Archive for the ‘iPhone’ Category

Finally, those of us in the South Bay now have a Girls in Tech chapter to call our very own.

This evening several of my Kosmix colleagues and I attended the first meeting of the new Silicon Valley chapter of Girls in Tech. A packed crowd—with nearly as many men as women!—came to the event to learn how to take their iPhone apps from concept to launch. Here are some of the highlights:

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One of the new chapter’s organizers, Dhana Pawar, a leading mobile application development expert, opened the session by outlining the basic steps for successfully launching an iPhone app:

1) Get a developer account from Apple
2) Choose a great design and development partner
3) Use the ad-hoc deployment process. Keep it simple. Start small, gauge the reaction of a focus group, and iterate from there.
4) Submit to Apple for approval. It takes anywhere from two to three weeks, so build the extra time into your launch plan.
5) Invest in marketing and PR. Social media can be very powerful here.

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Next, Suzanne Ginsburg of Ginsburg Design shared her advice for user-centered iPhone app design. She’s working on a book about this topic, which should be coming out in June 2010. Here are the five most common pitfalls that she sees iPhone developers make:

1) iPhone apps that are too complicated and unfriendly to set up

2) Tasks that require too many steps or too much typing

3) The inability to synch the iPhone app with a desktop or Web version

4) The app doesn’t remember where the user left off

5) No content for a given location, even though the app bills itself as “national”

Suzanne then offered three simple tips for creating a successful iPhone app:

1) Conduct upfront user research to understand usability and discover new opportunities. Methods include shadowing, field interviews and diary studies.

2) Brainstorm and sketch like mad. Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines are a good place to start, but try to see beyond the basic frameworks.

3) Refine and Test Promising Directions. Usability testing your concepts will help uncover issues related to setup, flows, terminology and more.

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The final presentation was by AdMob’s Mike Fyall, an expert in promoting and monetizing mobile applications through advertising. His company recently conducted research about iPhone user behavior, and came up with some interesting findings:

1) The average user downloads 10 apps per month, and the average iPod Touch user downloads nearly three times that amount.

2) More than twice as many iPhone and iPod Touch users have adopted paid apps as Android users.

3) Fifty percent of iPhone users buy paid apps, with an average of 1-2 paid apps each.

4) Users most often discover apps by browsing the AppStore and searching directly.

5) Over 90% of people download apps on their phone, rather than from their computers.

At Kosmix, we have two iPhone apps: MeeHive and Samachar News. Check them out at the App Store and let us know how well we followed the experts’ advice!