Aage Reersleve CEO of Squace - A letter!

There was me casually going through my post at the weekend when I opened a letter from Aage Reersleve CEO of Squace! Yes a letter, not email - a letter!! Yes, I am impressed!I tested Squace a few weeks back and although I thought the idea was a great one, and still do, some of the aspects of the implementation didn’t work for me or my colleague Tony Dennis.

In the past I have actually run mobile development teams. For the The Fastest Texter Campaign with Carphone Warehouse and the UK Tabloid The Sun we had over 200 Nokia 6210i’s on desks, charging, loading the application, testing the application, making sure they were all talking to our servers. For the Nokia RAW Tour we had racks of 1U pc’s all being hand assembled, installing our Linux derivative OS, installing our Bluetooth Content delivery solution running with every released Nokia handset available - it was carnage!!! So I know better than most the blood, sweat and tears that go into building mobile applications.

Not only this, but after spending hours on the UI and the design flow you hand it to a PR person or consumer and they go - why does it work like that, it doesn’t make sense!!! But that’s what all of us who have ever built technology, software or hardware, have to accept, how ever hard we try in the design not every one will use it the same way as us.

So that makes me even more impressed with Aage’s letter and him taking the time to personally reply. Of course it could just be PR but I prefer to take this on face value. I contacted the PR and made sure Aage was ok for me to publish his comments in relation to my review. Here they are:

1) RK: “At the bottom there are a line of squares..it’s like putting your hand in a lucky dip, as none of the squares here have a letter assigned to them..”

Aage Reersleve (AR):  ” We accept that this is today’s experience but it will change over time - the operative term here is relevancy….The line at the bottom is meant to prevent relevant links to you based on your unique profile as well as the latest and the most common links. The reason why this is still editorial and not yet implemented os that we need more volume an history to build relevancy. We will turn this logic on market for market and language for language”

RK’s response: Ok, I accept this AR but I think you need to find some way to get the application to update those squares, by all means have it dynamic but it still needs to give the user some idea what they contain.

2) RK: “…some of the pop ups were in Swedish, as Squace is a Swedish Company.”

AR: ” We believe this is an isolated case but nevertheless we are looking into this. For a typical user, implementing their profile should prevent this from occurring but we do apologise for this error.”

RK’s response: Great, I think the profile is something essential to a Squace user and something we don’t get to build having a demo unit, but even so I wish I could have read Swedish!!!

3) RK: “…You can add content via your MySquace page…Unfortunately this is not a great experience…At the moment it is half hearted and trying to remember what you already have added..is a drawn out process.”

AR: ” Yes, you are right by saying that content can be added to Squace through the website. You will probably soon have preferences on ‘My Stuff’ stored in a classic tree structure style.”

RK’s response: Good, for me this was one of the worst aspects for end users. Perhaps u could use a tag cloud based on the name of the saved URL and how often they visit it.

4) “It’s much faster and easier just to have any number of social book marking sites as your homepage on your mobile..add them to your desktop…your mobile gets updated too.”

AR: “We believe our forthcoming update, codename Caesar will significantly enhance the user experience through performance improvements such a new server design, load balancing, caching and code optimisation. All of these measure will speed up the application. But there will be some changes in the actual UI, which are likely to include icons in the dashboard (formerly the garage).”

RK’s response: Well I look forward to testing Caesar. I can only test what I have in-front of me so my comments still stand at this point in time and although all the server work will improve performance of the app, its the UI improvements that most interest me.

I thank Aage for his comments, it was the implementation that for me stopped Squace being a game changer and not the technology. I look forward to meeting Aage later this month and I will be bringing you an interview with the man himself.

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