I’m writing this review on holiday, direct from the home of the original tablet – Orkney.
A full millennium before Steve Jobs conceived the iPad, Vikings came here and got busy defacing giant tablets of stone erected 4000 years earlier by neolithic man, covering them with rune graffiti.
As tablets go, they’re not as functional as Apple’s, but they are certainly longer lasting: one thousand years on and still they communicate their strange, boastful messages.
“The one who wrote this is the greatest writer of runes in the Western Ocean,” reads one particularly beautiful set of treelike script.
What became of The Greatest Rune Writer In The Western Ocean is lost in time. Being good at runes didn’t add up to much when that script was rendered obsolete as a new religion, Christianity, swept through Europe, bringing with it Latin and a new alphabet, the one you are reading now.
Talk about disruptive models.
For anyone, like me, involved in the business of digital publishing, mobile is surely displacing desktop as our new religion. And the practices of this new religion are very different from the old.
Mobile has such distinct characteristics, even more removed from desktop than desktop is from print.
Portablity; a small screen with the challenges that raises for fat-fingered folk; geo-location; frequency of interaction (we look at our smart phones 150 times a day on average); high levels of personalisation (you are your apps); and – tantalisingly for publishers struggling with the economics of free-to-air desktop – it carries with it a propensity to pay.
All of these things are so obvious that it hardly merits spelling them out – except for the fact that not a single legacy publisher in the UK, with a handful of niche exceptions, has produced a mobile experience that talks to any of these characteristics.
Consider the national press on mobile and you find, by and large, a collection of newspapers crammed down onto a three inch screen.
All the content from desktop is there, in pretty much the same format. Lip service to mobile – even as this platform already constitutes around 50% or more of newspaper digital traffic.
Which brings me to Mr Porter, a retailer who increasingly sees the value in becoming a quality publisher in its own right (and doing a worryingly good job of it).
As it’s a retailer, I’m giving you a two-for-one deal, a review of the (terrific) Mr Porter mobile app and also their (lousy) spin-off Suit Yourself. Both are instructive.
For the shabby amongst you, Mr Porter is the online men’s clothing business from the people that brought you Net-A-Porter – the posh women’s clothes business.
Like Amazon, the true secret of Mr Porter’s success is not online at all, but in their brilliant offline service.
Mr Porter thrives because their customer service is superb. Smartly attired emissaries from Planet Fashion arrive at your doorstep with your personally labeled shopping bags within a day of order.
Service is so good, it distracts momentarily from the horrific mark up they take on the clobber.
Which only goes to show, all the digital cleverness in the world doesn’t cover up for poor real world delivery.
Visit Mr Porter on desktop and you are overloaded with layer upon layer of bespoke content, all high-end GQ style stuff designed to lure you into believing you can be the next Cary Grant. Or Dappy. Whatever takes your fancy.
But check out their mobile app and all this material is gone the way of bell-bottom flares and burgundy cummerbunds. All that’s left is a bare, ultra functional and intuitive experience designed to get you straight to that new silk Charvet tie in four clicks or less.
This bold minimalism is why I admire the app so much.
How many newspapers would be happy to jettison all that high cost editorial content just because it was on mobile? Even if they knew it was an obstacle to pure user experience?
I speak from guilty experience. When developing the first iteration of a very successful desktop MirrorFootball to mobile, I thought it essential to give the readers all those long-winded opinion pieces I paid so much for, so I practically replicated the desktop navigation and content from desktop to mobile. Duh.
Ten minutes considered thought would have told me that what mobile readers would want would be last minute transfer news and live scores.
The Mr Porter app is actually better for buying clothes than the desktop site. That’s progress.
And then, like some Shoreditch hipster blowing it all with injudicious use of double denim, they go and do something like Suit Yourself.
This spin off app is pants; a marketing department solution to a customer problem that doesn’t exist.
The premise is, you start with a naked (except for some oddly unattractive underpants) model and then clothe him as you would like to look.
It’s technologically slick, beautifully designed, and utterly pointless.
The lesson? In mobile, just as in fashion, tailoring the product to your customer’s specific needs commands a higher value.
And less is always more.
Mr Porter can be downloaded from the App Store.
