Thinking

At this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), Apple introduced the world to a variety of novel technologies and advancements scheduled for release in the coming months. Of course, due to COVID-19, this year was a stripped-down version of years past. There were no crowds, no fanfare, and no journalists frantically sharing hot takes from behind glowing screens. This focused, straight-talking aesthetic was mirrored in the announcements as well, with Apple presenting a comprehensive and focused vision of the future we’ll soon inhabit. Apple depicted a technology ecosystem that flexibly and respectfully serves its consumers and announced new tools to nudge other companies join them.

Justin Kaufman

The Future of Apps, Marketing, and Product

“A container is a standard unit of software that packages up code and all its dependencies, so the application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another” (by docker).

Lead Cloud Engineer — Sunil Yadav

The Benefits of Software Containerization

What is the meaning of life itself? This is a very personal question with varied responses depending on age, experience, and overall health of an individual. 

Director, Product Management — Trenholm Ninestein

The Personal and Personalized Journey through LIFE ITSELF

Technology can be a powerful tool to manage chronic illness, but only if patients are willing to use it. This is why creating an effective “mHealth app” takes a lot more than technical skills. 

Tom Malick

10 Ways to Drive Adoption for Your mHealth App

Growing up, my generation associated the future with a singular technological advancement – the development of a flying car. I had no doubts that by the year 2020, my life would very much resemble that of Jetsons especially when it came to transportation. If you are to look outside your window, the lack of flying cars will be painfully obvious. Our dream did not become a reality for many reasons. It may still happen one day, but what the greatest minds in the transportation industry realized is that we need not flying cars, but rather self-driving ones.

Vadim Dolt

How 5G and Edge Computing are Changing the Personal Transportation Industry

An acquaintance of mine who has spent a lot of time in China told me how he uses the barcode on his WeChat Pay app to pay for everything there, including when he buys a cup of coffee from the street vendor outside of his office. He can’t remember the last time he touched a physical Yuan.

Senior Director, Business Development — Eddie Chin

Mobile Wallets Create Fragmented Liquidity: The Opportunity for Payments Evolution

No matter what industry you’re in, success in the modern market is all about experience. To create experiences that deliver a competitive advantage, you have to look at experience holistically. You have to blend human empathy with data, creativity, and technology. And you have to remember that experience is not a static thing. It’s not something to check off the to-do list. Experiences are naturally in a constant state of evolution. The companies that thrive in the experience economy are the ones that manage experience evolution with vision and intention. 

SVP, Digital Operations — Joseph Lee

7 Ways Digital Operations Support the Modern IT Operations

The field of telemedicine has changed drastically from its inception 50 years ago. It began with sci-fi magazines and a few hospitals trying to reach patients in remote locations. The development of telecommunication and medical technologies provided the foundation for rapid growth in the area of telemedicine in recent years, and finally the COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented demand for that service.

The History, State, and Future of Telemedicine

If you want to maximize conversion rates, it’s important to focus on the role product discovery is playing within your online store. This quick guide will look at key areas that could result in weak product discovery and how to strengthen them to help increase conversions.

Senior Director and Commerce Practice Lead — Thomas John

Increase Conversions with AI-Powered Product Discoverability

At Google I/O this year, Google announced that there were 1 billion newly activated Android devices in 2021, putting them just over 3 billion active devices overall. For comparison, Apple only has 1.8 billion total active devices in the market. But Android has always led in volume, so this is not news. By making their mobile OS open to other hardware manufacturers, Google ensured widespread adoption but has suffered from wildly fragmented and uneven user experiences, a fate that Apple has guarded against by restricting iOS to only run-on Apple devices. Announcements at I/O this year indicate that Google is decidedly changing course.

Ben Wakeman

Ambient Computing: Google Closes the Gap at Google I/O 2022

True innovation is a risky proposition. The bigger you are as a company, the more you have to lose and the more difficult it is to be nimble, to take risks and to disrupt—but without innovation, your business won't survive.

The Rapid Innovation Sprint as an Accelerator for Your Big Idea

The increased use of digital payments is a central element of the push toward a digital economy. Our Banking and Capital Markets (BCM) practice works with many of the world’s largest financial services companies and has seen the acceleration toward the use of digital payments for consumers, small businesses, and large multinationals alike. Research from organizations such as Oracle Financial Services shows a 300% increase in electronic payments in the last eight years with around USD $577 billion in transactions.

5 Proven Strategies for Delivering a Superior Payments Experience

Have you been to a doctor’s office lately? The first thing I noticed is that my doctor REALLY doesn’t want me there. Don’t get me wrong, if I have a health emergency then I’ll go to the hospital. The thing is, most health issues aren’t emergencies and with it being risky to go to healthcare providers’ offices due to COVID-19, patients are inclined to put off needed visits. If this behavior continues, we’ll start having more emergency department visits for things that should have been prevented by ambulatory medicine before it ever became an emergency. 

Remote Monitoring and Telehealth is the Only Path Forward for Providers

Are human software developers on their way to becoming deprecated?

Front End Developer — Alex Lyon

The Impact GitHub Copilot Will Have on Software Development

A Rightpoint blog explored various aspects of the emerging Web3 and NFTs, and how these technologies may give rise to a new era of direct-to-consumer E-commerce. Since then, numerous enterprise-class brands have rolled out NFTs, from Coca-Cola, Anheuser Busch and McDonalds, to Mattel’s Hot Wheels, the NFL and Asics, and we thought now is a good time to see how the industry has progressed. 

Phillip Jackson

NFT-Community Engagement and Crypto Retail

There is a coming shift in how e-Commerce platforms are architected, and this shift is foreshadowed by recent technologies. You may have heard a lot of press about NFT and cryptocurrencies lately — digital artist Beeple sold an NFT for $69M, or Elon Musk is sending a dogecoin to the moon — but beyond the hype and the internet culturalization of digital currencies, there are real implications for how we transact online that are being formed by this current moment.

Web3 and Non-Fungible Tokens Signal New Era of Direct-to-Consumer

Have your stakeholders requested a feature on your native app that doesn’t jibe with a UX point of view? Full calendar widget instead of a picker? Yellow font? Labels next to carrots?

Associate Director, Product Management — Ben Rothman

Gain a Superpower: Explore the Apple HIG and Android Material.io

A Fantastic Resource for Product Managers

Every year at WWDC, Apple announces new versions of their operating systems, apps, and services. Usually changes to Safari tend to be incremental, but this year, the browser is getting a significant update with version 15 - introducing a number of changes that impact anyone who designs, develops, or even uses websites on Safari.

Everything Developers and Designers Need to Know About Safari 15

Imagine you've volunteered to take part in a medical study to help bring about a vital treatment. You overcome the fear of potentially experiencing side effects for the greater good of research. You feel hopeful the process is there to support your journey, as you, in turn, support the common good.

Managing Director, Europe Business Leader — Martin Zalewski

Create Meaningful User Experiences by Making an App Part of Your Digital Eco-System

Maintaining a strong Google ranking for your brand is about to include another variable: In May 2021, Google is launching their Page Experience Update. This algorithm update measures critical page load elements and scores them to quantify the user experience on a page. 

Associate Director, SEO — Mike Hanson

Google’s May Update Explained: Core Web Vitals and Page Experience

Market researchers forecast the roughly $4B smart home security camera market to triple in size within the next five years, but this is highly dependent on widespread adoption. According to a recent survey done by Porch, 68.5% of millennials and 61.7% of Gen X’ers don’t have a security camera because they don’t want to be recorded inside their homes. Despite this, the majority of millennials and Gen X’er survey respondents said they’d feel safer with home security cameras. So why is there such a conundrum and what’s Apple working on to address it?

iOS14 Brings Security Without Sacrifice

The proliferation of smartphones has reached a tipping point for the healthcare industry, which over the last few years has led to a vast increase in the number of health-related applications that are being published to mobile app stores such as Google Play and the Apple App Store. While the intention of these applications is mostly for the benefit of people’s health and well-being, some of them, intended or not, have started to cross the line from being simply health and wellness “apps” into the category of being “medical devices.”

Craig Spitzkoff

Your App is a Medical Device

Earlier this year, a client came to Rightpoint seeking a product strategy for their customer support group. Through multiple brainstorming sessions and idea collections, they had developed a long list of great ideas and features. The problem was, these concepts never moved beyond the spreadsheet used to collect them. Unsure on how to validate them and gain buy-in from their product team, one of our recommendations was to employ Google Design Sprints.

Ryan Sosin

Google Design Sprints: Sprinting in a Hackathon

If you asked me four or five years ago, I would have said that mobile apps are dead. Who installs an app anymore? I wasn’t crazy. Comscore had been reporting since 2015 that the number of people who install apps was shrinking. By 2017, comScore warned that according to its research, the majority of US consumers download exactly zero apps.

Ben Johnson

The Role of Mobile Apps in the Omnichannel Experience

By the time your mobile app receives feedback on the App Store or Google Play stores, it’s too late. If the users of your app had a less than stellar experience, their grievances will be aired in public and your average app rating will take the hit. This can result in your app updates falling on deaf ears and may begin to drive users away.

Three Steps That Elevated SeaWorld’s App Reviews From Rough to Rave

When you open a page in your browser, are you loading a website, or an application? Depends. Back in the 1990s when Al Gore was using the term “Information Superhighway,” most people would have said websites, but today, that isn’t nearly the case. 

John Jenson

The Most Ubiquitous Mobile Application Platform in the World: The Web Browser

For those who have been paying close attention to Apple’s products, you’ll likely have seen some similarities between the big announcements last week and those of the past few years. Features like App Clips, Widgets and Apple Silicon all fit into an emerging picture of what the digital ecosystem will look like over the next 10 years.

Adam Tierney

App Clips: Onboarding for Your Everywhere App

Payments are the new marketplaces. Okay, that’s a pretty big statement. Why would I say such a thing? Well, there are few proof points I respectfully submit to any doubters out there. Much of the evidence I lean on stems from my experiences as a long-term American Express card holder.

Payments are the New Marketplaces

If you are reading this article, odds are you are taking medication for a chronic condition, such as pain, diabetes, or hypertension. Over 50% of US adults have at least one chronic condition, and over a quarter have multiple that they are managing. Unfortunately, medication adherence (or non-adherence as we will discuss) is extremely common in these patients, affecting nearly half who are prescribed treatment. This leads to over 125,000 preventable deaths each year and costs the industry an estimated $300 billion annually.

Can Digital Solve the Medication Non-Adherence Problem? Apple Thinks So

Right now, the hottest internet craze involves digital illustrations of things like flying rainbow cats and Homer Simpson’s head on a dollar bill. And these are selling for millions in cash even though the process is bad for the environment. 