Categories
Tools

The state of UI and Interaction Prototyping tools in 2015

UI design

The UI design process has changed radically over the past few years. With the addition of innumerous tools for wireframing and prototyping, designers are spoilt for choice. Which is the best tool to use?

One thing is for sure, static designs simply won’t cut it any more. A designer ought to employ animation and interactive elements to stand-out from the crowd, now more than ever.

Why Prototype?

A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process or to act as a thing to be replicated or learned from.

The most obvious reason to incorporate prototyping in your design process is the ability to evaluate the interaction pattern before moving to development phase. This is extremely important especially for mobile applications, where implementing an advanced animation or interaction usually takes a significant amount of time compared to desktop websites. Prototyping will solve your design problems before they even arise.

The other major reason is to enhance intercommunication between designers and developers. While an animation might be very clear in the designer’s mind, a developer will often struggle to actually visualise and implement it. That’s where prototyping comes into play. Instead of trying to verbally explain how the UI design should look or feel like, the designer can use a visual prototyping tool to communicate to the development team exactly what they have in mind.

Flow Prototyping

The most basic form of prototyping that every designer needs to know is flow prototyping, which can be used to create an interactive and functional screen-to-screen prototype. Flow prototyping can help showcase a product and thus act as the basis of communication between designers and developers.

What you should look for in a proper flow prototyping tool is ease-of-use, speed, collaboration features (e.g. user/team management, comments), and version history.

Invision & Marvel

For basic screen-to-screen prototyping, the two most popular choices are InvisionApp and MarvelApp. Both apps allow designers and product teams to quickly come up with working prototypes for their web or mobile applications by simply uploading screens (or working designs), adding hotspots and transitions from one page to another, and forming solid prototypes that can be used for collaboration and/or developer handoffs.

invision-screenshot

A large amount of transitions between screens is provided out-of-the-box, therefore allowing users to create high-fidelity prototypes with an extremely easy-to-use interface that requires little to no learning time. It’s worth noting however, that none of these apps provide a way to transition or animate individual elements of the UI (with the exception of the overlay feature of Invision that can mimic such behaviors up to a point).

In terms of collaboration, Invision is a clear winner because of its sharing options, user and team management, project management tools, and moodboards. However, the Invision free plan allows for one project only, as opposed to Marvel which has an unlimited projects free plan and is perfect for designers who are just looking for a tool to get the job done without a price.

UI Design: Advanced Interaction Prototyping

When it comes to advanced screen transitions or in-screen animations and interactions, Invision and Marvel are not enough. Τools like Framer, Principle, Quartz Composer and Form make advanced interaction prototyping easy for designers and developers.

Principle

Principle is probably one of the easiest-to-use tools out there, giving designers the ability to create high-fidelity prototypes in a very short period of time, with the great addition of a timeline viewer for better animation handling. If you’ve ever used Keynote for prototyping, you’ll find yourself at home, with an out-of-the-box “Magic Move” transition as well as a variety of tools for advanced transition handling.

Integration with Sketch is excellent, allowing direct copy-paste of layers and groups, which saves time from importing/exporting particular elements – a time-consuming, repetitive task most designers prefer to avoid.

principle-screenshot

Framer

Framer is one of the most advanced prototyping tools out there, mainly because it’s based on code. Unlike Principle, there is no fancy WYSIWYG editor and Drag & Drop interface.

All the interactions and animations are done through CoffeeScript/JavaScript. This naturally results in a steeper learning curve, but on the bright side it means designers can prototype pretty much anything they like.

http://share.framerjs.com/a0aaba2lyu5l/

Framer has a very strong community and an unending collection of examples and tutorials to learn from, which makes it one of the most solid tools for prototyping for people who aren’t afraid of code. It features integrations for both Photoshop and Sketch, allowing for easy asset importing straight from the designs. Prototypes can be viewed on an actual device as well, like all of the other popular tools out there.

Quartz Composer, Origami, Form

Besides purely code-based tools like Framer, and completely WYSIWYG tools like Principle, there is another set of tools that utilize the so-called Visual Programming or Node based Programming. Tools like Quartz Composer or RelativeWave Form (now acquired by Google) let users prototype through building blocks (called patches) that are connected through noodle-like arrows, in order to describe interaction and transitions between states. Although these tools have a much steeper learning curve than Principle, they also allow for more advanced animations and interactions between states – making them an alternative for code-based tools like Framer.

Summing it up

Product Company Cost Advanced animation features Requires coding skills Overall
Invision Invision Free for 1 project, up to 25$/mo for unlimited No No For quick flow prototypes and simple animations. Good collaboration features.
Marvel Marvel Free with limited features, up to 15$/mo No No For quick flow prototypes and simple animations.
Framer Framer 99$ one-off Yes Yes Very detailed prototypes. Steep learning curve. Based on code (Javascript/Coffeescript)
Principle Principle 99$ one-off Yes No Easy to create prototypes and export video. Uses a Visual/WYSIWYG Editor.
Quartz Composer Apple Free (included in the Xcode Development enviroment) Yes No Very detailed prototypes. Steep learning curve. Based on visual programming (nodes).
Form RelativeWave, acquired by Google Free Yes No Very detailed prototypes. Steep learning curve. Based on visual programming (nodes).

For the majority of designers who want basic UI flow prototyping and team collaboration, Invision or Marvel will cover most of their needs, while requiring little to no time to pick up and enabling them to start prototyping right away. When it comes to more advanced transitions and animations, Principle is an excellent choice, taking into account the exceptional ease-of-use and time needed to come up with a solid result. For even more advanced interactions designers can use either Framer if they’re into coding or a Node-based tool like Quartz/Origami or Form if that type of visual programming appeals to them.

One thing is for sure, modern designers should master prototyping and interaction design as soon as possible. Tools might change, but incorporating rapid prototyping and motion design in their workflow will change their perspective and potential and undoubtedly help them create outstanding experiences.

Categories
Languages

So… is HTML really a programming language?

Earlier this year we polled more than 13,000 developers during our biannual Developer Economics survey (updating now), and 11% of those developers told us that HTML is their primary development language – that’s Hypertext Markup Language to the uninitiated. This response immediately begs the question: can HTML really be considered a “programming language” at all, or if we should consign to being a tool for the layout of JavaScript functions?

promo

Which is your favourite programming language? Take the DE survey and be the judge of which language will sit on the throne.

Developers answering our survey were asked to pick from a list of languages, HTML5 was on that list, along with JavaScript and more-traditional languages including C and Java. Most programmers work in more than one language, so perhaps those who selected HTML5 as their primary language really meant that they were JavaScript programmers who used a lot of HTML? It’s a nice thought, but the idea breaks down when look at those additional languages and see that only 13% of those who said their primary language was HTML admitted to also using JavaScript, so how are these people creating applications?

14% said they also use ActionScript, which can also come wrapped in HTML, but 12% of those primarily using HTML said they also program in C/C++, which is a combination we’re unlikely to see in the same project.

HTML was never designed as a programming language – the original 18 tags permitted the most-basic of layout options. The only interesting tag was the hyperlink itself; the revolutionary concept that created the web as we now know it, the rest are trivial. HTML was based, loosely, on SGML, which is another bastard offspring of XML – the eXtensible Markup Language – but the key word across these is “markup”: all three are intended to provide syntactical data to accompany textual information*, not applications as we know them.

But HTML has come a very long way since then, and has capabilities we would normally associate with a development language. Drag and Drop, Geolocation, and Local Storage, are blurring the line between applications and web sites, allowing cross-platform development where the only way to spot the difference is the title bar at the top of the window (and sometimes not even then), and there are a host of applications which bear testament to the fact that HTML can be used to create real applications.

Zero Lines JS is a fine example. A graphical game, requiring the player to navigate their ship between approaching enemies at increasing speed to a suitably-irritating soundtrack. It might not be the next Watch Dogs, or even the next Candy Crush Saga, but it would be hard to deny that it is a real application and one which (as the name infers) is written entirely in HTML with a few Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Less gaudy is the aptly named “You Don’t Need JavaScript for That”, which demonstrates various techniques to accomplish programmatical tasks without recourse to programming languages. Examples include a tabbed panel (bringing content to the front based on the selected tab) and an image slideshow, all done entirely in HTML5.

Purists will moan, of course, that these examples don’t make it a “real” programming language, that HTML is nothing more than a markup language made to enrich documents, and there was a time when that was true. Developers aren’t as hierarchal as they used to be, but those closer to the metal still look down on those who’ve traded an intimate knowledge of the hardware for speed of development. C programmers consider objects to be unnecessary fluff, but concur with users of C++ that anything which isn’t run through a compiler is just improper (and that includes Java with its bytecode nonsense). Java programmers consider anything without proper encapsulation to be faking its object orientation, while JavaScript developers see no reason for strong typing, and consider HTML to be a layout tool.

Meanwhile those versed in Assembler look down from their ivory towers, stroke their beards, and concur that when performance really matters they will always get the gig.

But despite being at the bottom of the heap we can see that HTML5 is being used to create applications, and it must therefore be considered a programming language. We might argue whether validating a filled-out form constitutes an application, but when you can crash a spaceship into an oncoming armada then there’s little room for discussion.

At Vision Mobile we’re currently updating our survey, asking developers what language and tools they’re now using, including those who choose to program in HTML. It will be interesting to see if an increasing number think that the layout tool has evolved, or if a momentary fad is passing. Take a look at the survey, and use the feedback from at the end to let us know how you feel about HTML being included in the list of languages, and what you think might end up on that list next time.

* To be accurate, XML is intended to be a framework from which one can derive markup languages, but that’s not really pertinent here.

 

The Developer Economics survey is now Live.
Have your say in which should be the next most popular programming language and you may win amazing prizes and gear. Discover more.

Categories
Platforms

Self-driving cars are about platforms, not about cars

Transportation platforms

There is growing consensus that fully autonomous cars will become a reality by 2020. Google self-driving cars have driven over 1.2 million miles. Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, predicted in September 2015 that Tesla cars will have fully autonomous capability in 3 years. Zvi Aviram, CEO of MobileEye, a supplier of self-driving systems to many car makers, expects their technology will support fully autonomous driving by 2019.

Most traditional car makers still see autonomous driving as a feature of the car, rather than a market shift that will open the path to the creation of a completely new winner-takes-all industry. It’s just like PC makers focusing on adding connectivity to their products and missing the transition to the Internet platforms (Google Search, Amazon, Facebook). Or telecom operators focusing on adding always-on fast data connectivity to their networks and missing the transition to the mobile platforms (Google Android, Apple iOS).

Is the same about to happen in the car industry? Are car makers about to miss the transition to transportation platforms in the same way as PC makers missed the transition to Internet platforms and telecom operators missed the transition to mobile platforms?

The future transportation value stack will be very different from the existing automotive industry. It quite remarkable that only two companies, Google and Uber, are present in all layers of the stack that are necessary for creating a dominant transportation-as-a-service platform.

car-platforms-blog-image

The car hardware (the body, the power train, the wheels) increasingly becomes a commodity. Modern cars are good-enough for typical everyday use offering little opportunity for differentiation. Car commoditisation will only accelerate with the transition to electric vehicles. Electric vehicles are much simpler mechanically and easier to make, which opens the gates for new players, including such electronics and Internet services players like Apple, Google, LeTV and even Acer. It’s also notable that Tesla ‘open-sourced” their electric vehicle patents in 2014 pledging not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, uses Tesla’s technology.

Autonomous driving is about guiding the car along the road, following the rules while avoiding obstacles and crashes. It involves lots of sensors, computing power and sophisticated software, but the most important part here is the ‘data’. Self-driving systems are machine learning systems that are trained to evaluate the environment and make fast decisions on how to react.

The ‘data’ represents all the collective experience learned by multiple cars driving in test and real-world conditions. The more cars you have on the road and the more miles these cars have driven in all possible conditions, the more experienced, safe and precise the self-driving system becomes. Google is undisputed leader here having its fleet of test cars driven over 1 million miles. Tesla’s Autopilot feature introduced in October 2015 on Model S cars will allow Tesla to start training its self-driving system in real-life conditions on tens of thousands of cars.

Uber seem to be behind in terms of putting real self-driving cars on the roads. The company poached 40 researchers and engineers from the Carnegie Mellon’s robotics lab in March 2015 and partnered with University of Arizona on optics research for self-driving cars.

Navigation is about figuring out which roads and streets the car should drive on in order to get from point A to point B. Google is again is a clear leader here with Google Maps and Waze. A consortium of German carmakers (Audi, BMW and Daimler) is trying to uphold an alternative acquiring the Here Maps business from Nokia in August 2015 for $3.1 Billion. Uber also works to create a proprietary mapping platform winning independence from Google and Here Maps. The company acquired San Jose-based deCarta in March 2015, absorbed part of Microsoft Bing mapping assets in June 2015 and has partnered with TomTom in November 2015 to use its mapping and traffic data. (Is Microsoft about to miss the huge opportunity in the future automotive and transportation markets?)

Fleet routing this is where it gets much more interesting. Self-driving cars combined with Uber-style on-demand services make individual car ownership less and less attractive. Some people even claim that hardware-as-a-service is the end game for Tesla. The shared usage models will turn car market into something that looks like a public transport platform, where operators will match in real-time the demand for transportation with the location and the capacity of self-driving vehicles. In other words, fleet guidance is about deciding in real-time where every car needs to go. Which car needs go to a specific pick up point? Shall the car drive to where the demand is expected in the coming 15 minutes? What is the optimal time to recharge or refuel? When and where to go to do the service and maintenance? Where to park, and more.

This is a very complex computational problem to solve at the scale required to support fleets of thousands of self-driving cars. Bill Gurley, one of Uber’s early investors, gives a glimpse into how difficult it is in his blog explaining why UberPool is the new Uber’s “Big Hairy Audacious Goal.” (BHAG). UberPool helps the company to build capabilities that will be directly relevant for the optimal routing of large autonomous fleets.

I’m sure Google is not standing still here as well. Being a machine learning company, it has the scale and the technical depth to become the leader in this space. Add to that real-time bidding capabilities with extremely complex optimisations that Google has mastered for its online ad business. One can even argue that building such transportation platform is the reason for Google’s interest in self-driving cars.

It’s very difficult to see how traditional car makers will be able to compete with software-centric companies in this space.

Finally, the transportation platform is the most intriguing part of the value stack. Moving people around Uber-style is not the only use for self-driving cars. What else can we do with the fully autonomous fleet of robotic vehicles, given that they don’t not have to look as Uber or Google cars of today? These robotic vehicles can be specialized delivery vehicles (see this Domino’s Pizza car as a hint for how they may look like), small delivery drones like Transwheel or StarShip or even autonomous motorbikes, like Motobot by Yamaha.

The number of possibilities and applications for autonomous transportation is mind boggling. No single company, even as nimble and well-funded as Google or Uber, will be able to address all possible needs and use cases by themselves. The recipe for addressing these yet to be known needs and use cases is in plain sight. It is a platform connecting vehicle manufacturers, vehicle operators, service providers and application developers with users (much like Google did with Android).

The platform will harvest permissionless innovation by startups and developers to discover and deploy new services and applications we cannot even imagine today – in the same way that no one could predict Instagram, Snapchat or WeChat on smartphones. Uber already works with developers extending its service into a platform. Google also has a long history of relying on permissionless innovation by developers to win its competitive battles, from Google Maps to Android. It’s only natural that Google will use the same approach to dominate self-driving cars.

It’s still too early in the game to say which companies will dominate the future transportation market. One thing is a safe bet: The future transportation ecosystem will look very different from the existing automotive industry. It will resemble modern technology ecosystems with their platform business models, permissionless innovation by developers, and domination of software-centric companies.

Categories
Business

What we’ve learned by designing 10 developer surveys

The question in question is the question of questions

This week we launched our tenth biannual developer survey – asking thousands of developers around the world what they’re working on and how they’re doing it. If you’re involved in software development, in any way, then go and fill it out – it will only take you fifteen minutes and I’ll wait here while you do.

Answers are easy. It’s asking the right questions which is hard.
Doctor Who – the fourth one

At VisionMobile we spend a lot of time composing questions, especially when we’re compiling a survey like this one. The process sounds easy enough – phrasing 30 questions we’d like answered to provide insight into the developer ecosystem, but it turns out to be a surprising challenge.

promo

For a start we have to create a lot more than 30 questions: the survey tailors itself to ask each person about the industry in which they work, based in the first round of questions. The survey can thus be designed to last around fifteen minutes, but the whole industry can be covered.

Some questions we repeat every six months, choice of language, mobile platforms, and so forth, so we can spot developing trends, but sometimes an old question will need new options as the industry changes. A year ago we added Swift to our language list, and were surprised to see how quickly it had gained popularity, now we’ll be waiting to see if that growth has been sustained and at what cost.

Other questions are created from scratch: the technology behind the Internet of Things might not be entirely new, but the developer interest is. For the first time we’re asking about Open Source in IoT, drilling down to see how this new industry is evolving.

After the questions are written the task is far from over, for once the words are down then the “discussions” can begin. How many options should be listed? Which toolkits are worthy of mention? Whose products should be used as examples? How many IDEs can one developer realistically use? VisionMobile employs experts in many fields; with practical experience developing software and an intimate knowledge of the challenges involved, but like most developers these people are driven by a passion for their subject, and have strong opinions on the tools and techniques they consider important. The survey has to be impartial so we try to ensure that all the experts are equally unhappy, for balance.

Software development is a global industry these days, so the survey has to reach a global audience. Once the questions have been written, discussed, dismantled, and rebuilt to a mutually-acceptable level of dissatisfaction, then they have to be translated into almost a dozen languages, always ensuring that the clarity of the original remains intact.

Designing developer surveys once more

And then it is done. Perhaps not quite a joy forever, as Keats would have it, but certainly a thing of utility. Questions laid out, check boxes ready to be checked, radio buttons ready to be… radioed(?). Everything waiting for the thousands of developers such as you (what do you mean you haven’t done it yet? Get over there now, this minute). They are drawn by the desire to contribute to the project, or get access to some of the results, or win a prize in the draw, or just know that their opinion matters to the companies and organisations which will be referring to the data over the next six months before the whole process kicks off again.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet asserted that “To be, or not to be” was “the question”, but in these days of Continuous Delivery the questions will never end, and we have turn to a pair of Hamlet’s school friends (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with the help of Tom Stoppard) to see where that might lead us:

Categories
Business

App Usage Surpasses TV: Traditional Media Companies Slowly Wake Up

We spend a lot of time on our mobile phones (that’s no surprise). But, what’s changing yearly about the way we use these devices? Simon Khalaf, Flurry’s CEO, wrote an interesting post that breaks down the above question and much more:

Last year, on the eve of the sixth anniversary of the mobile revolution, Flurry issued our annual report on the mobile industry. In that report, we analyzed time spent on a mobile device by the average American consumer. We ran the same analysis in Q2 of this year and found interesting trends we are sharing in this report.

After putting the desktop web in the rear view mirror in Q2 2011, and eclipsing television in Q4 2014, mobile and its apps have cemented their position as the top media channel and grabbed more time spent from the average American consumer. In Q2 of 2015, American consumers spent, on average, 3 hrs and 40 minutes per day on their mobile devices. That is a 35% increase in time spent from one year ago and a 24% increase from Q4 2014. In just six short months, the average time American consumers spend on their phones each day increased by 43 minutes.

mobile-time-spent

To put things in perspective, there are 175 million Americans with at least one mobile device. This means that, in aggregate, since November 2014, the US connected population is spending an extra 125 million hours per day on mobile devices. This growth rate is especially astonishing after seven consecutive growth years.

The Browser: Sidelined

Looking at the chart above, today only 10% of the time spent on mobile is spent in the browser, down from 14% a year ago. The rest of the time, 90%, is spent in apps. Effectively, the browser has been sidelined on mobile. This has major implications on the digital industry in general and the content and media industry in particular. Historically, the media industry has relied almost entirely on search for user and traffic acquisition, building entire teams around SEO and SEM on the desktop web. But search engines are predominantly accessed from a browser. If mobile users aren’t using browsers, the media industry will have to look for new approaches to content discovery and traffic acquisition.

The Media Industry: Absorbed by Apps

The chart below takes a closer look at app categories. Social, Messaging and Entertainment apps (including YouTube), account for 51% of time spent on mobile.

app-distribution

Entertainment (including YouTube) grew from 8% of time spent last year, or 13 minutes per day, to 20% of time spent, or 44 minutes per day this year. This is 240% growth year-over-year, or an extra 31 minutes. That is more than the time it would take to watch an additional TV sitcom for every US consumer, every day!

gaming-loses-ground

Messaging and Social apps grew from 28% of time spent last year or 45 minutes per day to 31% of time spent or slightly more than 68 minutes per day this year. This is a 50% year-over-year increase. However, the majority of time spent inside messaging and social apps is actually spent consuming media, such as videos on Tumblr and Facebook or stories on Snapchat. A study by Millward Brown Digital showed that 70% of social app users are actually consuming media. While we can’t correlate the 70% directly to time spent, we firmly believe that media consumption, either articles read in the web view in app, or video consumed in the feeds, constitute the majority of time spent in social apps. This is a big trend and one that will be watched very carefully by traditional media companies. These companies have to adjust to a new world where consumers act as individual distribution channels. The growth in entertainment on mobile proves once again that content is in fact king and is beating the gaming industry in its own game.

The Gaming Industry: Time is Money

The completely unexpected result of our analysis this year is the dramatic decline in time spent for mobile gaming. Gaming saw its share decline from 32% last year (52 minutes per day) to 15% of time spent (33 minutes per day) this year. This is a 37% decline year-over-year. We believe there are three factors contributing to the decline.

  1. Lack of new hits: Gaming is a hit driven industry and there hasn’t been a major new hit the past 6 to nine months. The major titles like Supercell’s Clash of Clans, King’s Candy Crush, and Machine Zone’s Game of War continue to dominate the top grossing charts and haven’t made room for a major new entrant.
  2. Users become the game: Millennials are shifting from playing games to watching others play games, creating a new category of entertainment called eSports. This summer, Fortune named eSports, the new Saturday morning cartoons for millennials. In fact, some of the most watched content on Tumblr is Minecraft videos created and curated by the passionate Minecraft community.
  3. Pay instead of play: Gamers are buying their way into games versus grinding their way through them. Gamers are spending more money than time to effectively beat games or secure better standings rather than working their way to the top. This explains the decline in time spent and the major rise in in-app purchases, as Apple saw a record $1.7B in AppStore sales in July.

What the mobile industry in general and the app industry in particular have achieved in the past seven years is amazing. Flurry now measures more than two billion devices each month and sees more than 10 billion sessions per day. That is 1.42 sessions for every human being on this planet, every day. And that is just Flurry! If there is anything to say about the mobile and app industry it is this: Mobile is on fire and it is showing no signs of stopping.

Categories
Platforms

Developers: builders or explorers?

open source

What do you think about when you hear the word “software developer”? Most people probably imagine a duffy engineer, turning his boss’s requirements into code. A software builder, so to speak. But developers are so much more. They’re often more like adventurers and explorers, boldly going where no programmer has gone before. This was never more true than at the eve of the Internet of Things. The most important role of Internet of Things developers is to explore new possibilities. The technology is widely available; in no small part because of open source software and hardware projects. Now we need to learn where we can take it. We can build it, but should we?

Why are Explorers so important?

Explorers are critical to any developer ecosystem, including in the Internet of Things. First, because that’s where all the truly new, out-of-the-box ideas come from. It’s hard to be super-innovative when you have a project to deliver to your boss or client. Only by exploring seemingly crazy ideas can the Internet of Things reach its full potential. The open source ecosystem is often the area where these ideas bloom.

Secondly, while exploring, Explorers gain a tremendous amount of experience. This will help them build their careers (as builders or otherwise). It also helps the companies that pay the bill. And it is needed. In Q4 2014, VisionMobile surveyed 4,000+ IoT developers. The lack of hardware development skills was the top challenge among IoT developers. 48% of IoT open source enthusiasts (those who find it important to use an open source platform) listed it as a challenge.

Learning and open source

VisionMobile’s data also shows that exploring, learning and open source technology go very well together. Among Explorers (developers that are primarily interested in gaining experience to seize on future opportunities), 20% value open source platforms and technology. That’s the highest level of any group. Conversely, Explorers are the biggest group among open source enthusiasts (32%).

Furthermore, open source is popular among developers that are new to IoT and new to software. A second group who value open source are seasoned software developers who bring open source business models to the Internet of Things. Traditional IoT developers with lots of experience underuse open source. In a way, these “experienced in software, new to IoT” developers provide another kind of ecosystem-level learning.

More data

Here are some more key insights about IoT explorers and open source enthusiasts that we summarized in an infographic, co-created with Arduino:

  • Open source is not just useful for building skills. It is also used by developers that want to increase efficiency (we call them Optimizers) and by developers that work on commission (Guns for Hire). This indicates that open source tools get the job done quickly, efficiently and inexpensively. On the other hand, developers are cautious about using open source technology in commercial products.
  • Open hardware in particular helps IoT developers to address their 3 main challenges: a lack of hardware skills, immature tools and high production costs. Arduino is clearly a leader in this space.
  • “Open” seems to be a professional philosophy that is applied on hardware, software and protocols alike. 60% of open source enthusiasts feel that open standards are missing from IoT, compared to 44% of other IoT developers.
  • All this doesn’t mean that open source has won everywhere. Some verticals, e.g. wearables, seem more difficult to address with open source technology and are therefore less popular among open source enthusiasts. Sometimes open source platforms struggle in the face of strong closed-source competitor. Smart Home platform OpenHab is a good example.

In conclusion, developer-explorers are critical to any developer ecosystem, and open source technology is an important tool to make that happen. I for one can’t wait to see what these modern-day Marco Polo’s and David Livingstone’s discover next!

open-source-enthusiasts-iot

Categories
Business Languages Platforms

Who, What, How, and Why: software development laid bare

Every six months we ask developers around the world those four questions, to see how the industry is evolving. Now in its 9th edition the VisionMobile Developer Economics survey reached out to 13,000 developers, from 149 different countries, and the results are available in our biannual report: State of The Developer Nation Q3 2015.

Who

94% of our 13,000 developers are male, showing a gender imbalance which needs to be addressed if the industry is going to reflect society as a whole. North America is making some progress here, but even in the land of opportunity only a tenth of developers identify themselves as female, and the figures of the rest of the world are much worse.

It’s perhaps surprising that Africa is next best in terms of equality, while Europe is positively embarrassing with only 4% of developers ticking the box for the minority sex. South America offers the greatest imbalance, but nowhere do developers reflect the proportion of women in the general workforce.

What

Cloud is increasingly important for developers, and cloud developers the most likely to be generating revenue (67% of them are bringing in more than $500 a month). But there’s no rush to the public offerings such as AWS or the Google App Engine, despite all the media attention: 44% of cloud developers are creating apps in private, for use on private clouds.

The Internet of Things is also getting a lot of developer attention, though more a quarter of IoT developers (26%) don’t know who their eventual customer will be. Half of those developers are making applications, rather than hardware or firmware, reflecting the evolution of the IoT industry.

When it comes to mobile the two dominant players (Android and iOS) are squeezing out the competition and 37% of mobile developers are targeting both the leading platforms. Interest in creating apps for Windows Phone has dropped slightly since we last asked, from 30% to 27%, but developers are understandably nervous of Windows 10 and the uncertainty over Microsoft’s commitment to mobile.

How

Across the developer community the most-popular development language is now a combination of JavaScript and HTML5. The evolution of web languages has imbued them with functionality, while cross-compilers and packaging tools can make them indistinguishable from native applications. That’s been enough to attract 71% of developers in North America, though only 58% in Asia where old-school languages such as Java and C retain their presence.

Learning a new language is always a challenge, though the growth in Apple’s Swift shows that developers are willing to invest in their education. Swift is, perhaps unsurprisingly, attracting a good proportion of self-taught developers (27% of those primarily using Swift consider themselves self-taught), while Java, C#, and Objective C, all appeal to degree holders (around 60% have degrees) who prefer a more-formal learning environment (around 17% are self-taught).

Why

Not all developers are motivated by money, in fact many professional developers are hobbyists or amateurs in another field. More than half of our mobile developers, for example, are also mucking around with IoT – some professionally, but mostly just to see what it can do, and what they can do with it. Developers are predominantly young, with an average age of around 30, and have both the time and the motivation to explore new areas. Many are involved in open-source projects: 11% tell us that Linux is their primary desktop target platform, despite the fact that the open-source OS accounts for less than 2% of desktop installations.

In mobile the path to revenue, if not riches, is clearly selling products and services, in the manner of Uber or Just Eat, rather than downloads and booster packs, in the manner of Candy Crush and Minecraft. Only 10% of mobile developers are chasing e-commerce revenue, but almost a fifth (19%) are taking more than $100,000 a month – a figure that only 6% of those reliant on advertising can match.

The State of the Developer Nation

The whole report, complete with graphics and figures, is a free download, and packed with more insight and analysis from Vision Mobile.

Categories
Business Platforms

Business Model combines Magic and Algorithms in Mobile Gaming

app success

Two years ago, I stepped into the mobile games market when I joined Planeto in Malmö, Sweden. With more than 5 million downloads, Planeto is a leader in knowledge-based mobile gaming. The experience at Planeto has changed me as a product creator and marketer.

Like many of my Scandinavian tech colleagues, I come from the planet where they build mobile phones. One step up the software stack to apps did not seem like a huge leap, especially as Planeto develops games for smartphones. As it turns out, one of the most talented game designers in Southern Scandinavia took me to a planet that was significantly different.

This is the third and final blog of a three part series on battle insights by a mobile game CEO.

Mobile Gaming as a Business

[tweetable]Even today, game designers prefer the traditional model of being paid up-front for games[/tweetable]. This business model allows them to devote most time on what is important to them, namely the game and it’s magical game play loop. Our world of algorithms has, however, made Free-to-Play (F2P) the dominant business model for successful games. Free is very powerful as a digital marketing tool for skillful individuals who are able to combine great gameplay with algorithm-winning distribution and marketing.

Ad revenue and In-App Purchases (IAPs) are the two traditional revenue sources in F2P games. Developers mix the two in different quantities depending on the game genre and design. Let’s explore one by one, before we look at the next possible frontiers in the mobile games business.

Getting the User to Buy Everyday

In our first game, we had one item for sale, namely a premium upgrade. This is not a good business model when your game has strong retention. We still have customers today who played our games nearly three years ago… incredible! These users love our games and, in our original game, their maximum spend was $2.99. That was it for three years of entertainment. 🙂

By implementing lifelines, offering new question packs, and decoupling game boards from the premium upgrade, we have in subsequent games removed the limit on how much money you can spend. Our best customers now spend more and in return we offer more features and content. A much better relationship than the original fire and forget model.

Because of this ongoing relationship, we also have become much more generous. We provide the users with some in-game currency for free, so they can try the different lifelines and game boards. That drives up our conversion, as the users get familiar with our in-game currency early on. Contact to support also triggers free stuff!

Third, we actively work with conversion of users through campaigns where we make seasonable items available either free or at heavily discounted rates. We have had great success with our X-mas tree game board. 🙂

Finally, our lifelines are micro purchases offered at a time where the user is most willing to spend – very similar to the extra turns in Candy Crush Saga.

Good IAP design is hard, and it needs to be closely integrated with the core game play loop.

Advertising as an Ongoing Adjustment Process

As mentioned in “The Science of Mobile Game Marketing“, F2P games need an ad mediation layer to be successful in the advertising space.

First, you need a mix of different types of ads from incentivized video, over normal video, to static interstitials, and banner ads. The mix allows you to adjust the ad types over the lifecycle of the user. Advertising is not something users love, so you want to avoid intrusive ad formats, like forced video ads, early in the lifecycle of a user. Later they might make sense depending on your game.

It is also important to ensure you drive up your fill rate. You will not have sufficient video ad inventory from one network available at all times, and hence you should backfill with interstitials from other networks.

Finally, you need to be able to play the different ad networks against each other to ensure the best possible CPM. The ad intermediation layer allows the developer to switch between many different ad networks and adjust advertising volume by network. On top of the automated CPM-based adjustments made by the mediation layer, we adjust our volume by network each week to make sure we get the best CPM per country.

Each advertising network has its own logic when it comes to buying advertising space in games, but generally speaking we’ve also seen that ad networks take advantage of developers who are stale, i.e. developers who do not tweak the number of impressions per ad network. So if you leave your ad network distribution untouched for more than two weeks, expect your revenue to start declining.

Tweak and learn!

The Real World as a Revenue Opportunity

Game developers often use other brands for marketing. Whether it is Kim Kardashian, CR7, or FIFA, it is obvious that real world brands sell games. Integrating the real world into games does not necessarily need to be a royalty expense. In fact, this can be a great opportunity for business model innovation in the mobile games market.

Brands, people, and organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to engage with their stakeholders in a positive, meaningful way. Designed correctly, games can be one such path.

At Planeto, we have worked with brands to create question packs about a specific topic for TV stations. One TV station worked with us on a question pack on the Premier League – they wanted to engage their viewers on knowledge about the Premier League. Another TV station wanted 250 questions on fashion for the Copenhagen Fashion Week. Great fun for our users and excellent exposure for the brands.

Think about your game – how can the real world increase your revenue or extend the lifecycle of your game by bringing in brands, information, or other stuff that your users care about? Be creative – people care about more than just celebrities and TV shows – what about the city you live in? Nature? Politics?

Big Data as a Revenue Opportunity

As we live in a world of algorithms, game developers have more information about their users and their users’ behavior than any other industry out there. Where traditional industries are looking to build up data about their customers, it often feels like we have excessive amounts of data in the mobile games industry.

Taking advantage of user data requires a thorough understanding of privacy – both from a legal perspective, but also from a product perspective, i.e. what value do you bring to your users and when you decide to generate revenue from data? Privacy must have priority over any revenue considerations. There are, however, cases where the two can go hand in hand.

In the past, we have successfully offered our users a free upgrade in return of receiving an offer for a popular science magazine subscription. This is a reasonable trade-off for the user. They know an upgrade costs $2.99. They know they will be offered a magazine that aligns nicely with knowledge-oriented games that they are playing. For that, they are willing to provide an email or a phone number.

Aggregated knowledge about the users might also be valuable. If you have personal statistics, high score lists, or achievements, could other stakeholders get any value from them, if they were presented in a slightly different way?

I would love to throw a game designer and a big data entrepreneur in a room for a few days to build a truly innovative game where data is the core monetization source.

…and We Are Only Just Beginning

These are only two examples of frontier-type business models. There are many more.

Education: I am not a big fan of the 1st generation of brain training apps. They are generally not fun to use and need such a huge commitment that they are unlikely to have any effect for 99% of their users. In the end, I do believe we will become better at using games for education. We are just not there yet.

Media: The traditional media industry is going through a tough spell at the moment. Great games where entertainment is integrated at the core of the game could be the future for some magazines, newspapers, and TV stations. SMS voting is one step in the right direction, but there must be more revolutionary designs waiting to be discovered.

Social: Games are good at bringing people together around a common interest. “Play first, date later!” could be an interesting business proposition to pursue.

I believe the next generation of big mobile game innovators will find business models that integrated a magical gameplay loop in weird and wonderful ways with the world of algorithms. What other innovative gaming business models have you seen or would you love to see?

Categories
Business

The Science of Mobile Game Marketing

mobile game marketing

Two years ago, I stepped into the mobile games market when I joined Planeto in Malmö, Sweden. With more than 5 million downloads, Planeto is a leader in knowledge-based mobile gaming. The experience at Planeto has changed me as a product creator and marketer.

Like many of my Scandinavian tech colleagues, I come from the planet where they build mobile phones. One step up the software stack to apps did not seem like a huge leap, especially as Planeto develops games for smartphones. As it turns out, one of the most talented game designers in Southern Scandinavia took me to a planet that was significantly different.

This is part two of a three part series on battle insights by a mobile game CEO.

science-of-mobile-game-marketing

Living in a World of Algorithms

In my first blog post, I addressed the development of the magical gameplay loop, a process that involves human beings at a very fundamental level working with basic needs like happiness, competition, and the urge to progress. In stark contrast, [tweetable]the marketing of mobile games hardly involves any human beings at all[/tweetable].

The mobile gaming market is at the extreme end of the digital revolution. In other industries, there is an existing physical distribution and marketing channel that gently slows down the product life cycle. There are fashion shows ever so often. There are retailers, who stock up on new items once in a while. In mobile game distribution and marketing, there are no physical inventories. There are just algorithms and a furious pace.

In a world of appfication, anyone involved in product creation and marketing needs to understand the basics of algorithm-driven marketing. That is where we are heading.

Starting with the App Store

Most people find apps by browsing the App Store or Google Play. A close second is recommendations from friends and family. People across the globe discover games in those two ways. It is as simple as that.

Apple and Google have not disclosed how their search algorithms work, but app marketers suggest the following parameters have an impact:

  1. Title
  2. Keywords
  3. Rating value & numbers
  4. Downloads over time

Title and keyword optimization is a topic on its own. Let us instead explore how rating and downloads can be improved.

Getting Your 4+ Star Rating by Beating the Algorithm

If you have read my first post about the magical gameplay loop, then you already know that perfecting the gameplay loop is crucial to creating a good game. In most cases, a good game does not automatically guarantee a good review. Customers will give you a one star rating for many different reasons: connection errors, strange chat messages from other players, tiny features that they do not like, etc. Often bad reviews do not contain any text – just a single star, a negative impact on your ranking, and a customer that rapidly moves on to the next app.

To avoid the info-less one star review, you need to take the pace out of the rating algorithm by implementing a funnel system that leads customers to the right place. The objective is to get only happy customers, who are willing to spend time on your app, to leave reviews. Unhappy customers, who are also willing to spend time on your app, send you an email with their issues instead. Quite a simple change that actually provides much more valuable info – you may find the details here.

Boom… first small victory against the algorithms. 🙂

Cross-promotion is a Friendly Face in the Sea of Algorithms

Once you have your ratings sorted out, the next step is to drive downloads. By far [tweetable]the easiest and cheapest way to drive downloads is to cross-promote in your existing games[/tweetable]. This is of course not an option for first-time developers, who instead should be thinking of including mechanisms to cross-promote the next game. Never think of your business as a one game business. We have successfully used Appboy in all our products, and it works wonders for us. Chartboost is another option.

Create your own friendly faces!

Living with the User Acquisition Algorithms

If you do not have a successful app already, then you need to follow the painful path of acquiring new users. No friendly faces here. It all comes down to math. The basic equation you need to be aware of is this:

Average Cost Per Install (CPI) < Average Life-Time-Value (LTV) * k-factor

LTV can be calculated in many different ways, but in simple terms, it can be thought of as Average Revenue Per Daily Active User (ARPDAU) * Average retention in days. K-factor is the number of users invited by each new player. If your CPI is $2, your LTV is $1, and each player invites another player (k-factor = 2), then you are break-even.

As such, the concept is simple, but it explodes rapidly. There are hundreds of different advertising channels to use and hence CPI never stands still. ARPDAU is easy to calculate on a given day for all your users, but as soon as you break it down into segments/cohorts (time, advertising channel, segments, geo, etc.) it becomes very complex fast.

Very few developers win in their fight with the UA algorithms. This is truly a scary beast. Experiment with UA, but do not get carried away, until you have a winning formula. In general, nothing is 100% guaranteed. The formula might work for one geographical area and might be totally inoperative for another.

Apple Recognizes the Challenges with Algorithms

Over the last couple of years, the big game developers and publishers have gotten bigger and customers struggle to find new games – however good they are. Apple has been trying to curb the negative side effects of the App Store algorithms by including more editorial content. The aim is to promote quality games by letting human beings select the games that gets most visibility in the App Store. That has sparked an entirely new set of recommendations on how to get featured by Apple. Google stays true to its roots and is still working to solve the quality versus quantity issue with algorithms.

In a market where there are only two relevant stores, I am not sure I feel completely at ease with the thought that the storeowners decide what goes on the shelves. It drives up the bargaining power of those storeowners to new heights.

Optimizing Your Advertising Revenue by Playing Algorithms Against Each Other

Getting plenty of downloads is only one-half of a successful game. The other half is revenue. Most first-time F2P (Free to Play) game developers make the mistake of implementing their own advertising solution with one or two advertising networks. This does not work and it will hurt you badly, if your game makes it through the noise and becomes successful.

You need an ad mediation layer from the get-go – an algorithm that allows you to fight all the other ad algorithms for you. More about revenue options in the third and final blog post of the series.

…and That is Only the Beginning of Mobile Game Marketing

I have not touched on keyword optimization, user engagement campaigns (i.e. how do you convert users from free to paying users), user acquisition tracking, k-factor optimization (i.e. how do you get users to invite other users), and retention funnels. For each of these areas, there are plenty of algorithms to learn and speak.

To make your apps successful you need to take on the algorithms that govern the marketing and distribution of games. As a rule of thumb (and to set your developers’ expectations right), it is reasonable to budget with 50% of a quality free-2-play game development project being on components (in-house or 3rd party) that does not relate to the actual gameplay loop.
We all love to work on the magical gameplay loop – it is truly rewarding – but the right infrastructure components allows you to take advantage of the algorithms. Do not underestimate the power of the algorithms.

Interested in part three of the series on mobile gaming? Read about Business Models here

Categories
Business

Forget about Gamification – It is All about the Gameplay Loop!

Screen shots from Battlefield 4: Gameplay loop takes less than 3 secs from target spotted to kill confirmed, but type of enemy, weapon type, and environment adds depth to the loop, which is repeated over and over again!

Two years ago, I stepped into the mobile games market when I joined Planeto in Malmö, Sweden. With more than 5 million downloads, Planeto is a leader in knowledge-based mobile gaming. The experience at Planeto has changed me as a product creator and marketer.

Like many of my Scandinavian tech colleagues, I come from the planet where they build mobile phones. One step up the software stack to apps did not seem like a huge leap, especially as Planeto develops knowledge-oriented games for smartphones. As it turns out, one of the most talented game designers in Southern Scandinavia took me to a planet that was significantly different.

This part one of a three part series on battle insights by a mobile game CEO.

The Magical Gameplay Loop

Having built products with some of the best people in their field, I claim to have a good understanding of how to approach a new product idea. In simple terms, the process involves a deep dive into the needs of the particular user, understanding what technical approach might deliver a product that caters to those needs, creating a first version (1.0), shipping it to the users, learning from the users, and then building an even better version 2.0. Each step has a number of tools you can use to deliver as much “bang for the bucks” as possible. You aim to capture as many facts as possible to keep learning and testing assumptions. Although user experience design and prototyping can make up significant parts, the overall creation process resembles a deductive science project where uncovering the truth is the overarching aim.

The magical gameplay loop makes mobile game creation a very different process. The magical gameplay loop builds on the fundamental premise that delivering entertainment is hard, but when you get there, it is obvious that you have arrived. You will see it in the smile, in the clenched fist raised in the air, or a loud “damn it!” – quite magical, when it happens. 🙂

Endless Iteration of the Loop

[tweetable]The gameplay loop is what the player does over and over again[/tweetable]. In a First Person Shooter (FPS) game, the gameplay loop goes like this:

  1. a target appears
  2. you aim at the target
  3. you pull the trigger
  4. the projectile moves towards the target
  5. you hit the target
  6. the target loses life

You will do this over and over again, so this loop has to work to perfection – because if not, the player will immediately notice a glitch in one of the steps. Sounds easy, but as soon as you start adding depth to the gameplay, you start challenging the loop: different targets (speed, size, life, etc.), different weapons (power, range, accuracy, etc.), different environments (complexity, dynamics, etc.), and so on.

Screen shots from Battlefield 4: Gameplay loop takes less than 3 secs from target spotted to kill confirmed, but type of enemy, weapon type, and environment adds depth to the loop, which is repeated over and over again!
Screen shots from Battlefield 4: Gameplay loop takes less than 3 secs from target spotted to kill confirmed, but type of enemy, weapon type, and environment adds depth to the loop, which is repeated over and over again!

[tweetable]The process of developing a mobile game starts with the gameplay loop[/tweetable]. You iterate the gameplay loop many times. Planeto is on more than 20 iterations of the next game. Forget about graphics. Forget about login. Forget about high score. It is all about getting the gameplay loop nailed down, testing it with real people, and observing whether you get a fist in the air or the “one more time!” that you are looking for.

It is an inductive process, in which you start with the gut feel and experience of the game designer, observe the reaction from the players, and then iterate until you get to something that is highly entertaining. Although you can access courses and tools, like “F2P Toolbox” creating great gameplay requires experience and a lot of patience. The development of the gameplay loop deals with human beings at a very fundamental level of basic needs, like happiness, competition, and the urge to progress.

Only when the gameplay loop is truly magical do you begin the “normal” development process.

Looking for the Loop

Once you realize the significance of the gameplay loop, you start playing games in a completely new way. You appreciate the beauty of the loop in good games and you become much better at looking beyond beautiful graphics and distilling the essence of a game. You also start benchmarking games against each other on a detailed level.

This brings out a number of interesting perspectives. First, can you find a gameplay loop in other types of products than games? Is there something that the user does repeatedly and therefore needs special attention and many development iterations? I have looked back at products that I have been involved in and I can point to the core loop in most of them. Some of the core loops were brilliant, but some of them were average to poor, as the features and general infrastructure detracted from the essence of what the product was supposed to deliver. My first take-away: look for the loop and make it perfect!

Gamification – a Contradiction in Terms?

My second take-away is about the inherent contradiction in the popular notion “gamification.” If the essence of a game is the gameplay loop, then you cannot gamify something that has an entirely different user experience loop and purpose.

Let’s take CRM as an example. The purpose of a CRM system is to improve the relationship with the customer. In other words, a CRM system offers a set of mechanisms that remind/drive the sales person to interact with the customer. A gamification project might introduce badges for different activities, high score lists for the best performing sales people, or other elements you might find in a game. Gamification does not, however, change the core user experience loop in a CRM system, which is: 1) enter data to qualify the relationship with the customer, 2) create a profile of the relationship with the customer, and 3) get notified about needs for actions/next steps, which in turn creates qualification data. This set of user actions is not a game. You might get a fist in the air when a deal is won, but sales people will still hate updating the account in the CRM system – even, if they get a nice “Sales Person of the Month” badge 🙂

Games Can be Much More than Fun

This does not mean a game cannot deliver more than just fun. As I will explore in my upcoming blog post “Mobile Gaming as a Business,” I am a firm believer that business model innovation is one of the biggest opportunities in the mobile games industry. At Planeto, games are used for lead generation. Games can also tell stories or educate. It is, however, essential that the starting point is the magical gameplay loop. If you do not get that right, then you cannot deliver on anything else.

Interested in how to combine Magic and Algorithms to create a successful Business Model? Read part three of this Blog series here.