March has started out with a bang for projects I’m involved with.

First, Drync was rated the 4 out of 5 mice by MacWorld Magazine, making it their top rated Wine App!  My favorite quote:

With its slick interface and a reliable search engine, Drync Wine lets you keep track of the wines you’ve drank, the wines you own, and the wines you’d like to add to your cellar.

What’s most appealing about Drync Wine is the ease with which you can add to your cellar journal. The app gives you two options. First, you can search for a particular brand and then add your rating and notes with the tap of a button. It’s ridiculously easy.

Slick interface? Ridiculously easy? Awesome.

Second, today as I was heading to pick up my son from daycare, I turned on WGBH just in time to catch Jake Shapiro of PRX talk to Robert Siegel about the Public Radio Tuner on “All Thing Considered.” I love the way they position the story:

Newspapers and TV networks are being forced to re-imagine themselves or decline — and in some cases, as with Denver’s Rocky Mountain News last week, they fail completely. Likewise, public radio stations are contending with MP3 players and podcasts for listeners, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

Thanks to new technology, there’s a new way for those stations to compete. The Public Radio Tuner was developed by a consortium of public radio entities and has become one of the top free software applications on Apple’s iTunes store.

I’m truly proud and honored to be part of this effort.

Oh, and to top it off, Public Radio Tuner crossed a million – a million – downloads at the end of February. Sweet!

As of today, the Public Radio Tuner is the most downloaded free music app in the store. It’s currently three places in front of another awesome music app, Pandora. In fact, it’s the 18th most downloaded app, right behind some app called Facebook (and who has heard of them?)

So why the sudden climb? Well, outside of the obvious – that it fills a need of hundreds of thousands on public radio listeners who until now couldn’t listen to their favorite radio station when they were out of tower range – it’s because Public Radio Tuner is currently featured under “New and Noteworthy” in the App Store. There’s nothing like the 10x accelerator of a worthwhile app being featured in the app store to make a move toward the top!

Congratulations to the Tuner team and collaborators! This is well deserved!

Read more about the tuner.

I have to say I was SUPER excited to find out this morning that Drync Wine‘s icon is featured in the new iPhone commercial, “Read.” This is awesome for Drync, which is really starting to get it’s wings

On a personal note, this isn’t the first app icon to appear in Apple Collateral that’s I’ve been a part of.  (WHERE was shown in the store demo reel when the app store first launched.)  It is, however, the first app icon to appear in an Apple Ad on TV and the first icon I designed to appear in Apple collateral. 

Pretty, pretty cool. Congrats to all the Drync’ers!

So US News and World Report, the purveyor of fine business/college related lists, has made a list of the “30 careers that offer strong outlooks and high job satisfaction.” And what made the list? Well, Usability Experience Specialist, of course.

Really?  I mean, seriously?

I’ve secretly always considered my profession to be the Rodney Dangerfield of occupations.  Until, say, the last three years it seemed that for most businesses building a useable product was an afterthought. Technology and developers seemed to carry the process of product development.  It was as if management teams thought: I’ve got a great technology and great developers, so why wouldn’t this produce a great product?

I credit two big things with this seismic shift from a developer oriented product cycle to one driven by user experience: web 2.0 and the iPhone.  Companies like 37signals built great products with that were surprisingly powerful wrapped in a simple to use minimalist design. On the phone side, Apple showed that a phone doesn’t have to be limitted by a numeric keypad and a small screen, but instead can have a rich graphical interface with only 4 physical buttons.   Both of these put the emphasis not only on great technology and the developers behind it, but have also shown a spotlight on how a great user experience and putting the user first can make an incredible difference.

So, as surprised as I am to see my profession finally gaining some deserved praise, I’m happy not only for the UX/UI practitioners out there, but for every person who buys a gadget or engages with a web app in the coming year. Friendly products are ahead!

[thanks to Jenny Chang's UX Minute Blog for drawing my attention to it.  Had she not added Drync Wine to your clippings, I never would have stumbled upon it! Hooray social media!]

I read today over on techcrunch that the Chipotle iPhone app has been removed from the store due to “request timeouts” (or, in layman’s tems, it’s been removed because it’s pissing off tons of customer who can’t get their burrito orders through).

It’s funny – well, not ha-ha funny – to think that a large and tech savvy company (they have great online ordering, I’ve been told) like Chipotle didn’t take into account server load when they released their app. But, it’s not in the least bit surprising. People just don’t understand the power of a free app with a compelling user benefit in the App Store

When the App Store first launched, I was a part of a team that launched one of the first apps. Our App was mostly web based and our team naively thought that our servers were up to task. Of course we never expected 10000 week a day, much less 10000 downloads a day. We had 10000 downloads before the store was even officially open! Our servers were toast. We’d get one up just to see three more down. In the time it took to get our servers back, we were handed a boatload of horrible 1 star reviews by the community, all saying that our app didn’t work. You’d think people would be nicer to a free app, right?

So, what’s the moral of this story? Well, take it from someone who has been there (and the folks over at Chipotle will likely tell you the same), if you want to be free and you have a compelling app or well known brand, and you want your users to like you, you should consider the following:

• Take your projections for usage and multiply them by 100. That should keep you in the ballpark for the initial surge.
• The first week or so in the app store is the biggest. Once the novelty wears off, and your usage slows, you’ll want a server that scales down to meet the lower demand so you’re not throwing money out the window on unused bandwidth.
• When you release an update, be prepared for a spike for the next couple of weeks.

If you keep these things in mind when releasing an iPhone App that relies on a server for some of its core functions, you’re one big step closer to a successful app and happy customers.

 I was super excited to get involved in this project as the “user experience” part of the team. To me, as a huge NPR fan, this is the ultimate iPhone application – it streams tons and tons of stations directly to your iPhone!   It’s the one app I wish I had when I used to do the train slog from Worcester to Boston.  So, it may come as no surprise that I’m proud to announce that the new version of the “official NPR” player is now out. Check out the official announcement.  

This is a significant upgrade from the previous version (of which I was not a part) and includes 

• Bookmarking of favorite stations
• Local stations (based on your current location)
• Search station or browse them by State
• Now playing indicator that quickly brings you back to the currently playing station

Like I said, I’m proud to be part of this release.  Download the Public Radio Tuner now at the App Store!