Facebook Connect.
Configuring and ordering your pizza is a snap using Pizza Hut's iPhone App.
3. In store positioning. This feature is not exactly widespread at least at the moment, due to the non-trivial nature of doing precise positioning indoors. However, there are low tech ways that can be used to make the shopper’s life a lot easier. Though not particularly well executed (latest update seems to have broken the app, at least on my phone) the “Point Inside” iPhone app is a good example of this approach. The application provides floorplans of most of the larger malls within the USA.
Find your way around the mall with the Point Inside iPhone application.
Users can specify where they want to go (by selecting the destination store from a list). A Pin is then overlaid on the mall floor plans to help you gather your bearings and proceed to the store of interest. The functionality actually goes well beyond the “you are here” directories physically situated throughout the mall in that in addition to finding stores and their contact info, it helps you remember where you parked your car, and/or quickly find that much needed restroom or ATM. There are however, lots of ways to improve this particular app and make it truly useful for those of us who habitually lose our way in the shopping mall.
4. Product interest/intent signaling. Making it dead simple for a user to quickly pull up information on a specific product/offer via a mobile phone is advantageous for the merchant as well as the customer. One of the advantages online retailers like Amazon have is that they have a lot of information about the individual end user. This information is at a very fine resolution and includes what products you’ve looked up, how long you spent staring at the product information between clicks, etc. Traditional bricks and mortar retailers have little more than a list of past purchases to work with. Using the mobile device as a sort of in-store concierge should provide better customer services (e.g. no need to find the guy with a blue shirt in Best Buy – just look up the reviews on your phone) and also help gather a lot of useful customer information beyond the end purchase decision.
The first generation of mobile applications supporting this sort of functionality have taken the obvious route – use the phone’s camera to get an image of the product’s UPC code and then access network services to pull down the relevant product metadata. Two good examples of this are the Shop Savvy and RedLaser applications. However, if you have any experience at all using a dedicated barcode scanning device you’ll find that imaging barcodes with a mobile phone is tedious and sometimes not possible in low light situation or when product packaging is such that there is glare on the UPC or its all crinkled up. These apps have a backup plan of course, in that if all else fails you can type in the UPC code.
You'll need a steady hand, good lighting, and a phone with macro lens to get a good barcode scan with ShopSavvy.
What is shaping up to be an even more interesting approach than scanning barcodes, is that taken by Amazon in the “Amazon Remembers” feature in their iPhone app. Here you simply take a picture of the product of interest and send it off to Amazon. Amazon first attempts to recognize the product automatically, and if successful a response is sent back to the phone in literally seconds. If Amazon’s automatic image processing doesn’t yield a it, hit gets outsourced to real human beings via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and you’ll get product info in short order.
A more recent attempt at this approach is Google Goggles. Goggles is intended to be a general “search by image” application and supports much more than product lookup. Though somewhat limited in its current incarnation, it gives you a good glimpse of the future, where you really don’t need a barcode – just point your phone at any object (people included?) and bingo you have everything you want to know about it.
5. Information aggregation. One very common theme is that a lot of applications in this space are not provided by the brand or merchants themselves, but by a third party that is aggregating data from a number of sources. The net effect is that the prospective customer is essentially armed with a real-time consumer guide in their pocket at all times. If a merchant doesn’t give the customer the best deal possible, the app will tell them where they can get it, just down the road at a nearby competitor’s establishment or online. Good examples of these sorts of apps are Shop Savvy (for retail) and UrbanSpoon and Yelp (for hospitality). If these
"Amazon Remembers" utilizes a combination of automagic and human powered search to match a product to a user generated image.
sorts of apps aren’t already getting the retailers attention they soon will be as more and more people begin to upgrade to application capable mobile phones. A good strategy for a retailer (beyond offering the lowest price and being as geographically ubiquitous as possible) is perhaps to offer a branded mobile experience of its own that provides a better experience than the third party aggregate apps, and possibly integrates more tightly with in-store experiences (indoor positioning, situated displays, POS, etc).
These are the best exemplars of these retail/hospitatlity mobile features that we’re aware of at the moment. If you are aware of better examples, please do let us know. We’re also interested in hearing from you if you can point us to mobile apps in the retail/hospitality space that incorporate features beyond the obvious, and which do not fit in one of the feature descriptions that in our list above.
Can't decide between the multiplicity of Thai choices in Allendale, MI? Give UrbanSpoon a shake and it will make the choice for you. 
GVSU’s fabulous skyline is getting even better!
Posted on | November 13, 2009 | 1 Comment
When I recently returned to my roots here at GVSU, I not only had to an assimilate an amazingly altered campus from what I left behind back in 1988, but I also had to get accustomed to the fact that GVSU now sprawls across the entire W. Michigan area. In addition to the main Allendale campus there is the gorgeous Pew Campus in downtown Grand Rapids, and a second downtown campus on “medical hill”, as well as campuses in Holland, and Muskegon.
Here on the main GVSU campus a project is underway to build a new library facility. This week a fly through of the new facility was published on YouTube. It is going to be a remarkable facility indeed! I was very pleased to see that among with all of the new ultra modern library technologies (including an Apple-like “Genius Bar”), the new library will still have a “Collections Wing” with a “Browsable Books” area where its patrons can wander among shelves of very real physical books and browse for good reads. Being the gadget geek I am, you all might be surprised to learn I don’t yet own a Kindle or equivalent dedicated reader device. I don’t know exactly what it is, but for me there is nothing digital that replaces the authentic experience of reading with a real dog eared tome in hand. Don’t get me wrong, I love Google books, and a Kindle is probably a much more practical form factor if you need to lug the equivalent of a box of books with you on a trip somewhere. However, to truly experience a good read, I still prefer the old fashioned media.
I’ve embedded the youtube video above. You can read more about the new Mary Idema Pew Library Learning and Information Commons here.
Must follow twitter lists for you mobile junkies!
Posted on | November 4, 2009 | 1 Comment
Twitter now let's you organize your favorite tweeters into lists. A very handy way to add some order to the tweet chaos.
The new “list” feature on Twitter is fantastic! Basically, twitter follow lists lets you the user organize your twitter friends into meaningful lists to share with others. This morning I started organizing various lists relating to mobile technology that I thought would be of interest to others. So far, I’ve put together the following lists:
- Mobile Manufacturers: Every manufacturer of consumer mobile devices I am aware of that has an official and active twitter presence. This includes their main corporate twitter accounts as well as specialized twitter accounts (e.g. mobile products business units, developer communities, etc.)
- Mobile Operators: Every mobile operator/service provider I am aware of that has an active twitter account. At the moment this list has a North American bias to it. Eventually, I’ll get around to creating similar lists for other markets.
- Mobile Techies & Bloggers: This is perhaps the most interesting list – everybody out there that I’ve encountered so far on twitter whom I think has something interesting to say about mobile. I tried to be discerning here as there are a lot of people who are tweeting about mobile. I didn’t not limit myself to folks in the USA, but I did try to limit it to those who tweet primarily in the English language. I’ll keep tweaking this as we go. I’m sure I’ve overlooked a few obvious folks here… sorry in advance.
This is still very much work in progress, but if you’re a mobile junkie, eavesdropping on these lists should help you very quickly tune into the tweets that matter. I’ll be adding some addition mobile-related categories in the future. If you find this useful, a retweet would be greatly appreciated!
Do mobile app stores have a future?
Posted on | October 30, 2009 | 1 Comment
Google Latitude is available on your iPhone via Safari (e.g. a web app) and not as a native app. The browser requests the user for permission to access the phone's location API.
This morning I came across this interesting and well-written article on the current state of affairs with regard to mobile app stores. I think the author’s forward looking comments are reasonable if you limit your outlook to a year or two, but there are a couple of things to consider with regard to app stores in the long term. First, the common presupposition made is that app stores will remain a relevant if not primary way users obtain apps for their phone. From a purely technical perspective I would suggest we should not ignore the possibility that rich Internet apps eventually begin to displace the need for native app installs, and eventually the need for mobile app stores. As HTML5 continues to evolve and the underlying mobile platform becomes more accessible to web app developers, what advantage is there in downloading an app, especially when the data seems to suggest that mobile app retention rates are surprising low (25% on average!)? It seems to me that web-based apps make perfect sense for a very large number of mobile apps that today are typically one-shots from the end user perspective. Here at MASL our students have already built some very clever iPhone apps entirely in Safari. Once a shortcut is added to the home screen it is indeed very difficult for the average user to discern whether or not its a native app or a web app. (We intend to do the equivalent of a “Pepsi Challenge” to actually measure this – look for more details in the future.) Google Latitude on the iPhone is an early example of using the browser as an alternative to iTunes App Store.
That brings us to our second point. From a commercial perspective, Google is shaping up to becoming a pivotal stakeholder in the future mobile application ecosystem. As I pointed out a while back, its raining Androids this Fall. (For a much more up-to-date and complete listing of confirmed and rumored Android devices see the list that TechCrunch recently compiled.) Every Android device I’ve used to-date requires you to become a Google citizen (you need to authenticate with a Google account or create one if you don’t have one) before you can use the device, and from that point on your mobile device is very tightly integrated with the Google cloud, and all the data and services you know and love (email, calendar, maps, search, etc.) are accessible from your mobile without the user installing anything. It makes perfect sense for Google to gradually nudge the mobile application ecosystem towards a model in which the browser is the primary vehicle for third party application providers to access and integrate with Google services and data in the cloud. This also makes a lot of sense for the end user given the current app usage patterns and in the end seems to raise some interesting questions about the long-term viability of the mobile app store model.
Mobile testing madness
Posted on | October 16, 2009 | No Comments
I saw a couple of interesting videos this week that are worth taking a look at. The first one is about testing mobile application. So if you have an app that targets a multiplicity of handsets, all with different form factors, technical specs, and service providers, how can you go about testing your apps? Its simply not feasible to acquire all the phones you need to test on, and even if you could you’d still have to worry about setting up service plans, etc. Worse yet, perhaps you’re targeting a non-local market and want to test your app abroad on a particular carrier, etc.
The MOTODEV guys recently interviewed David Marsyla of DeviceAnywhere.com. David’s company offers the “ultimate mobile application testing platform”. Basically they have a network of over 2000 shared devices world-wide that they make accessible to developers via remote access. So in theory you could test your app on any device, on networks anywhere in the world without leaving your desk.
The second video was posted by Engadget and involves stress testing the actual mobile phones themselves. The video is footage they took in Nokia’s product test lab in California. You’ll see them inflicting all kinds of serious misuse on the devices using an interesting array of robotic technology and other test apparatuses in an attempt to simulate the sorts of misuse you all inflict on your phones over the course of time. Makes for an interesting video.
The full engadget posting is here.
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About
Jonathan Engelsma is a computer scientist, programmer, teacher, mobile technology enthusiast, inventor, and life long student. He is currently an Associate Professor in GVSU's School of Computing, where he leads the GVSU Mobile Applications and Services Laboratory.
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