Simplicity Wins in the Top 25

Most of the Top 25 free apps on the App Store are games. But what kind of games are the winners?

You'd think that the Top 25 free Games would be high quality, high production value, immersive, made with love. Things like the airplane fighting game Skies of Glory:



Or how about Skater Nation, where you get to skateboard, grind, and jump like the pros?



You'd think these games would be the winners. But you'd be wrong. It turns out the games in the Top 25 is mostly simple, OK quality stuff. FallDown (at number 9), makes you move the ball down the screen faster than it scrolls the background. A great iPhone developer could write this game in a few days:



Another incredibly simple game in the Top 25 (at number 20) is Traffic Rush. All you need to do is keep cars from crashing on an intersection. Once again, super easy to write - a good programmer and a decent graphic designer could crank this out in half a week.



So why is it that these simple games win, and the high-dollar productions lose, at least in terms of number of downloads? I believe it's the iPhone audience and how these devices are used:

1. iPhone users are casual gamers: this is no PSP Portable. They just want to waste some time on a subway ride, and don't care for learning the ins and outs of an airplane fighter game.


2. Anything that takes more than 30 seconds to learn falls by the wayside.


3. Each level should take no longer than a subway ride. Gameplay that develops over blocks of 10 minutes and longer is a non-starter.


4. Startup time is a huge issue: It easily takes 20 seconds just to load Skies of Glory. Unacceptable to most users, since they know that their gameplay could be interrupted at any time by a call or text message.

The take-away? Simplicity wins. Dumb it down, make it load fast, gratify immediately, keep the gameplay fast-paced, keep each level short. And they will come, download, and play.

A Model of Your Inbox

I've been thinking a lot about how users view and manage their inbox. This post is about the model I came up with. I'm basing this on my own experience and on having talked to dozens of people about their email habits. But since this blog also is read by lots of email enthusiasts, I'd love to hear your feedback: Does this make sense? What am I missing?

Four Quadrants

Every single email message youreceive can be classified into one of the four quadrants below. Important emails are the ones you need to take action on. Urgent emails are time-sensitive. Urgency does not necessarily imply importance: Your coworker's cake will be gone in a few minutes, but it's not necessary to take action on that, especially if you're on a diet.


The key insight here is that the stuff you care about are the emails on the left. These are the emails that make it worth checking your Crackberry every few minutes. They emails that keep you awake at night.

Filtering the Important

How can you filter out what's important? My theory is that for humans, that's actually the easy part: You often easily determine importance by just looking at the sender of the message. Roughly, senders fall into three categories:

1. Crap: these are easy to remove: iTunes Receipts, Amazon notifications, LinkedIn emails, frequent flier statements, and the like. Not important.


2. VIPs: You know who they are! Major customers, your manager, and your girlfriend belong in this category. Important.


3. People you know: These are the non-VIPs that you still want to deal with. I like to think of this category as the intersection of your Facebook and LinkedIn connections. Mostly Important.


4. Everyone else: Recruiters and salespeople, senders you don't recognize. Mostly not important.

Research indicates that people use senders as their main importance indicator [1, 2]. The task of filtering out important email is easy, and you could probably train a classifier to very high degrees of accuracy.

Managing Later vs. Now

I believe that this is the heart of email overload. Remember how I said that the left side is what matters. I like to label the two subcategories as "Later" and "Now" [3].


The workflow should be that you decide whether you want to deal with an email now or later. You respond to the "now" emails and they disappear into the archive. The "later" emails haunt you until you're done with them.

This is the point where today's email clients fail. Users try various mechanisms to manage now/later and to do/done: Keeping emails unread, starring them in Gmail, and filing away stuff that is done into an intricate foldering system. The number of email management strategies that users come up with impressive [4].

But none of this works. Emails that are unread and starred disappear from your main view. Out of view, out of mind. Poof. There is no pressure to act upon them. In contrast, filing away emails that are done requires an amount of discipline that few users have. I think that the inability of managing now/later and to do/done is one of the main reasons for email overload.

Wrapping Up

Let's review. I've outlined three theories here:

1. Your incoming all fall into one of the four quadrants of urgency and importance. What really matters is the important stuff, which breaks into "Later" vs. "Now".


2. It's easy to filter important vs. not important.


3. It's hard to manage Later vs. Now because the current tools are broken.

I'd love to hear your views on my theories. Drop me a line or leave a comment.

References

[1] Gina Danielle Venolia, Laura Dabbish, JJ Cadiz, and Anoop Gupta. Supporting email workflow. Technical report, Microsoft Research - Collaboration and Multimedia Group, September 2001.

[2] Olle Baelter and Candace Sidner. Bifrost inbox organizer: giving users control over the inbox. In NordiCHI '02: Proceedings of the second Nordic Conference on Human-computer interaction, pages 111-118, Aarhus, Denmark, 2002.

[3] The "Getting Things Done" school of thought has a more intricate system than this, but I think that Later / Now is the essence of it.

[4] Steve Whittaker and Candace Sidner. Email overload: exploring personal information management of email. In CHI '96: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 276-283, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 1996.

Making up Emails for Mockups

When mocking up communications software, you have to make stuff up: You want to show a realistic inbox, messages that seem real, and clearly illustrate the use case you’re trying to support. Mockups help others grasp what you're building, and they help get you rolling on the prototype.



Photoshop and Corel Draw are my friends, and it's easy to find design inspiration on the web.

But how do you come up with the data? Some ideas:

1. Use your own email. Duh. Sounds reasonable. But you don't want your confidential emails in your business plan. The girlfriend might not appreciate the shoutout. And startup founders’ emails do not represent a common use case.


2. Enron Corpus. This is good for business scenarios, with some small problems: No attachments, no sender names (although you can make them up), and the depressing emails towards the end of the company: "Dear top management, please don't fire us now!". Use the Trampoline Enron Explorer to get to the data.


3. Celebrities. Great for consumer email scenarios. My friends at Google used to mock me for including Natalie Portman in most mocks, but People Magazine is your friend: Just use your personal email and add celebrity names. Added benefit: If you choose the right celebrities, that will trigger positive emotions with people looking at the mocks.

If you have a more ideas, let me know.

"The Future of Email" Talk in Sydney

Yesterday, I gave a talk about my views on the future of email at CSIRO / Macquarie university in Sydney. Thanks to Andrew Lampert for the arranging and promoting the talk. Here's what it was about:

Mail clients haven't moved forward since the mid-1990s. Most applications have added superficial features, but the basics remained unchanged: Folders, lists of disconnected emails sorted by arrival time. Clients have no sense of priority, urgency, workflows, or connectedness. Their search features are simple and are sometimes painfully slow. Users today are bombarded with email and find popular email clients hard to use and inefficient.

How did we get here? How do we get out of it? This talk presents new ideas of improving the email experience for overloaded users.

I promised to put the slides online. Here they are (also on SlideShare).

Gabor Cselle - The Future of Email

I'd also like to thank the audience for the great discussion that ensued after the talk - I might post some of the best questions here at a later date.

A video of the talk is available on the CSIRO website here.

Three Clever Xobni Features (3/3): Prefilling Invites

This is installment 3 of 3 blog entries about features in Xobni where I discuss well-implemented, clever ideas. None of these are Xobni-specific – you should be able to port these ideas to any web or desktop app.

Previously:

1. Are You Happy? (1/3)
2. As-You-Yype Search (2/3)

On January 9th, we started allowing our existing users to invite their friends to Xobni. If they have invites to send, this is what appears in the sidebar:



Clicking on the box brings up this window:



The dialog shows a list of your top contacts who use Outlook, which we identify by looking at headers of emails you received from them. These people are exactly the audience for Xobni!

This feature is an instance of smart defaults, not just sensible defaults. We take the vast amount of data in your email repository and do something smart with it. (The beauty is that the core piece of this functionality was written in one day with our powerful email data framework.) That's exactly what Xobni is about.

Three Clever Xobni Features (2/3): As-you-type Search

This is installment 2 of 3 blog entries about features in Xobni where I discuss well-implemented, clever ideas. None of these are Xobni-specific – you should be able to port these ideas to any web or desktop app.

Previously: Three Clever Xobni Features (1/3): Are you Happy?

Traditionally, you type in the query, hit Enter, and get the results. In Xobni, you start typing your query and we start showing you results as-you-type.



Outlook 2007 has a similar feature: When you type and pause for a bit, it starts a search in the background. But it's the same operation at the same speeds as their normal search. In contrast, our search indexes and data files are optimized for incremental search: We search for prefixes, not full words. This makes us much faster.



The next installment of this series appears on Monday, January 14. Subscribe to my RSS feed to get updates.

Three Clever Xobni Features (1/3): "Are you Happy?"

This is installment 1 of 3 blog entries about features in Xobni where I discuss well-implemented, clever ideas. None of these are Xobni-specific – you should be able to port these ideas to any web or desktop app.

We're religious about user feedback at Xobni. We get dozens of emails every day and read every single one. If you uninstall us, we ask for comments around why you uninstalled and how we could improve. We've built tools to collect and summarize this data.

But most users aren't vocal about their needs. The average happy user is unlikely to email with small problems she might be seeing. We want their feedback, but can't just pop up a window with a survey every time you use the software.

That's why we built Are you Happy?: Instead of a popup, we add a little box on the bottom of the sidebar every couple of weeks and ask: "Are you happy?" There are two buttons, Yes and No, and an optional comment field.



This is the most lightweight method of collecting user feedback. Note that:

1. We're not popping up an annoying window.
2. We ask a simple question.
3. There are only two options – "yes" and "no" - and no Send button.

If we introduce unpopular features or bugs, we know within a few days. This feature was inspired by a similar mechanism in the early days of Caribou.

Currently, 90% of our users answer "Yes".

The next installment of this series appears on Thursday, January 10. Subscribe to my RSS feed to get updates.