Mobile app usage tends to reach its daily peak in the evenings around 8 PM, according to recent research from Localytics.
The report was based on mobile app data from January 2015. Localytics examined the total number of sessions each hour relative to the daily maximum amount of sessions in an hour (in other words, 100% on the charts indicates the hour that the most sessions occurred).
All times are Coordinated Universal Time, so the data reflects behavior locally.
Most apps follow a similar pattern, with usage rising in the early morning as people start their commutes, then leveling off throughout the day, the analysis found.
After work, app usage picks up again and peaks between 8 PM and 9 PM, at which point it starts to decline.
Though that usage pattern is true for apps in the aggregate, behavior differs in different verticals. For example, news, travel, and weather app usage peaks in the mornings. Travel app use also spikes a second time, in the evenings, as people check traffic before they head home.
Other apps are less dependent on commuter patterns. For example, business, finance, and music apps have heavy usage throughout the day.
Entertainment and social networking apps have above-average usage in the late night hours. Entertainment apps in particular have high usage into the early morning.
About the research: The report was based on mobile app data from January 2015. All times are Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), so the data reflects behavior locally.
Creative work increasingly requires more with less. Instead of resisting limitations, what if we put them to good use for our agencies and clients? For the second Firestarters event in New York City (NYC), we brought together smart thinkers from inside and outside the ad world to share how they framed their creative constraints and turned them into advantages.
Constraints and limitations are all around us: the need to be in more channels with the same budgets, the finite number of the most talented people, the little time we have to execute. The pressure is relentless: get more done with fewer resources in less time.
It is often the constraints, not the freedoms, that define the work we do and determine its success. Do our limitations restrain us and our clients or are they like the string that lets a kite fly by tethering it to the earth?
This was the starting point for our second Firestarters event in NYC. (Our first dealt with the new agency operating system.) Approximately two hundred strategists and planners gathered inside Google to hear a diverse group of thinkers and entrepreneurs discuss how we as creatives can put our constraints to use.
Constraints as Allies
Discussion centered on a number of the foundational ideas within A Beautiful Constraint, an awesome new book by Adam Morgan and Mark Barden (both planning legends, now of Eat Big Fish). Our other Firestarters were Porter Gale, former vice president of marketing at Virgin America; Dr. Louise Waters, CEO of Leadership in Public Schools; and Tom Marchant, co-founder of The Black Tomato Group.
"We see constraints as things that inhibit us," said Barden. "As we were researching for our book, we looked for examples where constraints served as allies and helped with the work. Based on our learnings, instead of avoiding our limitations, perhaps we should give them a great big hug."
Barden cited Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) as a prime example. His publisher challenged him to "write a children's book that first graders could not put down." The catch? He was given just 250 common words to work with. He almost gave up but instead ended up taking the first two words on that list, "cat" and "hat," and writing the best-selling children's book of all time, arguably changing reading forever. (Incidentally, he embraced the constraint and used only 236 words.)
What can brands and agencies learn from Dr. Seuss? How do we as planners, strategists, and creatives help brands and companies that suffer from apparent disadvantages—limitations, pressures, and constraints—and turn them into assets?
In true Firestarters fashion, Barden and Morgan had just 15 minutes to share and provoke, and they highlighted three of the core concepts that are at the heart of the book: ask Propelling Questions, engage in Can-If thinking, and Create Abundance.
Adam Morgan & Mark Barden, 2015
Ask Propelling Questions
Morgan outlined that "Propelling Questions are meant to propel you out of your habitual behaviors. A Propelling Question is a bold ambition explicitly coupled with a significant constraint."
To get to your Propelling Question, ask yourself this: What is the biggest ambition you have, and what are the limitations that keep you from achieving it?
One of the Firestarters, Dr. Louise Waters, explained how she got to a Propelling Question in her work with urban high schools in Oakland and Richmond, California.
"Our big constraint is lack of engagement," she said. "Many of our students end ninth grade four or more years below grade level. That means they need to do the equivalent of several years' worth of learning each year, and these are kids who often don't believe they can learn at all."
So her Propelling Question was, in effect, "How do we help kids progress two or more grade levels in a year when they don't want to engage and don't believe they are capable students?"
Her team wanted a solution that would help the students progress rapidly, ease the burden on already-overworked teachers, give immediate feedback, reward instant successes, and ultimately drive engagement.
She and her team began experimenting with audience clickers, which are inherently engaging and allow for all kinds of instant feedback to both teachers and students.
Engage in Can-If Thinking
Can-If Thinking is a method of framing answers to these Propelling Questions in a way that forces people answering a problem to begin every sentence not with "we can't do that because … " but rather "we can do that if … ." An apparently slight change, it forces the conversation to focus on how an answer could be possible rather than allowing it to shift to whether the problem can be solved.
With the clicker experiments, Dr. Waters and her team resolved the following: "We can design the ultimate clicker if it gives teachers the answers and insight they need in the moment." She had a secondary Can-If thought as well: "We can involve disengaged students if we give them a tool for learning that is so engaging they'll beg to use it."
Dr. Louise Waters, CEO of Leadership in Public Schools
As they tackled those two challenges, ExitTicket was born. It's a student-engagement platform that works on any WiFi enabled device. Via a heat map on their tablet at the front of the classroom, teachers see how each member of the class is coping with set questions in real time and they immediately know when the class is ready to move on and when certain students need help. This allows them to intervene and help individuals instantly at points of need. ExitTicket has helped lagging students gain two- to three-year levels in key subjects within 12 months and, as importantly, has given them confidence for the first time in their ability to learn and progress.
The platform now has 300,000 users in 195 countries, and it was born out of the very real constraints of urban high schools.
Creating Abundance
A third principle of creative constraint is Creating Abundance—looking around to see what resources are available and where your strengths lie. What unconstrained resources can you put to work?
Tom Marchant co-founded The Black Tomato Group, a high-end travel service that launched in the early days of the recession. And yet Tom found abundance, harnessed it, and made it work for him.
"Our abundance was content," he said. "Travel produces beautiful images, stories, and experiences. When people travel around the world, they take pictures."
Operating with a nonexistent marketing budget yet needing to boost awareness, Marchant and his team took advantage of the visual side of traveling with a photo contest, seeking the best user-generated photos. The contest involved a prize, which increased in value as more photos were submitted.
This was a second abundance Marchant discussed: looking outside his industry for potential partners. High-end, custom travel experiences appeal to a very attractive audience, and Marchant has been able to leverage Black Tomato's expertise to line up a great list of collaborators, even with limited marketing resources.
"We look for ways that everything connects back to travel," he said. "It's enabled us to find interesting partnerships with Johnnie Walker, Mr. Porter, and Charles Schwab." Even now that they have budgets, Marchant noted, they fostered a culture of "something out of nothing."
Porter Gale, former vice president of marketing at Virgin America and current advisor to many start-ups, presented a different take on the same theme, focusing on how networks can help you escape your constraints.
"Abundance isn't about the best idea; it's often about the people, the network that we can tap into," she noted. "Winners look not for an abundance of resources but for one of relationships."
Porter related her experience of launching Virgin America in 2006. The tech world was beginning to take off again in San Francisco after years of struggle. Virgin America had impressive new planes but didn't have permission to fly them. In addition, they had little marketing money to work with.
So Porter and her team began making videos with tech influencers from San Francisco, inviting them to come on the planes and filming them asking the Department of Transportation for the right to fly. Those videos were posted on YouTube and drove popular support for the new airline.
"It was all relationships and networks," she said.
Putting Constraints to Use
Where does this all leave us, as creatives, as strategists? How well we manage constraints lies at the heart of how we progress and grow. Doing more with less is a defining and essential idea in today's world. So what can we take away from this?
Adam Morgan left us with three simple questions:
1. What is the Propelling Question we need to ask and answer (for our own business or for our client) to succeed over the next three years? What is the key constraint we face that we should link explicitly to our big ambition—and how might that tension provoke us to explore more inventive solutions for the future?
2. How can our apparent constraints stimulate us to better deliver our purpose? Rather than see them as something we have to work around, how can we turn them into allies so they help us do it better?
3. How do we redefine leadership today to reflect the importance of making constraints beautiful? As leaders of departments, disciplines, and companies who each face very real constraints in seeking to progress and grow, how do we change the way we lead to help those around us start to see those constraints as potentially beautiful and as a force for good?
For our inaugural U.S.-based Firestarters evening, a panel of industry luminaries shared perspectives on how to evolve an agency so that it succeeds in an ever-more-digital world. The consensus was less radical than one might imagine but no less relevant or useful for being so: digital is different, especially in being nonlinear; people are the foundation of success; and processes really matter. Also, "it's going to be messy."
It's doubtful whether there's ever been a more tumultuous time to be in advertising. Change is no longer a phase but a constant. The number of canvasses for creativity has exponentially increased, and the pace of just about everything continues to accelerate. While full of opportunity, this world can be confusing to navigate, for all of us.
A few weeks ago we managed to coax approximately 230 advertising folks—most of them planners and strategists—to Google's New York City office to hear five industry luminaries talk about change, about agencies, and about planning. Why planning? Planners and strategists in creative, media and digital agencies are pivotal to accelerating change within those companies. They are centrally placed within the creative development process, they help creatives (and clients) architect the overall campaign shape, they're frequently amongst the earliest of early adopters, and in many instances they are the champions of the user, the consumer ... of people!
The event was called Firestarters, the first U.S. version of a British event series that I have been following with some envy since 2011, run by Neil Perkin of Only Dead Fish. We had Perkin on stage for this first session, along with a few of the smartest thinkers in advertising.
Sarah Watson, chief strategy officer, BBH New York
Ian Fitzpatrick, chief strategy officer, Almighty
Johnny Vulkan, founding partner, Anomaly
Noah Brier, co-founder, Percolate
Spencer Baim, chief strategic officer, Vice Media, Inc.
The theme was somewhat loftily set as "The New Agency Operating System"—referring to the processes and approaches used to produce creative work. The focus was on both what those might entail, and the implications they have for planning. Typically, conversations around change within agencies tend to focus on new skill sets, business models, scope, and the need to "go agile." Our speakers took a subtly different tack, unpacking how the underlying culture and values of an agency—in short, the people and how they're organized—contribute to its success.
We asked our speakers to be brief and provocative, and they didn't fail us on either front. The five talks and ensuing debate hovered around three core themes: Digital is different, people come first, and process matters. These are not groundbreaking, yet despite how much things have changed, they're as true today as ever.
Digital is (still) different
There was no debate around one point: Developing ideas that thrive in digital requires a different approach. That's because digital differs from traditional media in a myriad of ways, enumerated here by Noah Brier:
Digital is horizontal.
Media is software.
Campaigns are going or gone.
Global is the default.
Mobile is the new paradigm.
Performance-based buying is here.
The channel explosion continues.
That different approach must be baked into everything from planning to creativity, from production to launch, and beyond. "Brands don't fit nicely on a piece of paper anymore," said Brier, "so we need to be nonlinear; we need to become system thinkers." He went on to suggest that the best way to deliver better work is by "planning for complexity." We see that complexity in the explosion of channels and audiences we can reach and in ever-messier customer journeys. For strategy, this comes down to answering the following question: Who says what [brand] to whom [audience], how [channel], and to what effect [objective]? Here's how he sees the interrelation of those elements:
Noah Brier, 2014
Anomaly's Vulkan continued on this track, arguing strongly for an organization built around solving a business problem, not a channel solution. He also proposed that there's no such thing as a successful operating system, just a lot of metaphorical code that needs constant updating. His approach is simple: "Get a diverse group of opinions, argue a lot, best answer wins, iterate continuously and openly."
"It's going to be messy," he noted, with a healthy slice of British understatement.
Anomaly's Vulkan
People (still) come first
I was struck by how much of the discussion centered on talent and how it is discovered and deployed. Just as software needs to run on a strong OS, the best people need a strong system. Without that system in place, developing awesome output will always be harder, less efficient, and less rewarding for the team.
Sarah Watson focused on the idea that the underlying culture and structure of a creative business can be either a powerful enabler of change or an anchoring source of inertia. "Agencies have their own operating systems, but they are different," Watson noted. "Ours are invisible, instead of being attached to a user experience. And the further you get inside them, the more invisible they are … which makes them potentially lethal. The agency OS can be both the unseen engine of greatness and the silent killer of change."
BBH's Sarah Watson
Process (still) matters
Many creative businesses would agree that they need to install an upgrade to their OS. What's not so clear, perhaps, is how they execute the install. So we spent some time on the how.
Extending the software analogy, Almighty's Ian Fitzpatrick argued that as operating systems age, they can get bloated with millions of lines of legacy code acting as a drag on the speed of the machine. The same, he contended, is true of agencies. "When we speak of agencies as nimble, large, or lean, we're talking about those lines of code, not the company's scale or billings," he said. "And when you ask someone about an agency they worked at and they say 'Oh, it was a total nightmare,' they're again talking about that code."
Ian Fitzpatrick, 2014
Just as with a legacy operating system, the trick to upgrading an agency's code lies in what can be stripped away, not in what can be added. Fitzpatrick suggested doing this by rethinking the people we hire, how we organize our staff, the role of leadership, our financial model, and what we ultimately deliver to our clients. Meanwhile, Vulkan focused on iteration."We should be stealing from the coding world, where the emphasis is on iterating together as a group," he said. "We should be testing and tweaking openly and continuously, the way developers do. We're already heading in that direction, and because of that, we're sharper and better, and we don't waste so much time going around in circles."
Spencer Baim's take on this—that brands have to start acting and thinking like media companies—clearly stems from his experience at VICE. His building blocks are also simple, perhaps even timeless: get the purpose right, the people right, the touchpoints right, and the environment right. If these building blocks are in place, it's possible to shoot for the bigger ambition: to create "marketing as culture." And isn't that what we're all aiming for?
Last week, enterprise messaging service Slack announced that 500,000 people use the service every day. The company, which first offered its product in beta-test form in August 2013 and officially launched a year ago, has been growing at such a head-snapping pace that most of those half-million users are newbies, relatively speaking: Roughly 75% of them have come aboard in the past six months.
There is, however, one Slack customer that has depended on the service from the start. That would be the company itself.
"Really, we do use Slack all day, every day," said Stewart Butterfield, Slack's cofounder and CEO, when I dropped in at headquarters recently. "I rarely in a working day go more than 10 minutes without looking at Slack. I mean, we’ve been in this room for an hour, and I’ve looked at my Slack instance a dozen times." (Confession: I too was looking at incoming Slack notifications, from my Fast Company cohorts.)
In a tale which is already the stuff of startup legend—and which has eerie parallels with the origin of Butterfield's earlier company, Flickr—he and three cofounders originally set out to build an online game. They whipped up a homemade chat system to help them collaborate on the project. The game,Glitch, didn't take off. But the collaboration tool made the team ultra-productive.
"When we decided to shut down the game, we realized we would never work without a system like this again," Butterfield says. "And so we made Slack."
Butterfield in front of a "living wall" (which he points out is not actually living) at Slack headquarters
Today, Butterfield says that "no one uses Slack more than we do." On one typical recent day, the company's own Slack setup transmitted 30,000 messages, spread among around 200 channels as well as private sessions. 9,000 of those messages were sent by 97 Slack employees; the rest were automated alerts delivered through integrations with other tools, such as the company's bug tracker.
"It's interesting," Butterfield says. "I was talking to a couple of people who formerly worked at Twitter, last night at dinner. And they were talking about how little, ultimately, the people who work at Twitter overlap with Twitter’s most ardent users...17-year-olds in Philadelphia who tweet 15,000 times a week."
With Slack, by contrast, the people who work at the company have almost everything in common with their most loyal users. Learning how they use Slack can help you use Slack more effectively.
Here are some Slack tips gleaned from the lessons Butterfield and his colleagues have learned by—as the tech-company trope goes—eating their own dog food.
Discussions in Slack can be as inclusive as a channel open to everyone in the company, or as discreet as a direct-message session between two people. In its own use of the service, "we encourage conversations to happen in the most public venue they can," says Butterfield. "There's a lot of value sometimes to ask a question and get the answer in the biggest public forum that it could happen in." That lets other people know that a problem was solved, and allows anyone who has the same issue later to find the solution by searching.
Slack's channel listing, as seen on an iPhone 6
The more people who are using the service, however, the more conversations need to be managed. When Slack the company was tiny, everybody chimed in on almost every decision. But "it multiplies really quickly when it's 70 people, all who throw their two cents in," Butterfield says. "Two marketing people will be talking about how they should express the benefits of upgrading. And now there's 70 people who all have an opinion about it."
Telling people to hush up would be a bad idea. "You don't want to discourage the person the customer spoke to from asking the engineers how to fix something, or how something works, or how to respond to a customer. And yet you have 70 people all thinking about the same trivial question. Because again, it's not just the number of people that's growing, it's the number of issues."
Oftentimes, it makes sense to carve off conversations or push them into direct-messaging sessions. Case in point: Recently when Slack switched benefits providers, everyone suddenly had questions about issues such as 401(k) matching and flexible spending accounts.
At first, they did their asking in a channel called Onboarding, designed for new employees, and the queries drowned out everything else. "We said 'Okay, everyone stop. We're going to make a Benefits channel, because no one can use this for onboarding anymore," Butterfield says. The company also encourages staffers with truly specific questions, such as ones involving adding funds to their public-transportation passes, to take them to a private venue.
People like working in Slack so much that they often ask the company to expand its functionality into new territory. Among potential new capabilities, for instance, "one of the most frequently requested things is for us is to add a task management feature to Slack directly," says Butterfield.
Despite such requests, he's skittish about venturing too far from the service's core capabilities: communications, archiving, and search. "We can only add so much without becoming bloated and crappy," he explains. "Our preference is rather to build nice, tight integrations with tools that already do task management and tracking very well."
Slack's own users already have such a well-integrated task-management tool for internal use: a custom bug tracker."Every bug that gets created goes into our Bugs channel," Butterfield explains. "And every time a bug is resolved, that’s also in the Bugs channel, so it’s searchable and on the record for everyone. And if there’s activity on the bug that isn’t resolved, anyone who’s assigned to it or is one of the subscribers to the bug gets a private notification."
It doesn't make sense for every team using Slack to create its own tools for in-house use, of course. But the service is designed to talk to third-party apps, which allows it to do things such as search files stored in other repositories and send out notifications triggered by changes elsewhere. Slack customers have configured 800,000 of these integrations so far; the top five, measured by the number of teams which use them, are Google Drive, Google Hangouts, GitHub, Twitter, and project-management service Trello.
As befits a buzzy, well-funded startup, Slack is growing fast. Seven new staffers joined the week I visited, including a new product manager who reports to Butterfield. As part of her onboarding process, he encouraged her to catch up on old Slack messages.
A pair of the socks that Slack bestows upon visitors. They're in its signature plaid, with a Slack-style sentiment on the label: "We hope your feet are nice and warm forever."
"I said 'Read the last few weeks of these channels,'" Butterfield says. "In an email-based organization, she would start with an empty inbox. But instead, she has the history of everything. She can search over all that, she can scroll back, she can see how people interact with each other. Statements that people made, or discussions that happened, or links that got posted, or files that got exchanged. Who knows the answers to what kinds of questions. Who really makes the decisions."
"The experience of being able to search back over all your team’s communications for, in our case, millions of messages, is super-valuable," Butterfield says. "But you don’t know what that’s like until you actually have it." Slack reserves unlimited archiving of messages for paying customers; 135,000 of the service's 500,000 users are on paid plans, suggesting that a goodly percentage of the companies that use Slack see infinite search as a game changer.
Slack lets coworkers collaborate anytime, anywhere. That’s a big part of its appeal. But it doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to treat it like a 24/7 paging system for your compatriots.
"I’m 41, and I’m the third youngest of the cofounders," Butterfield says. "We probably have more people over 40 here, on the engineering side especially, than most companies. We’re not interested in working 70-hour, 80-hour work weeks anymore. We don’t think it’s a productive way to make good-quality products. So we don’t want to encourage that craziness."
In Slack, you can get pinged every time anyone mentions your name. Internally, however, the company is mindful about keeping such notifications under control. "So Rebecca asks me a question, and I say 'Talk to Alex about that,'' Butterfield says by way of example. "But I don’t want Alex to get a push notification, So I would type a, l, period, e, x. That was something we saw all over the place." In response, the company implemented a feature that only turns a person's name into a notification if it's preceded, Twitter style, by an @ sign. It's turned that option on for its own Slack setup.
Both iOS and Android have "do not disturb" features that you can use to ensure that Slack doesn’t interrupt your slumber, even if a coworker is up at 2 a.m. and does something that triggers a notification. Butterfield himself sets his phone to do-not-disturb mode. But "not everyone has done that. We want to build the same functionality into Slack, so people who don’t know about it in their phone can still do it."
As Butterfield's startup shifted its efforts from the Glitch game to Slack, it began by building something designed to please itself. Once the company started opening up the service to outsiders, it discovered that every team reacts to Slack differently.
Rdio, the streaming music service, was among the first external customers. "Over six or seven weeks it spread to the whole company," Butterfield says. "Suddenly we had all these feature requests and complaints that were based on the difference between 100-plus using it and eight people."
A portrait of Butterfield that hangs at Slack HQ[Photo: Flickr user Matt Haughey]
Watching Rdio figure out Slack was illuminating. As the company's staffers arrived on the service, they began creating channels, many of which ended up being thinly populated. "It became really confusing," Butterfield remembers. "So we quickly made a way to see how many people were in a channel and how active it was. That’s just one of literally hundreds, and maybe at this point a thousand tiny little changes we had to make as the initial product design was confronted by other groups of people besides us using it."
For the CEO of a startup that's doing so well, Butterfield comes off as humble and self-aware. "People are very happy, and we’re growing incredibly quickly, and conversion rates are very high, and retention rates are high," he says. "By any business metric, it’s working. And yet every time I encounter a rough edge, it makes me cringe to imagine all of the thousands of people who are being irritated by that exact thing that I’m being irritated by."
Bottom line: Slack's own employees will never be typical Slack users. But the fact they use their creation so much forces them to confront its imperfections in a way that's unusual for any tech company—and which helps explain why its users seem to be atypically happy campers by enterprise-software standards.
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