Add iOS 8 Sharing Extensions to Your App

If you run an iOS app, it’s time for you to implement an important new feature in iOS 8 – sharing extensions.

If your app contains any type of share-able content, whether user generated or published by your company, you’ll likely want to set this up in your app as it will quickly become a standard feature people come to rely on.

There are two sides to this feature – sharing content out of your app to other apps, and being able to handle receiving content shared to your app from other apps.

To easily see this in action, open safari on your iOS 8 device, go to a page with some photos, and tap the share icon in the safari toolbar. If you have other apps such as Pinterest or tumblr installed, you’ll see those icons appear as sharing destinations. This is because the Pinterest and tumblr apps have implemented sharing extensions. Similarly, the safari browser has registered activity types for certain media, such as images, so that iOS knows certain media from this app can be shared out.

For more detail, look over this article that breaks it down in detail and gives more examples.

Marketplaces – How to Grow Both Supply and Demand

With the trend of new marketplaces being created, and new sharing economy services launching, entrepreneurs often face the “chicken and the egg” problem – how to grow their user base on both the supply side and the demand side from zero.

Without density of supply in a marketplace, consumers won’t return since they won’t be able to find what they need frequently. Without density of demand in a marketplace, suppliers won’t return because their efforts yield few sales.

There are several approaches to consider, and some are more suited to certain verticals or markets. One interesting strategy might raise your eyebrows, but has been used very successfully. This approach is to “seed” supply and demand with external data or “orchestrated” activity, made by the company itself, to attract users. Take a look at this article for some good insights, explaining how others have applied this and how it can be applied to new businesses.

 

What is Agile Acceptance Criteria?

In Agile, one of the goals is to keep you user stories clear and concise. To this end, it can be useful to separate out the user story from deeper detail needed by development and testing. As with all things, it’s a balance:

• Too much detail in the user story and you’ve lost valuable conciseness
• Too little detail in the user story and others won’t be able to understand the story

There’s also a balance in how you divide up user stories into bite-size, incremental, releasable pieces, but let’s save that for another discussion.

For now, let’s assume you’re starting with an appropriately-sized user story. How do you know what detail to put into the story itself, and what to put “on the back” of the card in Acceptance Criteria?

Acceptance Criteria is a list of statements that can be tested and must be true for a story to be considered done. This site has a good concise run-down of how to choose and phrase ACs. Each user story or AC can optionally have attachments such as a spreadsheet, list, mock-up, algorithm description, reference link, or other asset, for the team to refer to.

For example, if the user story is “As the site owner/manager I want my shopping site to show suggested products to consumers so that they are inspired to make additional purchases”, then you might have an AC explaining what logic is used for the product suggestion, and an attached link to an article about a recommended product suggestion algorithm.

Or in another case, if the user story is “As the app owner/manager I want the app to only accept signups for users with addresses in a specific geographic area so that I can build momentum in a small market first” then you might have an AC stating that users can sign up if their zip code is in an accepted list, and all other users are presented with a “thank you for your interest” page, and an attached spreadsheet that lists out all the zip codes that are included in the market area.

If you find yourself creating a large number of ACs for one story, you might take this as a warning that your story is too large, and you should take the opportunity to break it down into several individual stories. As mentioned earlier, it’s all a balance, and Agile is all about finding a method or process that works for you and your specific team.

Material Design Revealed

 

Google has taken a bold step with their reveal of Material Design last month. It may appear similar visually to Windows 8 and iOS 7, but upon closer inspection, it’s clearly based on conscious choices.

If you haven’t already, check out some of the samples and videos in the guidelines. Much of the design is founded in the concept of papercraft, supporting responsive, natural animations, and the notion of layers or depth.

One of my favorite points is called Meaningful Transitions. This allows for visual continuity from one screen to the next without confusing the user. For example, if a user takes an action, the app will smoothly lead the user’s focus from one view to the next, leveraging motion and animation in a logical or semi-physical way. So often, apps implement interactions that cause abrupt or random transition to the next screen, feeling artificial. I believe we lose an opportunity for software usability by ignoring how humans process objects in the physical world.

While this certainly isn’t the end-all design, it feels it’s a swing in the right direction, and hopefully the evolution will continue to be founded in human behavior rather than pure invention.

Mobile App Links Starting to Roll Out

Several apps are starting to adopt a new standard for deep-linking into apps, called App Links. There’s a great overview video on their site. The open-source standard was introduced by Facebook, and can be implemented into any app.

Previously, especially on iOS, it wasn’t possible to click on a web link within a web site or an email and have it open to a specific view or piece of content within an app installed on your phone. Instead, it would simply take you to a web page. Android has some methods for this, but there was nothing cross-platform.

One app that is taking the lead here is called Mailbox, which is an email app released by Dropbox. To see this in action:

1. On your iOS device… (I didn’t have as much luck on Android during my testing)
2. Install the Mailbox app
3. Install the Flixster app
4. Send yourself an email with a link to a Flixster movie such as the latest X-Men movie
5. Open up Mailbox and click on the link in that email
6. You should be taken directly to that movie in the Flixster app
7. For comparison, try clicking on that link from your regular iOS mail app and note that you’re simply taken to the web site

I’ve also posted a short video of this on YouTube.

A handful of companies have implemented some level of App Links. Facebook supposedly has incorporated this into their apps as well, but I wasn’t able to observe this functionality during my limited testing.

This could be an extremely useful feature to incorporate into your apps, since the mobile user experience of using native apps is so much better typically than strictly browsing the web.

We will have to wait so see whether Google, Apple and Microsoft choose to adopt this into their respective mail apps. It could really be convenient if they did.