A number of customers have been requesting an iphone version of textburst so they can run SMS Marketing campaigns when they’re out and about or for business continuity scenarios when you can’t get to a PC.
To put textburst onto our smartphones the first step has to be a site optimised specifically for the most popular devices. iphone and blackberry sping to mind instantly.
This being the first release of a Smartphone version of the application we wanted to keep it as simple as possible. The theory being we use our smartphones to access applications when we don’t have time to fire up the PC or when we’re out of the office. Either way, when using a small screen we really don’t want to be presented with a cluttered mess and too many choices.
Fortunately Google analytics backed up our suspicion. We found phone users spend less time on the site and use less pages.
Pages per visit Time on app
Mobile 3 3:55
PC 4.5 7:20
Here’s the spread of smartphone usage, notice the heavy skew towards apple devices, at least this was conclusive about what design style we should opt for, iphone it is!
iphone or itouch 71%
Blackberry 26%
Sony 3%
Android 0% (very interesting!)
So here it is:
After logging in you’ll find a simple, self explanatory menu:
Send message screen
As I type the send screen is still giving us a few headaches with the curved corners on the boxes, and hopefully will be rectified before we launch.
Sent Items and Inbox provide a scrollable list of your 20 latest messages
And clicking through to a sent item will show you a summary of the campaign as follows:
Hopefully the use of standard iphone formatting and navigation will make this as simple to use as the iphone itself. I personally can’t see any iphone user struggling with this in any way.
Just to clear any risk of users needing specific functionality there is a link on every page to use the full version.
So there we have it, simple, clean, easy to use, and due for release early next week.
Update: it’s released and working well.