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Research work by Christopher Hsse and his colleagues at  University of Chicago has revealed some interesting traits about human behavior; namely that we are naturally inclined towards idleness to conserve energy, we would rather do nothing, but we are happier and less bored when we are busy.

Therefore finding hooks and ways to make people feel like they are busy or giving them the illusion of busyness is a huge business opportunity for experience creators.

One example given by BPS is making travelers walk further to pick up their bags, rather than making them wait at baggage claim. Given a task like walking to a destination is more pleasurable than simply standing and waiting.

This simple and somewhat obvious insight must explain the massive appeal and success of applications for phones and tablets.

The user feels that that these distractions will keep them occupied for a while and are pure examples of futile busyness, just the fact they exist and are easily accessible is probably enough for most users to hook them in and get them to trial. They are the "digital candies" of the information age.

While many of these apps might lack staying power, for the store owners like Apple, it's the constant stream of new apps and potential distractions that make the store exciting to users. The problem for Apple will come if the rate of application development slows and there are fewer and fewer newer and interesting applications to satisfy user cravings for futile busyness.


Posted by Ed Cotton This app from GE is a great example of a utility that should be able to drive incremental business for the company.

Bulbs are a boring category, you buy them when one burns out or when a wave of environmental guilt hits you.

Bulbs become more relevant when we think about the light they provide and beyond that, the mood they create.

It's like paint, we have a tough time imagining these things unless we seem them in context, so there's a genuine consumer need to make what bulbs do, tangible for people.

Suddenly, with one iPhone application, GE has made bulbs interesting and relevant, but beyond that, they drive people directly to purchase.

It's a great example of how insight and understanding can make low interest categories pop by solving for a real need that's out there.

There's a huge opportunity here for planners to uncover these and work with UI and technologists to bring more of these ideas to life for our clients, ideas that directly impact their business.

 


Posted by Ed Cotton Most of us have seen how something like Mint can be useful tool to better understand our spending habits when we compare it with others or Nike+ also us to compare our training performance with others.

We are obviously going to see more of the benefits of collective data over time and especially with the data coming from mobile devices.

Mobile Logger is an iPhone application developed by Robert Carlsen that's designed for bicyclist to log their journeys and share the data from those journeys with us. Obviously, the more data that gets input into the system, the better it is for everyone.



While we might all use social media and geo-social applications, the level of data provide is pretty minimal, it's all surface and basic. Clearly, the players have a lot more data than they would care to share with their users and perhaps this something they should look into more. Sharing more data could be useful to users from a comparison perspective and pure insight, it would also enable the players to be seen as more transparent, which is clearly a big issue right now.

Mobile Logger might be one of the first of it's kind beyond Nike+, it goes beyond the basic functionality and uses the phone's microphone to pick up and monitor noise levels which gives a nice indication of traffic flow.

It appears the shine might be off branded applications, but if they were more useful and engaged users around shared data, perhaps they could play a role.


Posted by Ed Cotton A nice video by design thinkers, Gravity Tank, that takes a look of what people feel about phone applications.

It makes a change to see real people talking about applications instead of just reading the data.
 

gravitytank // Apps Get Real from gravitytank on Vimeo.

Posted by Ed Cotton Most engineers tend to think ads are a waste of time because they believe their great products will sell themselves.

There's only one problem with this theory. What if you are trying sell an iPhone application?

The iPhone ecosystem is mighty crowded with 30,000+ applications for sale which means you not only need a great application, but also an ad campaign to go with it.

A new arms race has just begun and it looks like Birdhouse is leading the pack.



Posted by Ed Cotton While most of the leading applications on Apple's 30,000 plus store are games, the company is keen to inform us that there's lots of meaningful things you can do with your iPhone.



This ad? (below) does a great job at highlighting all the recession-busting applications that you can get for your phone.

It's a nice example of a brand not only connecting with the current zeitgeist, but explaining how their products can provide real utility and benefits to help.

Via Down The Avenue.


Posted by Ed Cotton