People appreciate mobile apps that feel as though they were designed expressly for the device. For example, when an app fits well on the device screen and responds to the gestures that people know, it provides much of the experience people are looking for. And, although people might not be aware of human interface design principles, such as direct manipulation or consistency, they can tell when apps follow them and when they don’t.

A great user experience is rooted in your attention to detail.

The user experience of iOS-based devices revolves around streamlined interaction with content that people care about. Below are Apple’s 27 guidelines for mobile UX design:

1. Focus on the Primary Task
2. Elevate the Content that People Care About
3. Think Top Down
4. Give People a Logical Path to Follow
5. Make Usage Easy and Obvious
6. Use User-Centric Terminology
7. Minimise the Effort Required for User Input
8. Downplay File-Handling Operations
9. Enable Collaboration and Connectedness
10. De-emphasise Settings
11. Brand Appropriately
12. Make Search Quick and Rewarding
13. Entice and Inform with a Well-Written Description
14. Be Succinct
15. Use UI Elements Consistently
16. Consider Adding Physicality and Realism
17. Delight People with Stunning Graphics
18. Handle Orientation Changes
19. Make Targets Fingertip-Size
20. Use Subtle Animation to Communicate
21. Support Gestures Appropriately
22. Ask People to Save Only When Necessary
23. Make Modal Tasks Occasional and Simple
24. Start Instantly
25. Always Be Prepared to Stop
26. Don’t Quit Programmatically
27. If Necessary, Display a License Agreement or Disclaimer

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• Control exactly how much you spend
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If you have a handset that is network locked,  find out about unlocking your iPhone 4S.  Or find out the top 5 places to buy an unlocked handset.

 

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Information and comparisons on additional handsets, can be found at PAYGvsContract.com.

Wonga, the controversial high-cost, short-term lender, is planning to offer a wider range of financial services, including savings, this year.

Errol Damelin, co-founder of the company, said banks performed an important role in providing a safe place to deposit money and carry out transactions, but added: "We want to innovate around the edges of that and add value. We think we can. We think there are some places where technology can be used to deliver much better service."

And, in a move that may alarm parents, Wonga is intending to get involved with improving financial literacy for children this year, doing something "innovative and educational" in a digital capacity, says Damelin.

"Kids need to know what all the credit alternatives are and equally they should know about saving."

Wonga launched just over four years ago with one product – a short-term loan for consumers which could be approved within 15 minutes and delivered into the applicant's bank account within half an hour. It has since advanced 4m loans, worth £1bn, and launched into the small-business loans market earlier this week.

Damelin likens the company's development to that of Amazon, which "started with books, but it's not just selling books now. The end point for us is being a really meaningful, relevant business in financial services. It's being the Amazon of financial services."

However, Damelin would not reveal what new services he has planned and a sticking point could be that the company does not have the banking licence which it would need to take deposits. The Financial Services Authority says it takes nine months on average to approve applications.

Wonga has attracted considerable criticism for the high cost of its consumer loans, for which it charges 4,214% annual representative rate (APR). The risk-based interest rates on its small-business loans range from 16.6% equivalent annual rate (EAR) to 109% EAR, substantially higher than the rates charged on small-business loans provided by banks or peer-to-peer lenders.

However, Damelin claims critics are wrong to focus on cost, and that for small-business owners, speed, availability and complexity are often more important. Likewise for retail consumers, price often isn't the main determinant: "You don't always buy the cheapest [cooking] oil, or the cheapest shoes."

He even blames the "obsession" with pricing as one of the causes of the credit crunch, saying "there has been a nuclear arms race to the bottom on pricing". This has been to the detriment of cash-strapped consumers, who have ended up subsidising current account banking for wealthier customers.

Damelin appears quite calm when asked if he understands why Wonga is so vilified, and inspires so much wrath among Guardian readers in particular for making money out of people on low incomes. "I understand the concerns that people have with credit providers in general. One of the reasons I started the business was because I share many of the concerns that people have.

"But we do, as a society, want access to credit delivered in a responsible way … There's real demand from people – and businesses – for help in spreading the costs that they incur. Without that ability, then you might not have the opportunity for anybody who isn't very wealthy to get access to things like education, fixing a car that breaks down or entertainment."

He says he does "have issues" with how a lot of companies in the short-term lending industry, which includes pawnbrokers, payday and doorstep lenders, lend money. These include a lack of transparency on costs and terms, the rolling over of loans, resulting in the borrower owing huge amounts, and keeping people in permanent debt.

He's not the only one – the 200 firms which comprise the short-term, high-cost lending industry are now the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Office of Fair Trading.

Damelin believes the quality of short-term lending could immediately be improved if lenders provided the main credit reference agencies, Experian, Equifax and Callcredit, with details of loans and customers. This would enable the lenders to share data and immediately identify if someone was borrowing beyond their ability to repay. Wonga turns down two-thirds of applicants after its computer systems have analysed around 8,000 pieces of data to assess their ability to repay.

Wonga advertises prolifically, spending an estimated £16m in 2011. It sponsors all three CSI series and The Mentalist on Channel 5, using the Rawhide theme tune for its commercial radio ads, and plastering buses throughout London. Damelin denies that the pensioner puppets used for its TV promotions are helping to sanitise an industry that has been described by one MP as "legal loan sharking".

The company sponsors Blackpool and Heart of Midlothian football teams and advertises on football clubs' websites, leading one Northampton Town fan to start a campaign for its ads to be removed.

It has earned opprobrium from parents for running its adverts during children's programmes. One Guardian reader wrote: "Amid the ads for children's toys was a totally cynical ad aimed at hard-pressed parents for the loan company Wonga.com. [Its APR] is the kind of figure likely to propel the most disadvantaged families into the arms of the debt collectors, and perhaps even into homelessness. I suppose it is legal for them to advertise this on children's TV, but I'm sure it shouldn't be."

Damelin pointed out that children could not apply for loans, but added: "It's important that kids get educated about credit. I think they are hiding people from the reality that credit is a really important part of society … It's just naive in this day and age to think that people don't need to know about credit.

Wonga claims, probably quite correctly, that many consumers are confused over the pricing of credit and savings interest, having little or no understanding of annual percentage rates (APR) or equivalent annual rates, while some of the most expensive forms of borrowing including overdrafts need not display these measures at all.

Damelin believes APR and EARs should be scrapped and a single measure introduced allowing borrowers to compare products on a like for like basis, rather like the unit prices used in supermarkets to describe how much 100ml of olive oil or 100g of chocolate cost.

He points to the company's net promoter score — a measure of customer satisfaction developed by Harvard Business School. This asks how likely are you to recommend this service to a friend or family, allowing a company track its own performance over time and to compare itself against peers. Damelin said: "Most of the banks in the UK are negative. The Co-op has a score in the 20s while First Direct has one in the 40s — that's a good number. Wonga, at 73%, is in Google and Apple territory, and most of the time we're ahead of these guys."

Quasi controversial soundbite after quasi controversial soundbite.

Little late night snack cc @grumblemouse @unicornology

11.00 pm 4/18/2012 Hawksmoor Spitalfields - Steakhouse and Cocktail Bar Repost this

Cheeseburger, Chilli Cheese Dog, Chicken Wings, Shortrib Nuggets, Tamworth Laab, Triple Cooked Chips, Oxtail Poutine, Jalapeño Coleslaw, and Smashed Cucumbers. Mmmmm.

While he was still alive, my dear old Dad was regularly convinced that he had discovered “the secret of golf”.

Although after he died, his interest somewhat tailed off.

He died many years ago, I should explain. But he’d been a single figure handicap player, and he was obsessed with minute adjustments to his grip or stance or swing.

I wasn’t the least bit interested in the game,  so his observations meant nothing to me. For all I know he may have hit upon the actual secret just before he died, but if that’s the case, nobody will ever know.

And golfers around the world will just carry on hacking, cursing and stomping their way through some of the loveliest landscapes in the world.

In a similar way I find myself obsessed with finding the “secret of advertising”, a process that I am convinced can guarantee outstanding creative work while also producing disproportionate results in the real world.

(Picking up the average creative award has less to do with this ambition than ordering a wet raspberry latte in a shoe shop.)

In the last week I’ve had lots of meetings about Decoded, tea with my old HHCL partner Rupert Howell, given a talk to 100 people with CMW, had coffee with an anthropology student who wants to break into advertising, got into a very interesting debate with Tim Lindsay, had lunch with Glyn Britton of Albion, had a drink with Alex Wipperfurth who runs a lovely agency in SFC, had coffee with Zoe Osmond of Nabs and lunch with Zoe Bell of Grace Blue, helped an agency who wanted to get onto the Adidas shortlist, had tea with Rufus Olins, had lunch with a documentary film-maker  and oh I don’t know a few other things as well.

And I think I’ve finally cracked it.

The answer came in a process described by Glyn Britton, as we ate pie and mash in a converted shipping crate. (You’ve got to be down with the kids in Shoreditch and that’s where everybody is eating these days. Restaurants per se are rather last decade in Silicon T-junction.)

The actual process is described fully in Glyn’s blog on the Albion web-site but I’ll try to summarise it here.

You create several bits of work that break the rules (“light lots of fires”, as Mark Earls has succinctly put it), then test them out online by creating Minimum Viable Products (which you can put on Facebook or Youtube or wherever you like, really),  then use the very advanced metrics now available to fast-track the ideas which have real energy.

It may sound obvious, but how does it compare to the process your agency is currently using ?

It does away with waste-of-time-and-money research,  it encourages stand-out work, and it delivers metrics so that the process can be inclusive in a company rather than the  shielded-behind-the-hands procedure of working with a lone maverick.

Using this process, Glyn and a team at Albion produced the outstanding film of Keith Harris and Orville doing a hommage to Eminem for giffgaff.

 

There were various breakthrough bits of thinking along the way  – including using the plight of a battery hen as an analogy for being trapped in a phone contract – and I was lucky enough to be in various appropriate rooms as this project evolved. But the final masterstroke of using a stuffed duck to illustrate the plight of the battery hen, sadly wasn’t mine.

(Although, to the casual observer, I’m the only person linked to the agency who’s remotely old enough to remember Keith Harris in his prime.)

If the idea sounds complicated, then maybe that’s how you would have killed it if you’d been in a meeting discussing it -  indeed, I’m convinced that in a more “normal” process, it would have been killed exactly like that at some stage or another . But fortunately this process rides roughshod over such sliding tackles, like Lionel Messi carving his way through a couple of half-arsed retreating Albanian half-backs.

You just have to trust metrics,  more than the usual uninformed and over-cautious subjectivity which passes for creative judgement in this industry.

And this leaves just one question begging.

Should one keep the left shoulder perfectly still through the back-swing ?

Glyn, I feel, might know the answer.

Flight BA2012: pop-up airline food flies in to Shoreditch

Posted at 10:00 am, March 19, 2012 in Food & Drink

The air hostess pop-up restaurant is not a new phenomenon – we first reported on Ms Rubbernurse’s ‘Era Flot’ pop-up in 2010. But Era Flot’s just been seriously upstaged by… British Airways. That’s right, the nation’s favourite airline in running a pop-up restaurant in Shoreditch, based around the flight experience, and looking like the inside of an aircraft, called Flight BA2012. At £50 per head, this is most expensive in-flight meal we’ve heard of – but then they’ve got a proper chef (Simon Hulstone) preparing a menu overseen by Heston Blumenthal. Why is BA launching this self-parody, you might wonder? It’s to publicise BA’s status as the official Olympic airline. Hulstone and Blumenthal have created a special menu that will be available on first-class BA flights during the Olympic months, and this same menu will be served at the Flight 2012 pop-up. £50 buys you three courses of dishes ‘inspired by BA menus dating back to 1948’, apparently. The big catch is that you need to book via Facebook, seats are limited, and  tickets go on sale on Monday March 19. Flight BA2012 runs from April 4 to April 17 only. Guy Dimond  

 Book now at British Airways Facebook.

Tags: BA, british airways, Flight BA2012, Olympics, pop-up restaurant, shoreditch, Simon Hulstone

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