We released ShopSavvy in the US and UK in October. The rest of the world started complaining soon after, “Why can’t we get ShopSavvy?” We have heard you and we are doing something about it. Soon ShopSavvy will be available worldwide in localized format (i.e. translated with support for local currency). In the meantime, ANYONE-ANYWHERE, can download the beta and load it on their phone. Jailbroke G1? No problem. No SIM? No problem. ShopSavvy for everyone:
Who goes to a restaurant and says, “Just give me something to stop my hunger?” Eating out is more about the experience than it is about the food. Hell, why else would my sister pay $46 for 12 cupcakes? And they were the biggest hit at my wife’s baby shower. “They’re gourmet!” she explains.
With software, User Experience is king, especially in the mobile space. Look how users use their phones. They pull it out of their pocket, do something real quick and then quickly put it away. In a mobile setting, people’s patience is at a record low. Most of the possible actions they may do are so trivial that it’s not worth their time to endure a slow connection or scroll through a bunch of garbage. They’re not writing a paper or conducting research. They’re just looking up sport scores or just checking up on their friends. It their app doesn’t perform well, not a whole lot is lost by just giving up.
Here are a few philosophies we try to adhere to when building our mobile apps.
Trim the Fat
Show the user just enough information to get the job done and nothing extra. In a mobile setting, less is more. If they needed the whole story, they wouldn’t be using a three inch screen. Everything else is clutter.
The 80/20 Rule
Aim to serve 80% of your customers very well and ignore the cries of the other 20%. “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody” – Bill Cosby. We’ve gotten multiple requests to support scanning lotto tickets. Suddenly our elevator pitch would become unnecessarily complex.
Responsiveness
Every millisecond counts. It’s amazing what small amounts of lag can do towards killing the User Experience. Whether it’s lag in a network response or lag in an animation, immediate feedback keeps the user engaged and feeling in control. After scanning a barcode, ShopSavvy will start showing you prices before it’s finished searching for them. This approach prevents us from having to disengage the user for 10 seconds with a “Please Wait” screen. As it turns out, users don’t mind watching the price gradually drop over a few seconds. It’s even kind of fun.
Fun is a Requirement
Users’ attention spans are at an all time low on a mobile device. But I’ve seen people flick their home screen from left to right for minutes at a time. This accomplishes nothing! Why would someone choose to do that instead of interacting with some useful apps? Same reason eating out isn’t about feeding your body. It’s about how it’s done and why is it special. Users have told us that they can’t help but scan every barcode in sight. Scanning a barcode and hearing that beep is surprisingly gratifying. The “fun” aspect encourages continued-use.
The next time you select a restaurant, try to decipher why you chose it. Does it have the cheapest food? Probably not. Is the food the best tasting? Maybe, but I doubt that’s the whole story. Sprinkles Cupcakes puts a 30 cent cupcake on a fancy doily and calls it gourmet, “that’ll be $3.25.” You’re not paying for food, you’re paying for the experience. The best way to add value to your mobile app is by enhancing the User Experience. Write Gourmet Software (TM).
We have talked about UPC spam before. Retailers aren’t perfect. Sometimes they will enter the UPC of one item in exchange for another and as a result we will show the wrong item and price for that UPC. Instead of sending us an email saying, “I scanned chips and got a DVD!” How about pulling up the history tab and email us the UPC that you scanned as well as what you thought you were scanning and what actually came up. If you do this we will be able to ‘fix’ the data – i.e. exclude the wrong result and ban the bad actor from our system.
Please note that MANY users do not notice that ShopSavvy shows both New and Used item prices. If you select a Used price and then click through to the link on Amazon or another site with Used items you will need to do a second search on the retailer’s website for ‘best used price’ to find the same price ShopSavvy reported.
So please, help us keep ShopSavvy accurate – report bad UPCs or prices immediately. We WILL get the out of the system ASAP.
For those of you who are brave we have released ShopSavvy Beta 3.0.4. This release resolves a number of problems/bugs/issues our users have uncovered. Sign-up here (again, the Beta is not for novice users):
The main problem this version fixes is the wishlist overload issue. We had NO idea users would add more than 100 items to a wishlist. We assumed 5-10-15 items at most and as a result we never tested how the application would behave if you added more than 100. Now, you can add as many items as you like (well at least 120 items – we didn’t test over that number). Good luck.
I was reading Fast Company’s post titled, ‘Most Popular Android Apps for November 2008‘. Medialets created their own ordering (i.e. not the order of popularity Google uses):
So, if you look at applications by popularity in the Android Market you will find that The Weather Channel is the MOST popular application. MySpace comes in third and Pac Man isnt near the top. ShopSavvy (our application and why I care) is second. Medialets wont’ return our calls and I have confirmed they are not getting any inside intel from Google or T-Mobile. Their numbers are bunk. Anyone from Medialets care to comment? Love to chat further!
UPDATE: So Eric Litman the CEO from Medialets called me no less than 24 minutes after I posted this (Woot to Eric and Medialets). He explained that they are pulling numbers from the ‘download range’ instead of the application popularity page from the Market. I can understand how his team came up with the rankings – i.e. Pac-Man on top, but I think this has more to do with quirks in the market. I didn’t pull my punches with the title of this post, maybe I should chill out a little – sorry Eric. Application popularity as defined by downloads can be easily pulled up by selecting Market, then All Applications and then Sort by Popularity. Here is the list:
The Weather Channel
ShopSavvy
MySpace Mobile
US Yellow Pages (really?)
Free Dictionary
Ringdroid
DailyHoroscope
CompareEverywhere
Backgrounds and
Imeem Music
Movies and Shoptimes
Barcode Scanner
Shazam
WikiMobile Encyclopedia
Pro Basketball
VIdeo Player
Pro Footbal Live
AK Notepad
PicSay
AccuWeather.com
Bartender
Flashlight
Tanslate
fBook – Facebook
Power Manager
Stopwatch
T-Mobile HotSpot
Mobile Banking
Restaurant Guide
Note Pad
Weather Bug
Pkt Auctions eBay
OI Notepad
College Football Live
Voice Recoder
Tip Calculator
Rings Extended
Magic 8-Ball
and so on…
Just to be clear, I did not try to contact Medialets today. When I said, “Medialets won’t return our calls…” I was referring to calls I made to the company back in October when they wrote a post titled, “Android Market Unleshed“. The post talked about the ‘Drivers of Android Market’ relative to downloads and popularity, but failed to mention our application at all. I was annoyed and called the company – calls that we were never returned. Here was the graphic that failed to include ShopSavvy despite the fact that we were number 2:
I even posted a comment to their post, but they did not moderate it (i.e. it never appeared). So when I saw that they had another ‘popularity post’ that didn’t accurately reflect the current standings in the market I felt like I had to post my thoughts.
We do interviews about ShopSavvy and our company almost daily and the most common question is, “Why is your company called Big in Japan”. I figured it was worth a post.
The phrase ‘Big in Japan’, according to Wikipedia, “was originally a scornful phrase applied to rock bands that failed to sell many records in the US and the UK. During the 1960s and 70s, Japanese pop culture was not yet considered very cool in the English-speaking world. Thus, though a band might have tens of thousands of Japanese fans, it was not considered truly successful: the band was only big in Japan.” Of course, by the early 90′s Japan had become cool and everyone wanted to be big in japan so the phrase lost its original meaning.
Now that we have the origin covered, I will give you some of the reasons that had nothing to do with the name. First, some of you have asked, “was the name inspired by Tom Waits…?” Nope David, I had no idea Tom even sang a song called Big in Japan, but thanks for the new reference:
Others have asked how long ShopSavvy has been available in Japan; I assume they think our company is Japanese. Our application is only available in the US and the UK currently and none of us have even been to Japan. However, we will be in Tokyo meeting with NTT DoCoMo for our Japanese rollout in a month or so.
The next favorite question is whether not we named the company after the Alphaville song – Big in Japan. Of course, the song is burned into my subconscious; becoming popular in the U.S. in the late 80′s. But, no we didn’t really think about the song when we named the company.
Fewer people remember the punk band from Liverpool called Big in Japan, but no, we didn’t name it after them either.
The real reason is rather silly. A colleague and I were sitting in a hotel in San Francisco during the Web 2.0 conference a few years ago after listening to Sky Dayton talk about how everything related to cell phones was “Big in Korea”. We had an interview with INC magazine later that day and needed a name for our tool business. I said, “how about Big in Japan?” Thinking that it would look cool on t-shirts we went with it. More than a year later we combined our consulting (WeblogsWork) and our tool business (Big in Japan) and during a conversation with new hire he said something that convinced me we should dump WeblogsWork in favor of Big in Japan. He said, “Whenever I tell anyone that I work for Big in Japan they smile” I thought, ‘what better reason could we possibly have for choosing a name?’
Earlier this year we refocused our business for a third time and the name seemed to make even more sense – i.e. since mobile phones are so much bigger in Japan than they are here in the US. I wish I had a better reason, but that is it. It was a split second decision that stuck.
P.S. The domain we use ‘biggu’.com is the Japanese word for Big. Of course I wish we had biginjapan.com, but I have never been able to get the owners to call me back.
We are planning to launch in Europe early next year. We are adding retailers as quickly as possible, but we need some help. Our launch plans include UK, Germany, Austria, Poland, Czech Republic and Holland. What do you think? Give us a hand?
ShopSavvy generates lots of interesting data. For example, someone asked us if we could produce two reports a) what items are available through ShopSavvy (i.e. distribution based on product category) and b) what items are users actually scanning based on product category. Here are the results:
According to Brandon, a ShopSavvy user from Detroit, tells this story:
I saved money using shop savvy. I used shop savvy to search for an item and used the mapping to locate sam’s club and go! when i got there i found the items was priced higher. so i took it up to the counter and scanned it in front of the manager. confounded that such technology even existed he matched the price and i saved ten dollars. target on the other hand wasn’t so friendly. they said it was against the rules for customers to scan items with their phones. (once they found out what i was doing) if they would’ve cooperated instead of making up new policies i would’ve saved more money.
I called the Target he visited (27300 Dequindre Rd. Warren, MI 586-573-4200) and talked to the store manager, Debbie, who indicated that she wasn’t aware of the policy. I asked her if she could check as I wanted to let our users know if they weren’t allowed to scan items in her store. She put me on hold for several minutes as she called her manager who indicated that whoever told Brandon he couldn’t use ShopSavvy was simply wrong.
Note: Everyone writes Shop Savvy instead of ShopSavvy. Should we just give up and go with the flow or stick with ShopSavvy?
