Passive Apps to Accelerate Serendipity and Create Incredible Experiences

I’ve been working on a mobile app, Pingle, for 3-4 months now. We’re in a beta/soft launch phase and like a lot of other app developers our biggest time and energy sap is user acquisition - not growth hacking per-se but more a general need for a handful of users simply to test our assumptions.

A lot of our key metrics at the moment focus on engagement and the usage of our app; the number of groups posted to the platform, RSVP’s to other people’s groups and messages exchanged between users. Our strategy revolves around the idea of increasing these figures and driving engagement by reducing the time between users visiting our app. Sounds familiar right?

As time’s gone on, i’ve had stronger and stronger feelings that this is a very old fashioned stick by which to gauge the success of a digital product.

Put Down The Phone

I’m a mobile addict myself and I too have the annoying habit of reaching for my phone at the first sign of a 5 second gap in my busy life (News Years Resolution #1: Put down the phone!).

In order to stay in touch on Twitter and ‘check’ for new and interesting tweets, I have to manually visit the app and ‘pull down to refresh’ my stream.

On Facebook, to see if a single one of my friends has done anything remotely interesting recently, I have to open the app and spend time scanning my feed.

It’s the same with Instagram, Spotify, YPlan, FourSquare etc etc etc.

I know what you’re saying: “errrr, what about push notifications?”. Yes, these alert me to ‘things’ happening, but it doesn’t mean i’ll find those ‘things’ interesting!

In an ideal world, I don’t want to use my phone. It causes me to be unsociable, my skills in the art of conversation to detereorate and my girlfriend to get annoyed with me. Let alone the fact that I never ‘switch off’ as a result of the wealth of options I have at my fingertips. We’re humans though; by nature we’re sociable creatures, so our need to stay in touch with all of our friends, all of the time, is difficult to fight.

However, I think there is light at the end of the tunnel. Over the last few months I’ve been considering the idea of: Passively Active Apps (PAA’s). Sounds like a contradiction right?

Here’s the idea: Apps that remove the need for me to manually consume and digest my feeds and streams in order to garner information that is a) interesting and b) relevant to me. Smart apps for my smart phone, if you will.

There is a small amount of evidence that services are starting to consider this kind of approach. Twitter, for example, have recently been sending out notifications that alert me that some other people i’m following, all followed a particular account. This is probably interesting to me! I should follow that person too, or at least have a look and see who they are. This is helpful Twitter, thanks!

Me, Myself & My Data

I share a lot of information on the web, everything from my date of birth to ‘checking-in’ at my favourite restaurants and logging how many calories I burn every morning at the gym. We’ve all acknowledged we’re in the midst of a ‘Big Data’ era, thats fine. But even with all this data I don’t feel that any consumer orientated app (that i’ve experienced - maybe Citymappr?!) has produced a truly innovative product that takes advantage of this wealh of information, to provide me with some seriously ‘interesting’ updates.

YPlan - I log all my music to Last.FM and check-in pretty much everywhere; but still all you have to offer me, when I take the time to look at your app, is Billy Elliot at the Theatre. It’s not for me.

Facebook - You’ve got everything you could possibly need: my likes and all my friends’ likes, my status updates, all my personal information and a lot of the events I go to. Notify me when there is truly something of interest to me, not when one of my ‘top friends’ posts about their lasagne.

LinkedIn - You know where I work (both in terms of organisation and location), what my position/title is, projects i’m working on and who I work with. Now provide me with some truly serendipitous experiences, introduce me to someone relevant to my field who is literally sat at the coffee shop across the street looking for a human’s company for ten minutes.

Some of this stuff sounds creepy; I know, I get it. I haven’t seen it yet but I get the impression that Spike Jonze’s new film, Her, will open a lot of people’s eyes to the idea that artificially intelligent personal assistants (basically what i’m talking about in this article) really aren’t that unrealistic.

Put Serendipity’s Pedal To The Metal

Google are collecting mountains of data via Google Now, but it’s dull waiting for Google to jump into this space with something exciting, isn’t it? I can’t wait for the day when a truly innovative startup appears with a product that smartly gathers, digests and remixes all of my available data to provide me with a moment, an experience or even a memory (how amazing would that be) that stops me in my tracks and makes me consider how seriously cool that was:

• A serendipitous meeting with someone truly interesting.

• A restaurant suggestion that aligns perfectly with my location, my friends’ locations and our future itineraries for the evening.

• Automated outsourcing of my to-do list. Getting shit done for me! Anything from booking train tickets, rebooking my hotel reservations when the price of the room drops two days later, or simply compiling research on a particular topic i’m working on.

Measure Amazing!

It’s time we started measuring apps not by the page views and downloads they receive, but by the genuinely amazing experiences and moments they successfully (albeit artificially) spawn for us. These will be truly useful apps and ones that we don’t need to ‘pull down to refresh’ but instead can rely on, like a friend, to get in touch exactly at that moment we need them.