iOS features find inspiration from The Simpsons, eCommerce
Without Steve Jobs, the designers at Apple are finding inspiration in unexpected places. And actually, that was always the case – even during the days when Jobs resided over the company.
According to Scott Forstall, former senior vice president of iOS software, in a recent report compiled by the editors at Fast Company, tackling the iPhone keyboard can be linked back to an old episode of The Simpsons where a memo is erroneously changed from “Beat up Martin” to “Eat up Martha” on an Apple Newton, a sometimes scoffed-at precursor to the iPhone.
As revealed in the Fast Company report, Apple employees couldn’t shake the “Eat up Martha” spoof and would pace about the Apple headquarters repeating the phrase over and over again. Their obsession with The Simpsons gag eventually led to a weeklong hackathon where they swore to develop a keyboard that would never autocorrect words into nonsensical ramblings. And although the iPhone keyboard isn’t necessarily the picture of perfection today, it’s come a long way.
“Earlier iOS versions learned more slowly, requiring you to issue vetoes on several occasions, but iOS 6 often learns from a single incident,” explained the editors at Macworld this March, not long before the new iOS 7 came onto the scene. “The program then stores your words in the inaccessible, noneditable Keyboard Dictionary. Once a word is in there, autocorrect will not attempt to correct it—and will even suggest it as a correction or completion.”
In recent non-Simpsons-related iOS design news, some are saying that the Touch ID, Apple’s new fingerprint reader on the 5s, found its roots in eCommerce. Although it can serve as a method for unlocking a phone, it’s of particular interest for those in the retail space where it could be used to make app or mobile web payments.
“The fingerprint technology could drive payments if Apple enables app developers, such as retailers or operators of mobile payments apps such as eBay’s PayPal Here, to access the fingerprint image for authentication and payment,” explained Brian Klais, founder and president of Pure Oxygen Labs, a mobile marketing consulting firm, in a recent Internet Retailer article.
The fingerprint reader is also slated to elevate users’ sense of security when making mobile payments. It should also be able to improve the speed in which they can do so. In an article published by Business Insider, Peter Nixey, an entrepreneur with experience developing ID technology, explained how that might be possible.
“It took me a moment to realise it but the fingerprint sensor is almost certainly not about securing your device,” Nixey relayed. “The fingerprint sensor is about securing your account. The fingerprint sensor is about payments, initially to Apple and then maybe subsequently elsewhere. The fingerprint sensor may be Apple’s mobile answer to Amazon’s web-bound One-Click.
“... Amazon once measured a discernible difference in checkout rates from page loading increases of only 1/100th of a second,” he continued. “Apple has to request a password. That password has to secure the phone against chargebacks due to theft, purchases made by small children or just a trouble-making friend pinching your phone and playing with it. The only answer to those chargebacks today is to demand users to continually re-enter their passwords.”
Regardless of where the Touch ID takes mobile payments, it is yet another indication of how important it is to develop an optimized mobile site. As technology like fingerprint scanning evolves, consumers will become less concerned about the security or difficulty of making mobile payments. And hopefully by that point, your online store will be ready for a flood of mobile orders like the type that would make Mr. Burns proud.
For WebSphere Commerce users, in particular, methods are now in place to deploy a mobile site quicker than ever before.
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