The Useless iPhone App

“We need a mobile app, it needs to make us money and we need it NOW!” – comes the boom from the boardroom as yet another company jumps on the hype bandwagon to achieve its digital ambition. All the lessons learnt from the late 1990’s and early 2000’s seem to be forgotten in this latest digital fad.

Please pardon my digression in order to create a back story but in the early days of the internet websites were designed with the requirements of the organisation in mind. They often had animated splash intro pages, the worst ones even had music. This forced the reader to click the most popular link on the site ‘Skip Intro’. The next horror we often faced was a welcome message from the CEO or at least some marketing nonsense about when the company was founded.

8 navagation links. 1 for news 7 for ads

Then in the latter half of the noughties the dawning realisation swept across most awake organisations that websites were for customers not the organisation. Satisfy the customer and the organisation benefits. The purpose of the site was answering the questions and tasks customers wanted answered, not the internal message the organisation wanted to peddle.

Skip to 2010 and the hard learned lessons of the early 21st Century seem to have been forgotten in the gold rush to create an iPhone app. In our blind panic to get some iPhone real estate organisations are back to creating horrific user experiences that tick the needs of the organisation but fail the demands of the user, which in turn causes the failure of the entire project for both parties.

This week alone I have advised three different organisations to dump their iPhone app plans as they were self-serving and added no value to the user. Had the app been developed it would surely lead to an underwhelming number of downloads. Have we digressed back to the 90s in which the spirit of “build it and they will come” has been resurrected?

Random news content forcing the user to invest time sorting the relevant from the irrelevant

Results for "Hotels in Armagh"

Ireland.com is a reputable brand and part of the Irish Times digital publishing house. Its rush to create an iPhone app however has ticked the organisational needs but fails the reader completely.

The breaking news section is a collection of unrelated news stories while the other seven links take you to inaccurate ads from counties in Ireland. I ask, who does this serve other than the ad sales team of Ireland.com?

So what happened to this iPhone app and what created such ridiculous navigation with zero thought to the reader? Maybe it was a decree from the boardroom to “be in the mobile space and make money”.