Weekly Beacon Volume 28: The App Revolution Is Dead
This week the team tackles a tough one that’s close to our hearts, is the app revolution really dead?
“The right experience at the right time”. Beacon Me was originally designed to do 100 different things all in the name of making life easier. We’d take care of planning events, set location based reminders, make finding parties a breeze, and clean your kitchen sink (not really), but the principle remained the same. We bit off more than we could chew and we forgot about the importance of the user experience, inside and outside of Beacon Me. We didn’t ask ourselves “where would the user experience Beacon Me?”, “what’s the best way to connect them with experiences?” or even, “Why should they use Beacon Me to find experiences?". We figured that we made the tools and that the users would figure it out for themselves. This method clearly didn’t work.
So let’s take a step back to our redesign. We mention our redesign a lot because we really have gone back to square one. We scrapped the old and came up with something new. Beacon Me was redesigned as a platform that revolves around experiences because we live in a world truly filled with experiences. They are all around us, and shape our lives. We should not have to sift through the mud to hopefully find a diamond, but instead should have the ability to pick and choose from the best diamonds around us. We know that we are on the road to accomplishing this goal because like the author said we’ve figured out how to pair users with the right experience at the right time.
It’s not about the tech. It’s never been about the tech. Even when it was all about the tech, it still (really) wasn’t about the tech. Gates, Jobs and the rest aren’t visionaries because they were better than others at building or honing the technology, they are visionaries because they saw how their technology could enhance, optimize, and change its user’s daily experience.
What this article argues is two things - first, that we’ve been living in the app revolution. In this microcosm of time and experience, we have been placing value on the development of applications, of tech itself. This is a bubble. We know its a bubble, and we are at the point of bursting. Second, this article argues that for apps and new technology to be of real value, it must focus on experience rather than novelty.
While this may sound profound to some folks in our industry, it’s not new news to the team at Beacon Me. As Matt and Andrew also state, we built the kitchen sink in the first iteration of our app. It had lots of whizz bang features and plenty of ways we knew it COULD help users, but we weren’t really accounting for their overall experience. The new platform is ALL about experience. Simple, fast, lightweight, social, and inspirational we envision a world where the Beacon Me Experience enhances your daily experiences. This is the experience revolution, and we’re all in,
While I'm sad to be reading a eulogy for the app era, I'm equally excited to be a part of the experience revolution. At BeaconMe, we've prided ourselves from the beginning on being first and foremost a way of accessing experiences and interacting with people you care about. While we haven't always done it as cleanly as possible (we still have some learning to do from the applications era), our hearts have always been in the right place. We strive to provide you with an application and a set of experiences that people will actually use and benefit from. We're still sharpening our tools and honing our craft but we're working hard to deliver on the types of things that this article talks about. We're excited that you've stuck with us through the app era and are even more excited that you'll be on board with us for the experience revolution.