Big improvements to service for Tesco Finder app

I've just sent into live an update to the API service supporting Tesco Finder application. The focus has been on improving performance and accuracy of the service for the ever-increasing number of Tesco Finder users.

1. The "nearest branches" feature is now much more accurate. Before the update, the API tended to favour nearest branches by longitude (east-west of your location) over latitude (north-south), resulting in branches further away but in an east-west direction ending up higher up the list than those north-south. The API was behaving like this because changes in longitude are much greater for the same distance on the ground than changes in latitude where UK and Ireland are located on the planet's surface. I had over-compensated for this effect in my arithmetic. In fact, for longitude the conversion to distance is the same as latitude except the value is multiplied by the cosine of the latitude. Lesson learned!
2. Obtaining product information is much faster. This works by pooling the search session to a special account on our grocery API so all Tesco Finder users share the same login session - since you don't have to login as anyone to use Tesco Finder, the API has to login to a special grocery account in order to search for products and provide pricing and offer information. Before now, each search was preceded by a login for that user - nice and safe in the multi-threaded computing environment of the API. Sharing the same login session is a lot trickier because that session has to be locked to each user in turn while the search takes place. Fortunately it's so quick that the queue of search requests waiting in turn to lock the session does not build up.

Sharing resources in a multi-tasking web environment can be a dangerous game. Each process (usually a computer script preparing a web page to be sent to your browser - we call this a 'thread') must lock the resource so it doesn't get altered by other threads until this thread is done. If one thread keeps the lock for too long, the backed-up threads (usually other people waiting for their web page to arrive) can grow quickly. If the backup is severe and default memory allocation is exhausted, the operating system starts trying to manage memory by swapping it to and from disk, hitting CPU load and disk response times and slowing things down more. Soon the server hits the digital cliff and the infamous HTTP 500/Too Many Users results, or the server just stops responding at all.

That's why it's taken some time and lot of testing to ensure that this programming pain is worth the performance improvement for Tesco Finder customers. I'm glad to say it has worked out well - it's now live as of 1:30pm today.

TV advertising....works!

It's all very easy for us digital internet types to get sniffy about how TV advertising is old hat with its scatter-gun approach to marketing and no direct feedback that it works.

I was in this mood when I chatted with Tesco.com's marketing team on the eve of the first TV commercial for the iPhone Tesco Groceries scanning feature last Thursday.

I have to say that they do tolerate me, do marketing. They just smiled and asked me to wait and see.

The TV commercial has been airing since Thursday and...

...now we're in the top 5 list of most downloaded UK apps on iTunes. Oh, and my colleague Omar took a copy of the various API server logs and drew graphs. The graphs showed load levels where the app had been in communication with our servers. The load level graphs had some big peaks, and the peaks matched with the timings of the TV commercials.

That's right - the 40-second commercial basically gets people to scan the barcodes on products - and, when they watch the commercial, they pick up their iPhones immediately and start doing just that! The peaks appear not just from showing the advert on ITV1 (the UK's most-watched commercial TV channel) but even on less-viewed channels - both free and pay TV - on which our commercial is being shown.

I love the thought of thousands of people sat in their living rooms watching TV, viewing the ad which persuades them to pick up their nearby iPhone immediately and ... well... scan something.

I wonder what other customers might find to scan as they get overwhelmed with barcoding desire at the instruction of the commercial? Since the server logs are deliberately anonymised, it has just struck me that I should find out what products were being scanned. For example, as I look around my living room I can spot several grocery items with barcodes - bars of dark chocolate, a DVD of comedian Dara O'Briain I received for Christmas, and a box of Tesco value tissues. Would watching the commercial just make me the scan them? The evidence from the log peaks suggest that I would!

Make no mistake - the lesson that us sniffy web 2.0 digital types need to learn is this:
After 60 years, TV advertising still works.

Tesco TV Campaign Highlights iPhone App Barcode Scanning

If you're an Emmerdale fan than you will no doubt have seen the excellent and amusing 40-second TV commercial from our marketing department.

The commercial shows our "Tesco family" using the barcode scanning facility on their iPhone as they go about life. You'll see the ad popping up all over the place on commercial TV channels in the UK over the next four weeks.

If you haven't spotted the commercial yet, don't worry: I watched Emmerdale on your behalf and recorded the commercial (the things I do for you!). You can watch it now:

Don't forget that you can use the barcode scanner on the Tesco Groceries app only if you have an iPhone 4 or have upgraded your iPhone 3GS to IOS4 (which you can do easily using iTunes).

The groceries app will work on iPad and non-IOS4 iPhones but the barcode scanner is disabled for technical reasons and because the iPad has no camera!

Does your Tesco Finder app crash when starting up?

I've just accepted an update of Tesco Finder and now it crashes as soon as I start the app! Help!

If you downloaded the Tesco Finder app in the past, then updated to the more recent version of the iPhone Operating System,  then take our Tesco Finder app update, our updated app seems to crash on some customers' phones.


There seems to be a further clue: it is mostly affecting customers who have upgraded to version 4 of iOS but not yet further upgraded to v4.2.1 (the very latest version at the time of writing).
You can find out your version by tapping on the Settings app, then selecting General - About - and reading the version number. My iPhone says: version 4.2.1 (8C148).

Customers downloading the app fresh for the first time are not having this problem - it's about the new app version using its old data store after an iOS upgrade.

To get round this problem, here's what you need to do:

1. Sync your iPhone with iTunes to make a backup copy of Tesco Finder (unless you want to download the app again),
2. Delete the app off your iPhone, 
3. Shutdown and restart your iPhone (this clears away all remnants of the app),
4. Re-sync with your iTunes program to copy the app back on to the phone, or re-download the app from the App Store - and please check your iPhone has the latest Apple operating system installed - iTunes will help you confirm this - at the time of writing it is v4.2.1 .
5. Start the app (it will ask you to re-select your home store). The freshly installed app will rebuild the data store compatible with your iPhone.

Our apologies for having to get you to do this. It results from the latest Apple iOS having a data store which does not seem to be fully backward-compatible. When you updated the iOS version (iPhone's operating system) when instructed to by iTunes, it protected the earlier app code and data store. However when we compiled the new app against the latest iOS, the 'earlier version protection' was no longer provided by your iPhone. The updated app tries to connect to a now incompatible data store left over from the earlier version of Tesco Finder and crashes.

When we are back at work, we'll look at how the app can survive the crash and attempt to rebuild the data store (or wipe it out and create a new data store). We'll need to do something because the current live version, 2.3 has an overall 1-star rating :(

It's also a learning curve to be fed through to our testing process. It looks like we need iPhones with different iOS versions in order to test the upgrade not just of our app but cope with the consequences of an iOS upgrade too.

Nice review of Tesco Groceries app by BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones

The BBC's Technology Correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, has written a nice blog article on the Tesco Groceries app now we have updated it to include barcode scanning.

It's always good when people I respect are enjoying the fruits of the work coming out of Tesco.com!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010/10/mobile_barcodes_and_smarter_sh.html

Tesco Groceries for iPhone - now with Barcode Scanner

Our Tesco Groceries for iPhone app has been updated to enable you to scan barcodes using the iPhone's camera (the same way that Tesco Finder for iPhone does).

Now you can scan any EAN barcode and, as long as the product is sold in your home store, you can see the product's details and add it straight to your current shopping basket. This should really add to the convenience of grocery home shopping, so enjoy this new facility.

To update the app, just launch App Store on your iPhone or iTunes on your computer and follow the easy instructions to download the free update. If you're now convinced to download Tesco Groceries for iPhone for the first time, click here to get the app.

Ribot have taught us the art of Simple.

It's mid-afternoon on a Saturday, and my copy of Tweetdeck is on the screen displaying my favourite filtered Twitter feeds. As you can imagine I have a column filtering "tesco iphone app" and I have to admit I'm enjoying the very many positive comments coming from 'the real world'.

The team at Ribot are enjoying it too. Given that they designed and built the Tesco Groceries for iPhone app, their enjoyment at watching this very real feedback is even greater than mine (click here and you'll see what I mean).

Ribot haven't finished with us yet, though. Their mobile expertise is affecting our thinking and what it means to actually make the customer's experience better by simplifying it.

It's a similar story for Tesco Finder - now customers can get directly to the set of products they are looking for and ignore the cacophony of presentation surrounding them. Indeed I'm beginning to identify a new demographic of customer who has avoided big Tesco stores (particularly unfamiliar ones) in the past because they think it would take too long to find what they are looking for, so don't even attempt to visit.

Teso Finder simplifies the journey to the product by enabling the customer to only look out for the navigation landmarks to get there (such as aisle number signs) and avoid the rest of the information hubbub. This new demographic of customer is now entering our doors - and together customers are using the app to find products at their chosen store at the rate of up to 5 requests a second according to Tesco Finder's server logs.

Now a confirmation message has come down from the very top of Tesco that we must start work soon to join Tesco Groceries and Tesco Finder together into a single app.

This means that in our work pipeline is your simple guide to Tesco groceries on your smart phone whether in-store, at-home or out-and-about - because, as Ribot have taught us: simpler mean better.

Survive an earthquake with Tesco Finder

A techfortesco reader has just alerted me to a very interesting article from a geography teacher's blog that is introducing Tesco Finder for iPhone/iPod Touch into geography lessons as part of an earthquake survival kit.

Chris Green, Head of Geography at a west midlands secondary school, has created the lessons to teach his pupils how to plan and execute a disaster preparedness kit on a fixed budget.

http://geographyipods.blogspot.com/2010/09/earthquake-survival-kit-on-budget.html

Some text snipped from the article:

Pupils are given a budget of £250 and asked to create an earthquake survival kit suitable for their family based at their current address (we need to be prepared in the West Midlands!! - read this article from Wired). Following the teacher introduction using the resources above, pupils use their knowledge of short and long term effects and generate a 'real' shopping list on their ipods using the apps below.

The Tesco Finder app allows pupils to search for products in their nearest store, make decisions about the price, add to a shopping basket (named by them) and generate a sub total.

They can use the maps app to plan a route from their house to the store (extension task).

It's great to see teachers using innovative ideas to teach kids, and here in Tesco.com R&D we're really chuffed that Mr. Green has chosen one of our apps to help him in his work.

Missing products and delivery slots on Tesco Groceries for iPhone / Nokia

I don’t get any products, favourites or delivery slots when I use my iPhone or Nokia app - what’s wrong?

If you get this problem, it means is that your grocery account is set to an ‘accessiblity’ profile. In order to make your account work with the app it needs to be displayed in ‘standard’ profile.

Changing your profile is easy but you do need to go to our web site and make a change to one of the settings. Follow these instructions:

1. Login to your grocery account at http://www.tesco.com/groceries
   
2. Click on ‘My Account’.
   
3. Scroll down the screen and click on “Accessibility options”.
   
4. Now you will see “Use access site” next to a checkbox with a tick in it – uncheck the box.
   
5. Click the “Confirm” button and wait for the page that appears saying “Your changes have been successfully updated”.
   
6. Finally click “Logout” at the bottom of the screen. Your account will now be displayed in ‘standard’ profile.
   

Your account should now be compatible with your Tesco Groceries iPhone and Nokia apps. If you still have problems when you have performed these actions, please give our customer service centre a call on 0845 6756999.

We are working to ensure that customers won’t have to do this in the future but for now, following the instructions above will make your account and app work together successfully.

Are you not getting products or delivery slots when using the Tesco Groceries app?

Whilst most customers are having no issues with the Tesco Groceries app, we can see from a few iTunes feedback reviews that a few are not getting all their products or delivery slots.

Unfortunately there is no way of getting hold of the the authors of those reviews (or even responding to them) to find out what's up - and we just can't recreate the issue here at all which is hugely frustrating if customers are having problems.

Nobody has contacted our customer service centre at all over this matter since last Wednesday's launch (and we're still in the top 5 for UK download counts according to iTunes) so we think it's affecting a very small number of people - we just need to find someone experiencing it so we can uncover what it is. It might just be a bad internet connection they experienced at the the time just before they wrote their review or something similar - but it's in the feedback comments and we just need to know.

If you are having trouble getting delivery slots or products to appear, the Tesco iPhone Dev Team would like to hear from you. Please could you contact our support line on 0845 6756999 or email online@tesco.co.uk with the subject "iPhone app problem" and the message will be passed to us.

We'll need your contact email address so we can get in touch with you, if that's OK.

Thanks!

Tesco Groceries for iPhone - #1 Lifestyle App and in top 10 for iTunes UK

Thanks to all of you who have downloaded our Tesco Groceries for iPhone application.

The app is achieving a continuous top 10 position in iTunes for 'most downloaded free app' (it's at No. 5 right now) and is No.1 in the 'Lifestyle" category in the time period since it launched last Thursday.

Of course downloads aren't everything - we'll be monitoring usage to see what customers use / avoid / love / hate about the application and tune it up appropriately.

Feedback pretty good too. Oh, indulge me:

Downloaded it on 3G in sainsburys and went on to do shopping from tesco first time login no problem favourites loaded no problem 86 item order done and confirmed in 12 minutes well done Tesco.

Multiple mobile users can add to the same Tesco.com grocery order

A great question has come from @sitereport on Twitter:

Can multiple iPhone users add items to the same order?

Technically, as long as the users are logged in to the same account, then yes you can add to the same order (or change quantities or remove the item).

Indeed, this can be a mix of anyone on the iPhone app, the Nokia app, and the web site - each keeps the others up to date.

I say 'technically' because if someone checks out an order, the basket is emptied ready for the next order and other users on the same account are not alerted to this unless they tap the 'basket' button which causes the app to ask our servers what the current basket status is.

Always check the basket contents regularly before adding items if you know someone else is likely to be doing the same thing.

Tesco Groceries app for iPhone / iPod Touch - Walkthrough

Let's take a walkthrough of the Tesco Groceries app for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad (the latter running in "iPhone mode").

Here is the opening screen (when you first use the app, you will be asked to tap in your Tesco.com grocery login email and password). You can choose a delivery slot, and see when the next order is due (which you can amend if you wish):

The Shopping List is your own memo pad, allowing you to type any product name in free-form text, perfect for remembering items quickly as you think of them. You could easily use the app in any shop as an electronic version of a written list, or tap the text to perform a live product search at Tesco so we can entice you with great prices and special offers:

Tapping the square next to the item makes a "tick" appear, just as you would tick a paper list as you choose products:

If you're like me, then the first place to go when putting together an order is to use the Favourites list. When you registered your account and used a Clubcard, your Favourites list stores all the items you have previously purchased online and in-store. 

You can also filter your favourites to view just those on special offer.

In the example below, notice that one of the products has a green background - this means that product is already in your basket. All searches showing products in your basket will be highlighted this way so you can change the quantity or even remove them if you wish.

Here is the 'shop' screen. Either type in some text to find the product you are looking for, or follow the department - aisle - shelf hierarchy to browse for products:

Here is an example text search for chips. Again we highlight products on special offer:

Finally here is the basket. From here you tap the checkout button which will cause the app to start the iPhone's Safari browser which will connect into a checkout special page designed for iPhone on the Tesco.com grocery web site. If you are called Paolo then your delicious chips and beer diet will soon be on its way. For everyone else, at least you'll get the entire grocery range to choose from - on average that's more than 20,000 products. Healthier products are available...!

So there you are - our new little app for iPhone giving you personal, pocketable access to our complete grocery home shopping service. It's taken a year of planning, design, coding and testing by a fantastic team across Tesco.com and our mobile design and development partner Ribot.

Now it's yours. Enjoy!

Tesco Groceries app for iPhone now live in iTunes App Store

Here it is:

Tesco.com's grocery heart and soul in a little app.

This changes everything. Again.

("Again", because we launched on Nokia first!)

Tesco and Ribot present this powerful pocket of grocery home shopping to you now. We simply call it Tesco Groceries which says so much in so few words.

Oh, the decisiveness of purpose, passion for excellence and focus of hard work by so many people for a year to give birth to this little bundle of joy, the love child of Tesco.com and Ribot our mobile design and development partner....*

If you have iTunes on your computer, iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, follow this link:

http://itunes.com/apps/TescoGroceries

Walkthrough follows in the next article.


* Yes of course I'm sounding O.T.T. - this has been the centre of my working life for over a year now, so indulge me. Ribot have put their all into this little app and I salute them. Normal service will be resumed after a celebratory drink or two tonight methinks! What on earth shall I do tomorrow?! Oh yes, a Tesco presence on other smart-phone operating systems to come, especially now I've fallen back in love with my Nexus One again after its upgrade to Android 2.2. Anyway...

One Million Tesco Apps Downloaded

Computer Weekly, one of my favourite reads, has as exceeded even their own excellent forecasting abilities.

In their article Tesco Finder app reaches 1m downloads published yesterday, they reinterpreted my blog entry of Friday which spoke of the number of Tesco Finder requests reaching one million, rather than app downloads reaching one million.

Given that Tesco Groceries for iPhone is about to launch, I thought I'd compile the actual total count of downloads of all the other mobile apps we have out there on iPhone, Blackbery and Nokia stores.

We have six currently which are (in order of launch) Tesco Finder for iPhone/iPod Touch, Tesco Wine Finder for iPhone, Tesco Clubcard for iPhone/iPod Touch, Blackberry Clubcard, Nokia Clubcard, and Nokia Groceries.

Colleagues are used to my generally happy demeanour but even they weren't quite ready for the"OHHHH...YEESSSSS!!!!!" and waving of hands that came from somewhere within me.

You see, appearing on the screen was a number. It said:

1,081,555

One million downloads. One million Tesco apps in the hands of our customers. And that's before Tesco Groceries for iPhone has launched.

Er, wow!
(and thanks for the heads-up, CW!)

Who are Ribot, and why did we make them our mobile partner?

Our grocery home shopping application for Nokia phones (and soon, iPhone) was designed and built for us by a Brighton-based company called Ribot. But who are they?

Brothers Antony and Jerome Ribot (that's a French surname) came to our attention when we sent out a tender invitation to the world of mobile development companies. Many companies responded and we interviewed representatives of the most compelling responses to our invitation. All the companies we interviewed were professional, engaging, and thoughtful when it came to the ideas they had to help us deliver a great mobile shopping application.

Most of the representatives were dressed in suits and came across as ‘sober professionals’ who would deliver a ‘sober professional’ product. We saw plans, gantt charts and basic designs for home shopping.

The Ribot brothers didn’t come across that way at all.

Both Antony and Jerome arrived at Tesco.com HQ in ‘smart casual’. It’s not a look we are particularly used to when we are being visited by people who are aiming to impress us. We got over it: To look at them and listen to them made us feel we were onto something special; they had an energy about them; they fizzed with a professional creativity mixed with skill and experience from years of developing mobile apps.

The Ribot brothers listened to our requirements, made notes and sketches as we talked, and walked us through some basic concepts that might help improve the customer’s grocery journey.

However when Antony and Jerome returned a couple of weeks later with a detailed walkthrough of the application, we couldn’t quite believe it: They had designed the application quite deliberately such that the customer could use it for grocery home shopping in either a Tesco store or that of competitor.

The design was crafted as an easy to use generic grocery shopping list into which you could write anything - “carrots”, “potatoes”, “rice-crispies”, “chocolate cake”. If you wanted to take the phone and use it in any supermarket, you could. Read the list and tap a tick-box to confirm you had added it to your basket as you walked the store. A Tesco store. An ASDA store. A Sainsbury’s store.

We pointed this out to Ribot. They smiled. You see, the power of this design enabled to us to help take the customer on a journey into Tesco:

“Sure you can use this in any store,” says the design, “but if you register at Tesco and give me your registration details, I can give you Tesco prices for your list - complete with special offers”.

Then, .. “Sure I can show you Tesco prices, but if you add this product to your basket, I could have it conveniently delivered to your home”.

In other words, anyone can use this app for their grocery lists, shopping anywhere - and if that’s they way they want it to stay, fine. Nevertheless, the app might convince its user to see if Tesco might sell their shopping list for a cheaper price, perhaps with special offers. When customers see the prices and offers, the app might persuade its user to see if they could save time by having their shopping list delivered.

It was the sort of thinking that had never occurred to us; the sort of thinking that would make our application one that lots of people - not just Tesco customers - would find useful; the sort of thinking that could take a willing user on a journey into Tesco grocery home shopping.

Ribot were awarded the contract and their development team in Brighton have delivered a grocery home shopping application for Nokia - and soon for iPhone - with functionality we are proud of.

When I think back to our original meeting and maybe a passing puzzlement why the Ribot brothers didn’t dress to impress, the answer is obvious now: Their level of design thinking for mobile devices impresses all on its own.

---

I have no business lean or contractual obligation to promote Ribot. I can’t even buy shares in them. But credit where credit is due: If a person or organisation deeply impresses me, then I won't hesitate to promote them in this blog. It's my reputation on the line here, so I'll use it as I wish.

For more about Ribot go to their website: http://www.ribot.co.uk

---

Why have we snubbed iPhone by launching grocery on Nokia?

I have lots of interesting feedback from readers wondering why we we went for Nokia first and (as GoMo News put it, "Tesco snubs iPhone with mobile commerce application").

First of all we actually haven't snubbed iPhone. Ribot have built grocery apps for both Nokia and iPhone and we're just finishing user-acceptance testing of the iPhone version which will give you a similar experience to the walkthrough I posted yesterday.

You know me by now - I love iPhone!

But it's not about me, is it: It's about thinking of our customers and the sort of phones they have. I have written before about 'Busy Mums', and there are are other demographic groups core to our online grocery business.  You'll also recall that I wrote recently about our Venn Diagram of core demographic shoppers and iPhone users and finding there wasn't much overlap. So when we did look at the sort of phones that they have, we spotted that plenty of them had Nokia phones, so we invited Nokia to come and map their phone data on our demographic data and we both confirmed much more overlap with their Series-60 smart phones than we did with iPhone. Maybe not a surprise, but we needed to see the evidence.

With this data staring at us - and with three iPhone apps from Tesco already deployed - it just made sense to try this out with Nokia first. Yes of course Nokia are delighted with our decision and they will be showcasing the Tesco grocery app in their OVI store awareness marketing, and we thank them for that!

But R&D, as a value to our business, is about examining the facts ruthlessly and following the evidence relentlessly - and the biggest cold hard fact is that a much greater percentage of our core customer base for online grocery have a Series-60 Nokia phone than an iPhone.

It's also a fact that Nokia's latest phones are capable internet devices and have become savvy at running apps. Customers will enjoy a good grocery shopping experience on their phone.

However, iPhone fans, a grocery application from Tesco will be reaching you during the course of September. Far from snubbing iPhone, I think we (or rather, Ribot) have done that device proud, as you will see.

Until then please allow our Nokia-owning customers enjoy a first crack of the app whip for once!

Why we all need a Hero (Device)

As you know, at Tesco.com we targeted iPhone first. Yet if I was to draw a Venn diagram containing two circles - one representing the population of Tesco online shoppers and the other the population of people with iPhones - you would see that the overlap between the two circles is only very small. However, if we created a third circle representing a phone that has a large overlap, we would find that it would be largely incapable of running anything.

Our core online grocery shoppers are busy Mums with a hectic lifestyle thanks to their kids, and they tend to have mid-range handsets. Their phones are cheap or free and are used to make phone calls or send text messages. We can’t reach them with a decent internet web service or app until they enter the upgrade curve naturally to a smart phone over the next 18 to 24 months. They feel no hurry: very few of our busy Mums are frustrated this morning because they can’t pre-order an iPhone 4 now Apple’s order books are full.

So why did we continue to target iPhone with our apps when our own data shows that the majority of customers are not using them? To answer this question, let me come at it from a moment of recent experience:

Early yesterday evening I sat in the corner of The Only Running Footman, an olde London pub in Mayfair. I was there to kill an hour between the end of a conference in nearby Piccadilly and before a business dinner engagement, and I thought I would use the time to catch up on email and news.

So I whipped out the iPad, asked a member of staff for the wifi password and got started.

I soon noticed admiring glances (and not at me!) - within 15 minutes no less than five people had come over and asked if they could have a look at it.

The good news for me was that the Footman is the sort of place that attracts clientele who would want their own iPad rather than want mine, so I was happy enough to show them. All five admirers were wowed by the iPad and told me they now plan to buy one.

The iPad is, therefore, an example of a what I call a “Hero” device. It attracts a crowd, it is considered ‘best of breed’, and (importantly) the journalists who might discover and write about your app have one.

I first mentioned the concept of “Hero” devices at MobileMonday this week, and I note that several attendees to that session have quoted me talking about the benefits of targeting these devices first, and admitted to poor uptake when they targetted the actual phones used by the main demographic of their customer base.

So back to our first app being made for the iPhone. As I have said in a previous post, we chose it because I have an iPhone and so it was a good starting point. Talk about the right choice: even when I blogged that our first app was rejected by Apple, that made headline news. When we finally managed to get Tesco Finder into the App Store, again a round of journalistic column inches resulted. In addition, the whole company has felt good about having a presence in Apple’s App Store; it has given Tesco a sense of being innovative and forward thinking.

If I had targetted a non-hero phone first and blogged about our app in that phone-maker's app store then I dearsay journalists would have yawned and a few of you would have removed me from your blog reader having been instantly bored.

“Hero” devices enjoy more kudos, craving, and column inches than any other device. This gives you access to a halo effect of marketing and general brand feel-good that you just don’t get when you target any other device.

You may find that your core customer base doesn’t have a “Hero” device. Don’t let that stop you having a presence on it.

Mobile Monday and Living in a Multi-platform World

Yesterday evening I joined a panel of 'thinkers' at a session of Mobile Monday London, hosted at Microsoft's Victoria offices in London.

Chaired by Marek Pawlowski of MEX (the strategy forum for user experience), the session was entitled "Living in a Multi-platform World" and explored the challenges of developing for the much more fragmented world of mobile operating systems and hardware.

I was joined by fellow panellists Oded Ran from Microsoft's Windows Mobile 7 team, Tom Hume who is MD of Future Platforms, Jerry Ennis who is the CEO at the social networking site Flirtomatic, and Ilio Uvarov, leader of user experience practice at RG/A London.

The sixty-strong audience of Mobile Monday were mostly 3rd-party mobile developers, or small companies running on venture seed capital aiming to implement their good ideas in the mobile market.

Excellent and detailed notes from the session are available at this entry in Adam Cohen-Roses's "Expanding Horizons" blog.

What intrigued me was the challenge that many developers were experiencing as they had to build their skills for such a fragmented mobile landscape. For example, if you develop a successful iPhone app and wish to port it to, say, Android, you have to learn a whole new programming language and work with a different development environment. Consider Blackberry and you have a third language and development toolset. Microsoft and Nokia, fourth, fifth and so on.

Several member of the audience were looking for 'something' that would make the transition easier; that allowed them to stop feeling that they were starting from scratch each time they made the decision to target a different handset.

I had unwelcome news for them.

My experience of mobile development is that the most successful mobile applications:

1) Fulfil a strong need,

2) Are reliable and can be trusted to do their job,

3) Use design to create an engaging, even immersive experience.

So the bad news I gave the assembled audience is that, if they try and short cut the process of creating a reliable, engaging app that fulfils the customer's need on their phone, then they end up with a mediocre offering and little success.

I've seen 'mediocre' over they years so many times with Java applications - remember their 'write once use everywhere' philosophy? The result was uninspiring and unremarkable applications that could use only the lowest-common-denominator facilities across the 'everywhere' world. Java has found its greatest strength when the applications built using it are hidden as server services or utility applets. Glamorous they ain't.

The mobile phone world is the exact opposite: It demands a great experience for each make and model of handset. That's despite the variation of capabilities, CPU power, screen resolution, colours, aspect ratio, touch/non-touch ability, buttons and more.

If there is one element you may be able to port, its your set of excellent user-interface designs - and even then you will have to have variants to fit the various screen sizes and shapes, and whether the 'phone uses buttons or touch.

The unfortunate lesson is that, unless you can target a group of handsets - and deliver the best experience tailored experience for each one of these handsets - then don't bother at all.

Let's make that positive: If you make the time to deliver a best-of-breed experience for every particular handset you target, your application will be savoured by its users because you have made them feel special through a great experience. You may even have validated their choice of handset because your app works so well and looks so good on it.

Competitor apps may do more but yours can also be successful if it does less, better (comma important).

Believe me, customers who experience fantastic design and a great implementation on their mobile will reward you with commitment and loyalty. That's a prize worth the pain of starting from scratch each time.

Tesco Finder gets barcode scanner / remote support from remote countryside

I'm just back from one of my splendid 'cycling and cider' holidays in Cornwall - mountain biking through the fantastic trails set up around Calstock and Gunnislake in the day, delicious local cider procured from any one of a number of local cider farms in the evening (and it's important to get it that way round).

While I was away, Apple finished quality-assuring the latest version of Tesco Finder, which now supports barcode scanning through the iPhone's camera. Management and editing of product lists has been improved, too, such as being able to delete a shopping list even if there are still products in it.

It just so happened that the day following the launch of the update, our R&D server (that supports requests from Tesco Finder applications) rebooted inconsistently from a Windows Update event. At the time the hubby and I were out biking in the middle of a trail through the woodland across the Tamar river from Gunnislake where mobile signals don't go. It was only when we climbed up next to the ruined chimney of an abandoned tin mine above the forest that my phone started alerting me that something was wrong.

Fortunately on that day the phone I had taken was my Google Nexus One which I have grown to love over the last few weeks despite its occasional glitchiness. It just so happens that some time ago I had downloaded a free app called "Remote RDP Lite" which acts as a simple Windows remote desktop client. Despite the GPRS-only data signal, I was able to reach the server / login / check a couple of logs / reboot it whilst I sat on the hillside. After 5 minutes I used the Nexus One's web browser to check the admin web page for Tesco Finder and discovered that once again requests were coming in thick and fast - and being processed successfully.

You might wonder why it was that a colleague didn't reboot the server? Yes I have wondered that too since an important group of them know where all the account and server login information is kept. It's in a safe to which they have the combination, and inside is an envelope containing login information, on which I have written "Everything that has a Beginning... has an End". This dark motto reminds me to ensure that we always have the ability to access the knowledge of any R&D project, in case one of us should be accidently terminated (for example, a losing a dimension having been hit by London bus, or mountain biking unexpectedly over a cliff).

Apologies to customers whose sparkling new Tesco Finder didn't work for a few hours, and also to developers trying in vain to get the API to respond. I've stopped the server from automatically installing Windows updates and immediately rebooting - we'll be doing that manually for a while.

On the other hand I have to admit to feeling a sense of immense satisfaction that technology has enabled me to support a leading application for customers whilst located in the technology-free remoteness of an abandoned Cornish tin mine overlooking pure countryside. If you want to see where I was located, click here

To celebrate, I felt a sip of local cider was in order....