Mel’s thoughts in Luxury Daily

Plastic President and co-founder, resident artist and one-woman mobile think-tank Melody Adhami was quoted by luxury daily again. This time, on the topic of mobile ads for luxury brands and the importance of a call to action.

When it comes to adding a call to action in Luxury brands mobile ads, Melody suggested, “I think a call to action can be very important and paramount to success, but in some instances I think great brands can get the message across loud and clear without saying a single word.”

“Luxury brands fall into the category of great brands that can get away with this.”

Of course sometimes a call to action is necessary, but mobile requires you to think within certain constraints.

“Because of mobile’s inherent screen limitations, brands need to pare down ads to the most basic essence and every pixel needs to be accounted for,” says Melody.

She also notes that, “Since words take up valuable screen real-estate, a call to action should be short, direct, clear and easy for the user to act on or follow.”

What are your thoughts on how major brands should be using the limited screen space of mobile? Let us know on Twitter @PlasticMobile

When you are the COO of an award winning mobile agency and the Globe and Mail names you the “Queen of Apps,” people are going to want your opinion on matters digital.

That’s exactly why Luxury Daily asked Plastic co-founder Melody Adhami to give her thoughts on Lanvin’s new mcommerce enabled mobile optimized website.

Lanvin is a French based luxury retailer. When they’re not busy setting trends on the Paris runway scene, Lanvin is expanding in the lucrative North American luxury retail market.

The new site is the latest strategy in their North American invasion plan.

What were Melody’s thoughts on the matter? “The new Lanvin mobile site allows the brand to enter markets that its limited physical presence simply cannot.”

“There are currently seven Lavin stores in all of North America. An Affluent individual in Vancouver or Seattle is more than 1,000 miles away from the closest store location.”

You can read the whole story, and keep up to date with all the important luxury news, at Luxury Daily.

Think this is a good move for Lanvin? Let us know on Twitter @PlasticMobile!

There’s a small chance that you missed Melody Adhami‘s twitterview with Adlounge today. Thankfully, we have got you covered. Read our President and COO’s 140 character chat about Art From the Unexpected, what it’s like working here at Plastic Mobile, how Melody went through the process of becoming an artist and more fun intel about her amazing (but top secret) art project.

Don’t forget to get your ticket!

Plastic Mobile co-founder and COO, Melody Adhami, was quoted for a Luxury Daily article on Christie’s new iPad app.

For those of us not in the multi-million dollar real estate market, Christie’s is a publication listing high-end properties from around the world. They recently released a free iPad app. The app is a high quality digital magazine with excellent production values. It’s easy to read, navigate and comes loaded with breathtaking photos of some of the worlds most beautiful properties.

Anybody can tell you that an app with nice pictures is good, but Melody digs deeper, “Magazines are a very vivid, visual and tangible medium. When it comes to leisurely browsing, the kind that consumers have been trained to do for years with existing magazines, the simple added screen real estate of the iPad and other tablets allows users to garner more of this traditional experience.”

With print media increasingly struggling, Melody says that “if magazines are going to survive, they will simply have to embrace mobile devices.”

Do you think the iPad and other tablets are the future of magazines? Share your thoughts with us on Twitter @PlasticMobile

Guided Access for iOS

Pending its release later this year, the new Apple OS has once again managed to incorporate features that we didn’t know we needed…until we saw them. Among many, iOS 6 features include new vector based maps, the highly anticipated PassBook app and a very convenient Do Not Disturb mode for your iPhone. Less publicized however, is Guided Access, a feature that will make it both easier with those with a vision, hearing, learning and mobility disability and educators to incorporate iOS devices in their daily routine.

VoiceOver, a screen reader first introduced in Mac OS X is now integrated with more features including maps and zoom. This will allow the visually impaired greater access to content and generally, offer more ease of use. The feature serves different functions as you change devices – for example, with every Mac computer, you can connect a braille display and VoiceOver will program the keys for you.

What’s completely new is how Guided Access plans to expand to assist parents, teachers and administrators use iOS devices in their working environments. Whether it be at home, in a classroom or on the go, Guided Access provides the functionality to better educate.

The highlighted features include:

·      the ability to selectively disable portions of the device from use

·      disable hardware buttons

·      disable certain portions of certain apps

·      transition into single app mode

These features are useful in a number of ways and for many people. For instance, in classrooms it is commonly understood that technology is more of a distraction than an asset. But with Guided Access, devices in the classroom serve as an educational tool, where teachers are provided with control as to what students can access and – more importantly – can’t access. It’s hard to cheat when you’re locked into a test!

Also, Guided Access provides an opportunity for enhanced learning experiences for those with a disability. Students can focus on the task at hand without worry of hitting mistakes.

Guided Access has has functionalities that are excellent for outside of the education space. Consider iPad kiosks, menus at restaurants and satisfaction surveys, which can all now be conducted while the user is on the go.

As our co-founder, Melody Adhami, often says, technology should help and not hinder. As Apple continues to provide us with devices that we can virtually do anything with, they continue to also increase the ease with which we do all this anything.

Everything taken into consideration, kudos to Apple once again for their efforts in equal accessibility and their efforts in revolutionizing the education system.

Love Apple’s latest efforts? Tweet us @plasticmobile and tell us your thoughts.

In my weekly blog post, I normally prefer to comment on some of the large scale challenges or successes affecting the mobile industry, but this was too special to pass up.

Our team  made some time earlier this week to mobilize our Ping Pong matches. It all began with one of our Android developers creating a tablet app that could actually keep a proper game score (there seemed to be a recurring discrepancy in the scoring of our afternoon table tennis matches). The idea was that an Android tablet would sit atop the Ping Pong table and the app would keep an accurate, un-biased score of the Ping Pong games while in action.

How it works is pretty awesome. The “Plastic Paddle,” as it has now been dubbed, is good for a single’s or double’s match, and scores in terms of three sets per match and follows the proper rules of Ping Pong prior to 2000, meaning every 5th point the server changes. You can pre-set the serve, or use the server randomizer by clicking in the middle. A voice not entirely unlike Siri (but, better) will tell you who’s serve it is based on the scoring system. She will also tell you who’s advantage it is or if it is a deuce. To compensate for the inevitability of human error (if you click a point on your side when you did not actually receive a point) you can minus out the score. Last, when you win, the voice will tell you that you are the winner, and then a prompt will appear to allow you to post your results to the server.

It proved such a huge success around the office that it’s currently being developed for web to include such things as player stats with loss and win ratios and real-time tracking so matches can be carried over and rivalries can be tracked.

While this is an amazing first step, I’m looking forward to an even more advanced Ping Pong tracking system – Got that, team?

A big congrats to our developers for their ingenuity and drive to maintain a civilized game playing environment, and stay tuned for the coming improvements!

Great job team!

That was the question posed to me by our UX expert on Tuesday when writing our PM UX blog post.

So I thought I’d weigh in with my take on the tool tip. Here goes…

Our foremost concern when creating a mobile solution at Plastic Mobile is the end user – the person who will actually be using our product for their entertainment, everyday lifestyle or as a tool. Ergo, it’s my thought that if you have to explain your app, website, etc., you have probably missed the mark in terms of user experience; if they don’t get it right away, you’ve basically #Failed.

That being said, I am not naive. I understand and appreciate that certain things require subtle cues to prompt or gently nudge the user to properly deploy certain functions or get them started. For instance, on any iPhone, the very first screen has a sliding bar along the bottom. It actually says “slide to unlock” in faint type which is illuminated by a pretty sparkle that lights the path of the sliding bar. This is what I consider a subtle cue. Just a helpful hint to get the user started that, while clearly explains to the user what to do, doesn’t interfere with their experience. We’ve used a few of these similar nudges with various apps, including our award-winning Pizza Pizza app to help the user along the ordering process.

What I’m mostly taking issue with, is the idea that a mobile initiative should come with a manual, or require a tutorial or full explanation in order to make it useful. For me, that says that you over-complicated the application and didn’t properly consider the fundamentals of UI and UX.

What do you think? Are tool tips good, or would you rather it just be clear from the get-go? Tweet us @plasticmobile and join the conversation.

All you have to do is take a look around you to see that mobile is fast becoming a ubiquitous part of our society. Mobile is everywhere, but especially retail locations.

Specifically, the proliferation of mobile in relation to retail has left marketers scrambling in a frenzy to re-evaluate their audience and understand how consumers are interacting with mobile – and how to take advantage of this new relationship.

In order to do this successfully, brands need to better comprehend how current trends are shaping the mobile environment, who this new audience is and how to best interact with them.

This is no easy task. As a brand, where do you start? For me, I think there is an expanding dichotomy between retailers and the mobile + social spaces, which marketers should be conscience of for 2012.

Let me explain.

Many 2011 reports, like comScore’s 2012 Mobile Future in Focus, identify various mobile users demographics. Still, retail marketers seem to glaze over the 20- to 30-something GenY-ers (or, as this Mashable article calls them, “Generation C,” the C standing for “connected.” A bit cliche, but probably accurate), who I tend to think are the ideal demographic for brands as they use both mobile and social media for commerce.

Sure, the stats say that moms are the decision makers and dads are the money makers, but the “young influencers” are a generation of digital-hungry consumers who covet cutting-edge tech and are spending on everything from the latest tablet to Vegas vacations and chic urban condos.

Perhaps this demographic is so often neglected because, as Shane Smith of Vice Media pointed out at the Young Influencers Conference in Toronto last week, most brands don’t really “get” that generation. And, as he suggested, there’s absolutely no point focusing on that demographic just because you think you should – they’ll see through that kind of fake like a bad boob job.

Regardless, to me it seems obvious to focus efforts on a group that’s poised to shop and who’s lives are hinged on mobile, as well as social media – an area that has seen significant growth on mobile, with its overall popularity in accessing social networking sites on mobile devices becoming nearly common place last year. Basically, it’s the same people who are using their mobile devices for social sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. who will then flip to a new browser window or app to research or buy that great item they just read about in a tweet or post.

I foresee this super trifecta of young influencers + mobile + social making an impact for brands in 2012 as marketers recognize this spectacular opportunity to increase customer conversation and conversion by tapping into the young influencers through the device that houses their entire life.