A friend of mine is starting to look into
doing a site, and I wrote him some suggestions
based on my slim base of experience.
It then occurred to me that others here
might be interested, and might have helpful
hints (even, I hope, corrections) to offer.
So here it is:
---
Prototyping is pretty easy if you
already have the back-end application
framework - you can't display much
content on a phone, for one thing, so
there's not much use in putting a lot
of effort into anything but keeping it
brief, at least on the phone side.
For i-mode, you're basically just
doing an HTML subset on the
front end (plus a little). Not much
learning curve at all.
This doesn't make it effort-free,
though. Some things might be
harder.
I'm not sure if my experience of
doing i-mode demos has many
lessons for you, but....
If I had to do it again, I'd go in
with some things to compensate
for the relatively low experiential
profile of the phone. Here they
are:
(1) do a very nice, orderly, rehearsed
presentation, with nice printed
materials they could take away.
(2) have an impressive-looking desktop-
browser site-management front-
end (at least slightly beyond
storyboard level in actual
functionality)
(3) do the demo on nice phones -
good color, good sound, sizable
screen. Maybe bring more than
one of them, besides your own.
(4) go to lunch with them, taking the
phones, and keep the prospective
customers looking at, tinkering with, and
asking questions about the app
before, during and after the meal.
This might seem redundant,
but I think it would help to really
underscore the mobility of the
application. Make enough
of your management-console
functionality available via i-mode that
you can unglitch the demo app
if need be, over coffee somewhere,
while still talking with them AWAY
FROM THE OFFICE, and preferably
in something like the end-user's
expected environment.
Finally: bring along someone who
really knows how to close deals.
(I don't.) The chances of a successful
sale drop dramatically if you don't
get a signature at the end of the
presentation. Making it look like
magic is not the same thing as
selling.
-m
[ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Tue May 15 16:27:17 2001