by Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) We all know we want one – a mobile app, that is, what with the stunning cellphone penetration in this country and the rise of smartphones in particular.
World Wide Worx MD Arthur Goldstuck recently estimated that there are 14.3-million smartphones in use in SA and this figure is expected to
pass the 16-million mark next year. Even the not so interweb-savvy Print and Digital Media Transformation Task Team recently said of the future of news in this country: “Mobile access will be the game changer, translating into unprecedented reach, even at grass roots level, where basic handsets are shared.”
So what should you be thinking about when you’re looking at a news app for mobile? Should the primary concern be simplicity and ease of use or should it have plenty of bells and whistles? It this about design or it chiefly about development?
Grubstreet chatted to Lynette Hundermark, apps business director at digital agency Prezence. She directed the development of the recently released Eyewitness News free mobile app (as well as Primedia’s very popular Ster-Kinekor app, Media24’s Leisure Books Android app and mobisite and Bidorbuy’s apps).
What a fascinating, specialist field – and Prezence is fast becoming one of the leading South African authorities on apps development and strategy.
So pay attention hacks and publishers. We can all learn a thing or two from the dev people.
Grubstreet: When you’re developing a mobile app, what’s the key thing you’re thinking about? That it will be user friendly and intuitive for the user to figure out or that it has all the bells and whistles and really makes full use of all the functionality of a smartphone?
Lynette Hundermark: It’s actually everything. It’s to make it user friendly and functional and especially with the app, it’s smart bells and whistles. It’s literally about coming up with a solution that ticks all the boxes quickly because the thing with apps is that it is the next step from a mobisite.
With Eyewitness News (EWN) they already had a mobisite, which is functional and has got everything.
With all my clients, it’s pointless taking a mobisite and repackaging it as an app. There’s no added value to the user if they don’t get anything different, bearing in mind you do get two different types of users. You get those who love mobisites and the people who love apps.
If clients have the budget, I’d say: “By all means, go into both at the same time”. But it seems that most of our clients have already gone into the mobile space. So with EWN and Ster-Kinekor, they already had really cool mobile sites so when we came to do the app, it couldn’t just be that repackaged.
The EWN app had to go in on all the platforms – iOS, Android and BlackBerry, and this is the old BlackBerry – and it had to give the user… all the basic functionality that you expect: all the breaking news, latest news, search functionality. But ideally an app needs to be developed for the specific platform so we needed to think of the capabilities of the iPhone, the Android phone and the limits you have on the BlackBerry phone. Because the target was the smartphone market, it needed to be rich and very, very picture perfect – it’s all about the pictures and the graphics.
It needed to be extra special so what we did with this app is that we tried to present news in a different way because when it comes to app users, you need to move with the times. You need to be monitoring user behaviour – especially with news where it’s no longer a linear process, where you switch on the radio or the TV. People don’t just sit down and consume news. Now they can consume news pretty much whenever they want to.
So when they go on to an app it’s not just a matter of getting a recap. People want all the details, like we saw with the Oscar Pistorius story.
There are a lot of news apps out there and it would have been easy for us to just go and clone a News24 app but we didn’t want to do that. It needed to be something a little bit different.
Grubstreet: How long did the design and development take for the EWN app?
Hundermark: There is this idea that apps are these quick little things you can pull together.
There are some apps like that but the approach that we use for major clients like EWN and Ster-Kinekor is that it needs to be something valuable because users are multitasking all the time. So development is a big thing but we place a lot of emphasis on the design and the user experience. If anything, the design and user experience added longer to the development.
When it comes to design, you work a lot with the client because it’s their brand. So we will make recommendations but they need to be on board with us totally so that takes a lot of feedback to get the perfect user experience. This was about a three-month process and then it took about another three months to actually do the development.
But depending on how the user experience and the design goes, it’s not a matter of just developing. Especially with EWN, the user experience is very different to the News24 app.
So how long the developer takes to implement depends on the functionality and experience you want to create.
The development (on the EWN app) took a lot longer that we thought it would because the user experience was so different to any other bog-standard app like a CNN app.
Also, because mobile development is such a niche, new market at the moment, it’s not like traditional web development where there’s pretty much a standard way of doing everything. Here it changes pretty much all the time. For instance, an operating system will come out so how you are going to do it today is different to two month down the line.
And we had the challenge of iOS 7 being launched in the middle of this (EWN process) so we had to tweak the design a bit – and we’re still tweaking things a bit…
Grubstreet: How many people would work on a project like this?
Hundermark: Well, there’s a design team and, if it’s a native application, it’s separate developers for each platform. So iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows have their own sets of developers.
Basically, it depends. With something like EWN, all the platforms were developed in parallel but there were different developers. It wasn’t one guy doing them all.
Grubstreet: And, of course, in South Africa – and in many other African countries – BlackBerry is still big.
Hundermark: It is very big. And I think Prezence is the only company in South Africa that is doing BlackBerry apps.
Developing for BlackBerry takes very long – it takes almost double the time. It’s very, very challenging and there’s a shortage of developers so that’s also why the EWN app was delayed: because they insisted on getting it released on all the platforms at the same time. Android and iOS was ready probably about a month and a half before (BlackBerry was ready.)
Grubstreet: The Ster-Kinekor app has been around for a while and is hugely popular. Are you still working on that?
Hundermark: We’re adding more and more features. At the moment, we’re taking it up to the next level and piloting bar-code scanning in Sandton (with QR codes) so you don’t actually have to swipe your card to collect your tickets.
The thing with apps is to build them with longevity in mind. You build them with a foundation that you can add to later without starting from scratch.
South Africa’s leading media commentator Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) offers intelligence on media, old and new. Reprinted from her site Grubstreet.