Here are a few tips on how to think about, and build iphone applications that never get binned by users.

Define a powerful value proposition

There is no point building an app when there several apps available that do the same thing.

Research the existing apps and examine download stats and user feedback. If the apps are poorly designed, there may be a case to offer an alternative in the same league.

Think about how you could augment your app to make it more original. What kinds of data and functions could you over lay to make your app the killer app? If you decide to serve content through the app, is this beneficial when the same info is available on websites.

Branding apps

Just because you slap a well known brand on it, won’t make an instant hit. In fact the expectation is greater, as users expect the app to be of a higher standard. There are plenty of corporate apps that didn’t make the grade and were slammed by user forums.

Quality of build

Find an organisation that can build apps which meet the same standards of quality consumers expect from the corporate’s products and services.

Adoption of apps

Expect adoption to be slow at first and increase as the app becomes known and talked about.

Promote the app through current communications, by allocating small download buttons. If you are planning high traffic events, think about how the app could be downloaded as part of the event. Events offer lots of captive eyeball.

You can also promote the app through the itunes store. Apple reserves the right to refuse apps on their store and approvals need a one month lead time. Remember though, no amount if marketing can make up for an app’s short comings. If users label it trash, its likely to end up there.

The iTunes store may have over 60,000 iphone apps, but many of these are gimmicks. They are downloaded and immediately discarded.

Property marketing is all about getting onto a house hunter's list of must-see properties. Once you're on the list, the buyer is almost guaranteed to come to your showroom. Here are a few tactics for getting onto that lucrative list.

Mobile friendly websites

Real estate sales is about location, timing and events. Mobile provides the perfect platform to harness these three variables. The arrival of 3G phones and cheap data plans by telcos is making this a reality.

The mobile version of the website has become more important than the desktop. While the desktop website may constitute the start of the journey through search, and present a favourable image of the property commensurable to the price, it is the mobile site that enables the user to find info quickly when they are in the field.

During a house hunt, the buyer is time-poor. Faced with seeing many properties back to back on a Saturday morning, they need information delivered to them in the field quickly. While they are planning their appointments using the phone calendar, they can check maps, video and Facebook to find information about the property.

Mobile also enables buyers to do less preplanning before embarking on their house hunt. Property developers with strong mobile friendly content presents a tactical advantage over their competitors.

Locality-based SMS

A promotion timed on certain days, targeting an age group, based on their proximity to the showroom is a good way to get on their list. That way, even if they have not heard of the development before, their location, age and timing can provide some quality in the data. For example, locality bases SMS can be sent to an age group 25-35 years-of-age, on Saturdays, when they are near Tanjong Pagar.

Digital showroom

The sales brochure and agents are not expendable. In fact, they complement digital. What can be removed from the equation are CD ROMs. These are inconvenient and easy tossed away. Bluetooth provides a more ubiquitous method of sharing information.

Bluetooth overcomes the issue of phone compatibility as a way to share video, pdf brochures, maps and other content. Once it is on the buyer's phone, they have it with them to check anytime, anywhere. It's easy to share it with friends or family to gather opinions and validation.

Offer free wifi and encourage downloads of an audio walk-through application. Events create a focus and reason to download and use applications. Add codes or numbers to the exhibition stand and sales materials to allow buyers to get more information from the application.

While browsing printed sales brochures, keying in codes to a mobile application can reveal more information. This is convenient for the buyers, as they have their phones beside them as they browse.

Present custom maps that sell the entire area, and not just the condominium. After their prospect leaves the showroom, their journey of discovery continues with interesting historical information, shops to visit, and parks to sit in.

Hashtags are a great way of aggregating conversation around a trending topic. While Twitter helps spread messages, hashtags help organise them. Hashtags make turn Twitter into a mini forum. Hashtags are popular for events, conferences and promotions.

Hashtags, are just like 'tags'. Tags in general are a "bottom-up" type of classification, compared to hierarchies which are "top-down". In a traditional hierarchical system, the designer sets out a limited number of terms to use for classification, and there is one correct way to classify each item.

In a tagging system, there are an unlimited number of ways to classify an item, and there is no "wrong" choice. Instead of belonging to one category, an item may have several different tags.

Hashtags don't work like domain web addresses. You cannot simply register one and immediately take ownership. No one owns them. Like any tag used to codify content on blogs, wikis or forums, they are just that, words. They belong to no one. Within the twittersphere, there has been a movement to codify hashtags, so people can identify what stream their conversation belongs to.

So like so much user content, it is defined by the community, and it becomes acceptable a hashtag takes on a certain association by the sheer number of users. Very much like the words in a language are defined and redefined over time, so are hashtags.

Twitter has no right over hashtags, nor any other organisation for that matter. Hashtags, like words in the English language, are defined by the mass majority.

Sites like tagulus and twub try to give more definition and 'ownership' to hashtags in the twittersphere. This is a good place to start researching if a hashtag is currently in use. Tagalus allows you to define a hashtag, and other users can comment or vote if they agree or not on the definition. Popular tags emerge because they become popularly understood as meaning one common thing.

Hashtag stats

Track tweets from a hashtag in real-time using Monitter and Twitterfall are good choices. If you need to track a less popular Twitter hashtag, try setting up a Twilert to get a daily email of the use of a specific hashtag.

Hashtag for powerusers

If you're about to put on an event or are looking to take your event to a new level, here are some useful tips for hashtag organisation:

• Choose a single hashtag early: This may seem simple, but it is vital to get right. Choose a simple hashtag that represents your event or brand. If your event is the Business of the Calling Ducks conference, don't use #businessofthecallingducks as your tag. How about #bizducks instead?
• Remind attendees of the hashtag constantly: On your website, on your Twitter feed, at the opening remarks, and throughout the day, make a friendly reminder about your hashtag and that you can track the conversation through it.
• Provide a website widget: For anyone who isn't using or knowledgeable with Twitter, provide an easy conversation tracker tool on your website. You can make one via Widgetbox or Tweetgrid.

Usability testing measures the usability, or ease of use, of the product's capacity to meet its intended purpose.

Usability testing tries to measure the value the user was able to derive from a single visit. Did the user find what they were looking for, and are they likely to return or tell someone else?

Usability studies have shown that a website may be aesthetically pleasing, but fail to deliver on it's intended purpose.

Key metrics

These are some of the variables which come to play in a usability study:

• Performance. How long and how many steps are required for user to complete a basic task? (eg find a product, create a new account, and order the item.)
• Accuracy. How many mistakes did people make? (And were they fatal or recoverable with the right information?)
• Recall. How much does the person remember afterwards or after periods of non-use? Sites which have poor logic are difficult to learn. They force visitors to relearn the site each time they revisit.
• Emotional response. How does the person feel about the tasks completed? Is the person confident or stressed? Would the user recommend this system to a friend?

Continuous usability testing

It is better to receive criticism early, and adjust the course of the project in real time. The later usability testing occurs, the more expensive it becomes to fix.

By the time it is left to the end, fundamental flaws cannot be ironed out because of time and budget constraints.

Make user testing part of the process of development. This approach allows usability to move from being a one-time, report-oriented process to an iterative, action-oriented one. It's much easier to change a whiteboard drawing than a wireframe; easier to change a wireframe than a prototype; and easier to change a prototype than a finished product.

When to conduct a usability test

Usability testing is most useful when initiating a new project, to ensure the investment in the project provides the value it was intended to.

Pay particular attention to the user's experience of sites which challenge conventional navigation. New types of functions may appear to be ground-breaking, but may be introduced at the expense of fundamentals such as reading gravity or white space.

Although there may be a strong conceptual reason to challenge convention wisdom, if the experience is foreign, the user is being forced to relearn basics.

For example, taking a standard road map and changing all its icons and colours, will violate common meaning, and disorientate the user.

When to avoid usability studies

When someone buys a car, they know it has a shelf life of approximately five years. After five years, the car begins to slow and rust.

Part of this is because the car is becoming fatigued, and part of it is because engineers can make a better car than they did five years ago. You don't need a usability expert to tell you that the car needs to be replaced.

Be careful of usability study that are designed to have an academic outcome. Let the car manufacturers tell us how to best engineer a car, and focus instead on buying the vehicle that best suits your requirements.

How usability testing should be performed

Having a usability expert on the team can make a difference. However, there is no substitute for real users.
One way to test a user experience before commencing HTML, is to create a wireframe in Microsoft PowerPoint. A designer is capable of adding buttons, and it is a good simulation of the final experience.

Another route is creating paper prototypes. This is slightly simpler, and involves the subject sitting a facing a light box. Over a light box, an assistant overlays hand-drawn graphics.

Subjects click different parts of the paper screen with a pen, and the assistant replaces the slides with new ones to simulate the website.

Measure performance above preference

Performance is measured by how quickly the users were able to complete a scenario. Preference is their like / dislike of the site, based on an overall impression.

Studies have shown that even though users gave sites a low performance score, they still gave a high preference rating.

Preferences are highly subjective, and could be a mixed by influences like design, colour or content. Performance however is much more objective.

Rate performance above preference. Beauty is the eye of the beholder - keep it that way.

Annual report websites are very different to corporate websites. They originate for a very different reason, and fulfil a different purpose. Hence, building either requires a unique approach, resources and processes. 

Content management

Annual reports cover a company's activities throughout the preceding year. As the document reports retrospectively, additions after the site goes live are few. A content management system (CMS) is therefore not essential.

However, a CMS can speed up the process of uploading initial content, especially for non-technical content providers.

Content in a printed annual report can run as long as 100 pages, and include complex graphs and tables. Access is imperative to ensure the print edition content can be transferred quickly and easily to the electronic edition.

Depending on the complexity of the style sheets, some HTML knowledge of HTML may be required on the part of those uploading content.

Traffic to the site

The bulk of traffic to an annual report site comes soon after it is launched. Ongoing traffic is likely to decrease over ensuing days, as all stakeholders have read content, and have few reasons to return.

Calculate the likely spike of traffic at the launch and ensure the server hosting the website is capable of hosting enough connections and stream video if necessary.

Accuracy of content

Where a corporate site could be quite vague, or written with exaggeration, annual reports have to be highly accurate. Every word and figure may be scrutinised. Auditors read, cross-reference and approve the electronic edition against the print edition.

Achieving this level of detail can be an exhausting task, so it is important the production team are aware from the beginning the expectation placed upon them.

Design of the annual report website

In most cases, the design of the online edition follows the print edition. This is because most companies still offer a print edition, and the creation of an annual report traditionally begins with print.

As such, designing an annual report is not so much an exercise in creativity, but design discipline. Being able to recognise key motifs in the print edition, and translate them effectively to a web page is essential.

The subtle design elements which are easily achieved in print, can be quite a challenge for developers to achieve online.

Developers who are normally very technical people, can struggle to pick up the typographic nuances set out by the print designer, including column grid of the page, space before headlines, leading in body copy, size of headlines and creation of a consistent relationship between sizes of images.

Creating cascading style sheets (CSS) that accurately reflects the print edition's style sheets, requires an eye for detail.

Tight production deadline

Annual report sites are built under great time pressure. Content is normally only available once the print edition is approved, giving the online production team only a few days to upload content.

The pressure of the deadline does keep all parties focused on contributing their scope of work. However, it also means there is little room for things to go wrong. Careful planning and identification of key hurdles well in advance will keep development on track.

Objectives of an annual report website

While the objective of a corporate site may be to gather sales leads, annual reports don't have much in the way of a two-way dialogue. In fact, in the few instances when a visitor has a query, this enquiry is best directed to a contact page on the corporate website.

Define the objective. Is the objective to match the print edition? Or offer dynamic ways in which the visitor can choose to assemble content, other than viewing a pure webpage.

Given the tight production deadline, be clear in what you are setting out to achieve.

Serving dynamic content

Content in a database can be presented in variety of ways to the user. Apart from serving a pure web page, you can offer a several other platforms like print-friendly version, dynamic PDF and mobile.

If the objective of the annual report is to match the print edition, be careful how many platforms you introduce. Each platform is like another website, with its own template, CSS style sheet and testing requirements. 
Adding just one platform, can multiply the size of a project by a factor of two.

User content sharing functions

Placing video content in Youtube to be featured on the annual report website may not be desirable, if the video is intended to be viewed alongside the content on the page. Sharing functions allow for quicker proliferation of content, but can also present content out of context.

In addition, functions like RSS and Twitter are not much use when content is added once with no subsequent posts.

Average time spent browsing

Set a target of 8 minutes of average browsing. Most corporate sites, even those with blogs, are lucky to achieve half of that.

Visitors are more engaged with annual report content. For instance, a shareholder will read more pages than a first time visitor to a corporate site looking to contact a sales representative. There is more detail for the visitor to absorb, and they are likely to read every word as opposed to skimming.

To keep an audience engaged, consider adding videos, and build relationships between articles using keywords. Plug-ins can examine keyword density of pages, or track user history, and make intelligent suggestions about what a visitor ought to read next.

Creating related links between articles removes dead ends and keeps the user journey moving forward.

Security

The window for the annual report to make the right impression is much smaller than for a corporate site. Unlike a corporate site which may only have a few hundred visitors per day, an annual report site can have a few hundred per hour.

Security from hacking is paramount. If the site is being hosted externally, carefully consider how to prevent attacks and have in place a disaster recover plan in the event a hack does occur.

For more on security click here.