10 Lessons From The Apprentice Going Mobile

It was with some trepidation that I heard that the contestants on The Apprentice this week would be tasked with creating a mobile app. On the one hand, it's fantastic for the industry that when the BBC needed something to illustrate a fast-moving technology with global reach, it was mobile rather than traditional web they plumped for ("think big and go global" was the challenge). On the other, when the television circus rolls into town, there is the potential for the liberal application of "telly magic" to leave a rather inaccurate picture of how things really work in mobile development to 8 million viewers. So, with bated breath, we sat down at Red Ant HQ this morning and watched it as a team. As it stands, my fears were relatively unfounded; although the commercial reality of the task was wildly inaccurate for a show that ostensibly focuses on the cold heart of business, Lord Alan and co. presented a glowing recommendation for going mobile – and a interesting insight for viewers into the development lifecycle. Below are some lessons you can take from the short but storied lifespans of Slangatang and Ampi Apps. And if you'd like some more information on our approach to mobile strategy, please see our upcoming whitepaper, "The Unified Mobile Strategy", of which you can read an extract on our Whitepapers page.

Note: This post contains spoilers for the episode of The Apprentice that aired on 11 May 2011. If you haven't seen it already, you can check it out on iPlayer.

1) Don't scrimp on planning

What we saw last night was essentially a very compressed version of the normal mobile strategy lifecboycle. Unfortunately, when you're concepting, building, and releasing a product in less than 24 hours, there's not a whole lot of room left for proper strategic planning, and the lack of coherence showed in the end products. Whilst credit is due to both the Boys and the Girls (and their all-night development partners at Grapple) for getting a working product out in the time, I think it is safe to say neither app would really set the world alight once the cameras stop rolling – which you could see coming from the way they approached the early stages. Unfortunately, sometimes the same approach is taken by businesses with a lot more than 24 hours to work with – don't make the same mistakes. Of course, we don't know what was left on the cutting room floor – the planning stage is hardly the most electrifying part of the process – but that's all the more reason to emphasise it's still important to your business, if not the BBC's editors.

2) Know your audience

At first, it seemed as though the Boys had the advantage here – whilst the Girls didn't seem to have any clearly defined target audience for their app, the guffawing Boys were obviously aiming Slangatang at versions of themselves, following the go-with-what-you-know approach. However, it soon transpired the reverse was true. Arguably, the reason the Boys lost was due to two mistakes made in their appreciation of their audience. First, they ignored the Sugar diktat to "go global" - the largely regional UK humour of Slangatang did not appeal to global audiences in the same way the universally annoying sound effects of Ampi Apps did. Then, they were quite rightly criticised for the potentially insensitive (and certainly hackneyed) stereotypes the app involved, leading to Wired choosing to feature the Girls' app instead (which, I have a suspicion, accounted for a vast proportion of their 10,000 downloads). Although the iPhone did not feature in the program (due to Apple's refusal to bend their App Store process), I'm not sure it would have got through their approval system – a flag we would have raised earlier in the concept. Back in the real world, this is exactly the same mistake PepsiCo made.

3) Do your research AND listen to it

I really wanted to congratulate the Girls here. Whilst the Boys were rushing in to ideas, the Girls despatched a team to pound the streets to get some (albeit untargeted) market research…which they then completely ignored or indeed contradicted. You do have to wonder why they bothered! Both teams could also have done with a bit of time spent getting up to speed with what competition is around, which might have saved them both coming up with fairly tired apps that would have nothing new to offer in the real world (particularly Ampi Apps – a quick search on iTunes shows at least 20 almost identical apps). However, since their "competition" in this case was just the other team, and they had very limited time available, we can forgive this omission. In the real world, however, we can't recommend a marketplace review enough – what's good, what's bad, and what's missing out there.

4) If you can't define your product, you're doing it wrong

The best moment of the show for me was watching Susan Ma try (and fail) over and over again to explain her app idea. Edna Agbarha, the project manager, was absolutely right to cut her off (despite the subsequent sulking) - if you can't describe your product idea in one or two sentences, it's probably going to be a pretty terrible app. We call this the Product Definition Statement and it's a vital tool for ensuring your app is tight, focused and streamlined – you can refer back to it throughout the development process and make sure you're on the right track. Ten-page decriptions might work in other channels, but there is simply no room in a good app for features that aren't focused on the main task.

5) Pick a leader who understands the business

Interestingly, there was a stark contrast in the discussions between the Boys and Girls when it came to choosing the project leader. The Boys focused almost exclusively on their technical experience, eventually settling on Leon who had (supposedly) experience in the logistics of creating an app. The Girls, by contrast, chose Edna, a "business psychologist" with presumably little technical background, the only candidate to put herself forward. You might imagine that this would give the Boys the advantage but as it turns out, it had little noticeable benefit (Mike Butcher at TechCrunch UK, one of the three sites the teams pitched to, bemoaned the Boys' lack of technical knowledge, proving that experience in one technology field doesn't necessarily translate into another). Instead, the business knowledge shown by the Girls in understanding the audience proved far more important. Specialist tech expertise is the whole reason you are hiring a mobile agency – being a leader who understands your business is far more valuable to the project as a whole. We urge our clients to choose a project lead who has the most knowledge of the business objectives – not just the IT team because "they're the techy guys".

6) Publicity is key

The producers of the show were pretty astute to place a larger focus on the publicity and marketing side of the challenge rather than the nuts and bolts of the apps themselves. By asking the teams to pitch to thought leaders (the websites) and early adopters (the conference-goers), it showed an understanding that these two groups have a huge influence on app success – few great app success stories "just happened" with little supporting marketing activity. Indeed, with just 24 hours to download it in and number of downloads the sole metric for success, publicity was pretty much the entire task, particularly on the websites with their large readerships – with no need for long-term customer satisfaction, engagement, monetisation, word-of-mouth etc., the actual content and function of the apps themselves was largely irrelevant; someone who downloads the app and hates it is just as valuable to the teams as someone who loves it. This was borne out by the fact that despite both finished apps being pretty poor, the three websites were effectively forced to feature either one or the other leading to a very respectable download performance from their readers – I highly doubt Wired, TechCrunch or Pocket-Lint would have chosen to write about them had the BBC not been involved, and Mike Butcher from TechCrunch admits as such today. For real businesses, the message is that publicity can still make or break your app – as the Girls found out when they won almost solely due to Wired's article. Hopefully, your attempt will be a lot better than Ampi Apps too.

7) There's no excuse for bad user experience - "random" is not a design strategy...

When asked why the Ampi Apps "animals" section featured a picture of an elephant but no elephant sound effect, the reply was a classic Apprenticism – "the link is that there is no link" – and one of the worst design philosophies I've ever heard; the professional designers were banned from advising the teams and boy does it show! By contrast, the Slangatang interface, for what we saw of it, actually seemed quite well thought out. The general lack of attention to detail also meant both teams failed to write effective app store copy (although the apps are now removed, archived versions are here and here). Despite being praised by Sugar, the Girls managed to spell the name of their own product wrong throughout (!), and offered little info outside of a fairly fluffy introduction (plus "Ampi Apps" as a name fails to capture anything regarding the nature of the app); the Boys' was actually better in my opinion, and the app name and tagline were actually pretty good, but they came in for a fairly serious drubbing in the boardroom. We'll put this down to a lack of expert advice and time – something you'll have both of in the real world.

8) Freemium models require longevity

The single concession to real-world business viability of the apps was a short discussion on monetisation plans, and both teams went with the Freemium model of free downloads with premium content later (according to Grapple, the Boys also planned for user generated content and seemed more advanced in their commercial thinking). The key requirement for a Freemium model to work, is long term engagement and satisfaction to encourage users to pony up for the paid content – which as you can imagine, I don't think either app was going to offer. If we were tasked with bringing these apps to market, we would probably go for a standard upfront purchase model; the limited content on offer for both apps is unlikely to encourage users to stick around for repeat purchases.

9) Platforms are great (to a point)

It's testament to the power of platform-based development, in which apps are created from standard building blocks to provide a rapid foundation for development and minimise duplicated work, that the (simple) apps were built and released for Nokia, Android and Blackberry within 24 hours – it's this reason we created Colony Mobile, our own commerce and content platform. However, it's important to avoid the problems platforms can bring with them, particularly those that offer a single coding structure for multiple operating systems – namely an overall lack of interface polish (due to not using specific development tools for each operating system), most apps built with the same platform also tending to look the same, and a more limited overall scope; whilst Slangatang needed little complex functionality, something like Lovestruck required ample bespoke code created especially to meet the app's goals and company branding.

10) Always, always stick to your objectives

Ultimately, the Boys lost because they lost focus on their objectives. Despite having a better app than the Girls, by forgetting the global appeal required or the need to maximise download numbers above all else, they ended up on the back foot and another team member down. The same is true in the real world – you can build a great app, but if it doesn't match your business objectives (which, of course, you laid down in your well thought out planning stage, and stuck to by referring to your product definition statement throughout development, right?), it won't have the success you deserve. Put your business objectives first, and the rest will follow.

In closing, I will leave you with the thought that if these two teams of infighting, self-promoting, cliché-ridden misfits can achieve this much with mobile in just a day, imagine what you can do with a proper strategy, realistic timescales...and no need to please the man responsible for inflicting the Amstrad E-m@iler on the world.

 

This blog post was written by Alex Sbardella - Mobile Products Manager

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