our snaffle ambassadors take over covent garden!

January 20th, 2010 by kimpartridge

If you were out and about in Covent Garden yesterday the chances are you will have bumped into one of our wonderful brand ambassadors who braved the cold weather to tell the world about our new discount app, snaffle.

Our snaffle ambassadors outside the tube station!

As you may have already read in this blog, snaffle displays discounts in your local area on food, drinks, shopping and anything else you can think of. Currently snaffle is on trial in Covent Garden, and it is free to download on the iPhone.

Although the lovely ladies are no longer around to tell you about snaffle there are plenty of posters in Covent Garden and Picadilly Circus tube stations promoting this easy to use app.

Picadilly Circus escalator

Just take a look at the photo of some happy customers below, who just enjoyed a fantastic half-price Nutella crepe – how amazing! Download snaffle today and it could be you…

Jo and Rich snaffle a great deal!

topsee on the iPad

January 20th, 2010 by lastminutelabs

As it has been practically 24 hours since Apple announced the much-anticipated iPad, why isn’t our first app done yet, I hear you ask?  It is well underway, I can confirm, as you’ll see below from our iPad emulator.  This is the beginnings of topsee taking advantage of the wonderful larger screen.  Unfortunately we don’t have access to a real device as yet (although if anyone would like to lend us one, please do!).  We’ll keep you posted on progress…

topsee running on an iPad

We’re hiring!

January 15th, 2010 by Marko Balabanovic

One of our team members has foolishly decided to travel to the other side of the world recently, so we have an opening in our team for a multitalented product manager. We’re quite a small group, there are 7 of us, so you’d be very involved in all kinds of innovative projects to do with mobile, the web, travel, entertainment and who knows what else. If you’re interested please read all about it on our jobs page and send us an application.

How we built topsee – the technical details – the floating images

January 14th, 2010 by Sam Dean

This is the third post in our technical series about topsee. If you’re not interested in iPhone development, feel free to skip this post, I promise we won’t be offended!

One of the things we wanted to achieve with topsee (which I assume you all have installed on your iPhones – it is free after all!) was a new and unique interface as soon as you started the app. We played with a few different options before we finally decided on the floating photos design. This post of going to describe how we have made the photos flow round each other.

We want the photos to fill the available space as well as possible but still let the user move them about and resize them. We wanted to give the feel that the photos were sliding around, floating slightly above the background (I imaging this as being a bit like air hockey played in treacle).

I’m a bit of a maths geek and laying out the photos on topsee fits quite well into a section of maths called Graph Theory (more specifically, graph layout). Underneath the photos, hidden deep within the code is something called a force directed graph. This is a method for laying out connected items by applying two forces to them; Firstly, all the items repel each other and secondly, each connection is like a spring pulling the two connected things towards each other. Given enough time, the system will settle down into a state where the items are evenly spread out but the connected items are close to each other.

Explaining a force directed graph in words is pretty difficult so here’s a little demo to explain it a bit better. Use the ‘Add Random Node’ button to add a new item to the graph. You’ll see that the new item will be connected to some of the existing items; try clicking on it and dragging it around to see what happens. You can add and remove the connections youself with the two buttons on the right to see what effect that has.

(You can find the complete source here, the interesting bit is the graphTick method in the fgraph.Graph class)

The basic algorithm behind this method is very simple

1. Deal with each node in turn . . .
2. Each other node will push this node away from it (the closer it is, the harder the push)
3. Each connected node will pull this node towards it (the further the connected node, the stronger the pull)
4. Go back to 1 and repeat forever

This idea is the basis for the layout in topsee but we have another problem to consider – in topsee, not only do we want the photos to be evenly spread out but we want the photos to be as large as possible. To get this effect, we’ve altered the usual force graph layout algorithm (as in the demo above) with a few unique changes.

• Photos have an idea of internal pressure (similar to a balloon); they are constantly trying to reach a certain size by expanding
• If a photo overlaps another photo, the photos will repel each other (the more the overlap, the harder they will push each other away)
• If a photo is overlapping the edge of the screen, it will be gently pushed back in

Once we added these modifications, we found that the photos just slide into position without us having to do much work at all, which made us very happy.

The good thing about this layout method is that you can add or remove photos from the graph and the remaining photos will respond to this immediately. You can also ‘grab’ photos which stops them moving about but the other photos will still slide around them.

Hope this gave you a bit of an insight into the workings of topsee, if you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment in the box below and we’ll get back to you! The next technical topsee post will be about the ‘behind the scenes’ synchronization of top things that lets topsee work even when you have no internet connection.

can topsee make londoners happier?

January 4th, 2010 by Marko Balabanovic

An iPhone app that can increase your happiness?  How can this be?  Surely this claim is too bold?  You be the judge.  You’ve heard about the fun and lighthearted side of topsee already – the photo-based design, the great recommendations – but today we’re going to delve into the dark underbelly of its psychology.  An important caveat -  we’re not psychologists and we have no proof of the thesis below – although we’d be happy to hear thoughts and opinions from those better informed than ourselves!

Choice

I’ve already spent a little time talking about the two kinds of choosers – the satisficers and the maximisers – in my post “Are we building sites that make people ill?” In a nutshell, when faced with a choice (for instance, which camera should I buy?), a satisficing behaviour will be to have an idea of what kind of camera I am looking for, and when I see one that meets my criteria, to buy it. However a maximising behaviour will not be happy with that – after all, what if there’s a much better camera on the second page of results? The maximiser will try to find the best camera possible.

It’s not hard to notice that most travel and entertainment sites today encourage maximising behaviour through the dominance of “search” as a mindset. For instance, check out the number of options, filters, controls, maps and navigation elements when searching for a restaurant near Covent Garden using TimeOut or Google or Qype, or even lastminute.com.  There’s a complex interplay between someone’s innate tendency to make satisficing or maximising choice in a given situation, and what the tools and options open to them make easy or encourage.

So what’s the problem with this? Isn’t this providing customers with exactly what they’re asking for? Indeed it is. And this is the very paradox at the heart of Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice. In demanding more choice, consumers are guaranteeing there is more choice, but as a result you’re more likely to indulge in a spot of maximising.  This causes problems.  People high on the maximisation scale experience less satisfaction with life, they’re less happy, less optimistic and even more depressed.  They’re more likely to regret their decisions.  And confronting the trade-offs involved choosing between many options isn’t fun for a lot of people, in fact too many choices will often mean people don’t choose at all.

Expectations

Now before we think about solutions, let’s also discuss expectations.  It has been shown in countless experiments that the expectations you have about an experience will have a huge influence on your perception of that experience.  Two quick examples from the world of beverages: in 1964 it was shown that people preferred their favourite beer when the label was visible, but not when comparing without labels (Allison & Uhl in the Journal of Marketing Research), and more recently in 2008 some researchers in California saw subjects’ brains’ pleasure centres light up more when told they were drinking an expensive wine than a cheap wine (of course the wine was the same).
Dan Ariely, in his book Predictably Irrational, has many great examples of these kinds of effects. In this video Ariely talks about beer and pain experiments – people love beer with balsamic vinegar added, unless you tell them you’ve added it!

Stories

There’s a third pillar to my thesis, and that is about stories.  Even with a simple choice, such as what bar to go to with my friends, there is a story I will tell myself about why we’re going there, what kind of place it is, what’s great about it.  There’s a story I’ll tell my friends in suggesting this venue or trying to persuade them.  And there’s a story the next day about what a great night it was.  Many kinds of therapy realise that these stories can directly influence our state of mind and our happiness.  In his quick-fire summary of proven psychological techniques, Richard Wiseman in 59 Seconds notes that subjects asked to write about great experiences in their lives ended up happier compared to a control group.  In this video, he recommends thinking about one great thing that happened yesterday, as part of his mass participation experiment the Science of Happiness.

So we have three interesting theories to work with:

1. People are happier when making satisficing choices, and have less regret about those choices afterwards
2. People enjoy things more when they’re told those things are great
3. People feel happier with an experience and with themselves if there’s a positive story they can tell themselves about it afterwards

Note I’ve phrased them all positively, given my generally optimisitic outlook on life, but of course you could also say that people are more unhappy and regretful having make a maximising choice, will enjoy things less if they’re told they’re awful and will continue on this downbeat trend if there’s no positive story to tell themselves about the experience.

topsee and happiness

Now let’s get back to topsee.  topsee is quite an unusual application in that:

• You can’t search
• You can’t see everything in a big list
• You can’t see everything on a big map
• No you really can’t search!  There’s no way to express any kind of wish
• Everything in there is only there because someone thinks it is amazing, the best of its kind
• Everything in there has an article explaining why the contributor thinks it is amazing
• The articles make very specific recommendations – not just a restaurant, for instance, but a specific dish
• Because the articles are deliberately a quirky mixture (things to eat, drink, see, do and buy), you’re likely to see things you weren’t expecting

So you can see that, relating to our three findings:

It is not really possible to use topsee to make a maximising choice, you are forced to satisfice, to make a decision faced with a small set of great things around you right now.  The nugget of delight you choose is therefore more likely to leave you happy as you haven’t spent a long time comparing and contrasting many alternatives.  If you follow the topsee suggestions literally, you won’t even need to peruse the menu at a restaurant, because you’ll be going there for a specific amazing dish.  Furthermore, if you’re following a recommendation for topsee, you’re much less likely to regret it afterwards than if you’d made the choice yourself.

We’re telling you the choices are great, because we’re only including the top of each thing.  If there’s an espresso there, it is because someone with a deep knowledge of London’s coffee scene thinks it is the very best in central London.  Your expectations are going to be set so that you love it even more than if you’d just randomly wandered in off the street.

And finally we’re giving you a story to tell.  We’re telling you the greatest hidden little finds in London, each with a lovely writeup – they’ll often be things you would not have noticed or heard of before.  You’ll not only be the popular one for knowing where to go, you’ll also start to become your own London expert – what a great story to tell yourself!

Therefore, my logical conclusion is that topsee will make you happier.  Go out for a day or an evening, find a time you’re willing to be spontaneous, give it a try and follow some suggestions, and let us know if it works or not!

And if you’re interested more in the science of happiness, behavioural economics and the psychology of choice, I’ve assembled a set of blogs on the subject from Dan Ariely, Richard Wiseman and others you can follow in this stream called happiness.  Please suggest any good additions.  Any psychologists wanting to collaborate on an experiment please get in touch!