This weekend I downloaded new apps for a fresh new iPad. I downloaded both Flipboard and Editions. I was previously enamored with Flipboard but I’ve come around to liking Editions a lot. I think the product managers at AOL did a great job with this app. When thinking about what they did so much better than the competition, I concluded the following:

Design. Editions is a beautiful product that recreates the gorgeous feel of glossy print. It doesn’t seek to re-imagine the linear reading experience of print but rather the non-linear reading experience of tablets. It was a bold design decision but I think it paid off. I know immediately what to do when I am given the product unlike Flipboard where I actually had to relearn how to add things (which has become more complicated than it used to be) and had to remember which sections I had already read in that sitting.

Discovery. Editions also has a personalization capability that isn’t too intrusive about getting user feedback to improve itself. A lot of readers want to do this but don’t know how to ask for data from the user.  

Completion. The biggest distinction of Editions from any other competing product is the unique sense of completion it gives the user. You actually reach an end when reading the daily edition whereas with other products you can keep going and going until you realize the information in antiquated. It is empowering to feel you got something done in a world inundated by information. It was a bold design choice to make a product that you can’t keep wandering around infinitely, and I applaud the decision.

That said, I would like to see a few improvements:

1. Integration of Instapaper to allow read later function
2. Ability to cache content for offline viewing similar to the Wall Street Journal app
3. Better integration of Twitter, perhaps in the form of popular tweets at the end rather than useless horoscopes.

All in all, I’m surprised by how good the product dubbed “the app for when you crap” turned out. It’ll be interesting to see if the product managers can keep the simplicity in tact for future versions.

Today PaidContent published a guest editorial post I wrote about how freemium for news could work.  I tried to crunch some numbers and figure out how to make the numbers work in my post.  Here’s an excerpt:

If you do the math (i.e. back out from the weighted average of $12/year/user), 99 percent of users (call this the paper’s “economy class” customers) are worth $11/year/user to the Herald, while the remaining 1 percent of users (call this “business class”) is worth $120/year/user. For similar newspapers to improve their online revenue, those are the numbers they would need to beat.

Can it be done?

In 2006, Joan Meyers-Levy, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota’s school of management, studied the relationship between ceiling height and thinking style. She demonstrated that, when people are in a high-ceilinged room, they’re significantly better at seeing the connections between seemingly unrelated subjects.

I had a Facebook account long before I had a MySpace account.  In fact, I never signed up for a MySpace account; instead, I had been using Imeem, a legal music website, which got merged with MySpace Music and migrated all its users over with it.  As a result, I was one of the few that joined the social network as it was declining in growth and usage.  It’s been interesting to see its attempt at revival as an Internet brand.

It’s gone from social network to “social discovery,” focusing on entertainment content.  I like the rebranding and redesign, which makes it look a lot more creative and fresh.  

MySpace though shouldn’t forget its roots as a way for individuals to express themselves to their friends.  Self-expression is behind Tumblr and its monster growth.  MySpace has been accused of ripping off Pinterest, and I think they should embrace this creative source of inspiration and just buy Pinterest and the team to fully embrace this angle of media self-expression and sharing.  What Tumblr and Pinterest does well that MySpace users could benefit from is aesthetically pleasing design constraints that the enable cool self-expression.

Thinking about all the things MySpace should be doing to not only ensure relevancy in a fast-changing Internet world but to restart growth, I have realized that the big Internet brands as a whole could be doing a few things better than just redesigns.  They should be learning from counterparts whose growth had stalled but has been re-ignited.

Acquiring Innovation: eBay + Paypal

eBay bought Pay in 2002 while eBay was still reporting very strong growth.  It ended up being a prescient move as its marketplace business, its traditional source of revenue, has slowed down.  Paypal now accounts for most of the growth.  Buying complimentary businesses with new, monetizable technology has in many ways been the most relied upon strategy by incumbents with maturing businesses. 

Adding Human Touch: Starbucks

Starbucks made an interesting decision in 2008 when it was facing stalling growth and shutting down a lot of locations.  The New York Times reported that CEO Howard Schultz “lamented the ‘watering down’ of the Starbucks experience, blaming the expediencies of rapid growth for removing ‘much of the romance and theater’ from the ubiquitous stores.”  He decided to retrain the baristas to take back some of the drink making process which added more magic to the production of the drink.  People sometimes need to see the human touch to appreciate the finesse and craftsmanship.  Machines that are black boxes capable of magically producing the drinks at the touch of a button seemed somehow less impressive to customers.

The lesson here is the value of showing the work being done, particularly signaling the care and affection put into a product by people.  Efficiencies and automation are good but they can’t subtract from the magic.  Reminding customers of the people behind the product seems to be yet another way to reverse the decline in brand value.

Investing in New Brands: J. Crew

Another interesting strategy is to incubate your own new brands.  This is very different than launching new products with simply new names.  New brands require just as compelling stories behind them as the original brands do rather than simply stamping on the existing brands to the product line.

J. Crew CEO Mickey Drexler used this strategy as he turned around the apparel company into the behemoth it is in retail today.  He focused on producing what he called “cult brands” like Alden shoes for JCrew.  He says “integrity and craftsmanship is the new no-logo logo of J. Crew” and so supports the J. Crew brand while nurturing new ones.  

Curating and cultivating these new “cult brands” can draw new customers while affirming the fanatical loyalty of the existing base.

Conclusion

Of course, there is no silver bullet for the woes of any company facing stalled growth or decline.  Internet companies in particular seem to have had fewer successful turnarounds, which may be due to the nature of technology as a fast-changing industry.  However, the challenge of reversing the decline isn’t unique to them and they would do well to pay attention to ways other companies have re-ignited their engines for growth.

Ever since what some consider the worse font choice of all time, I’ve been wondering what makes certain fonts considered socially acceptable and taken seriously while *cough* Comic Sans *cough* others have been ostracized as unintelligible scribble.  My conclusion: ubiquity.  

It’s a little paradoxical, but essentially, once it has been pushed out to people through being the default choice of some influential decision makers, then it becomes legitimatized.

Times New Roman has earned itself a highly respected place in people’s minds — especially those of academics and serious intellects.  You would never turn in a paper or a college application personal statement in another font.  All this reverence because Microsoft chose to make it the default font as far back as Windows version 3.1.  Maybe it’s because it looks so serious with the feet and styling of the letters; however, I would conjecture it is because Office Word became the most ubiquitous word processing program in the 90s. Times New Roman then most ubiquitous font for documents.  Consequently, it became accepted as the only serious font.

Helvetica has become the “mainstream font” largely because designers for corporations and mass media adopted it.  I just saw a whole documentary on it (not surprisingly called Helvetica).  People say it doesn’t stand out because of its very clean look.  It is used by GAP, Crate and Barrel, and countless others (though you can see 40 great examples of logos with helvetica).  

Of course the initial clean design may have attracted large corporations to adopt it, but I do believe having it show up everywhere that these corporations sprout up has contributed to its ever growing ubiquity and popularity — and therefore acceptance as a legitimate font to use by people wanting to be taken seriously.

Calibri may soon gain acceptance as a serious font.  Not many of my Mac friends know it, but it’s actually the new default font for Microsoft products ever since Office 2007.  I personally love it.  Microsoft claimed that san serif fonts like Calibri are easier on the eyes when you have a lot of text which is all too common for documents made from Micorsoft products as well as the web now days since so much long-form content is being put up.  I hope Calibri catches on but I do wonder if academics will ever accept it as a serious font with the same august that Times New Roman presently enjoys.

While I doubt Papyrus (or Comic Sans for that matter) will catch on anytime soon even with the occasional cameo is blockbuster films, I do wonder what the next big fonts will look like.  The folks at typekit may be the first to know if their startup takes off and designers adopt their tool kit.  Browsers now support the ability to use different fonts while previously, you had to put stylized fonts in images or flash; however, there are a lot of rights issues around fonts and Typekit has effectively streamlined the process to a point where you just pay Typekit a small fee to gain access to rich library of fonts.  I wonder if they have interesting data on what web publishers are using outside of the normal arial, verdana, and helvetica fonts.  This may give an indication of what’s the next big font based on trending adoption.

I suspect however that the adoption of a font as the default choice by Google docs or The New York Times could be all it takes to legitimize it.