A Digital Business Card Design Manifesto
Many people have asked about the philosophy behind beamME’s universal business card exchangedesign. While some business card exchange applications (especially for the iPhone) have focused on “gimmicky” features, like shaking devices in midair or using WiFi to exchange contact info, we’ve taken a vastly different approach. beamME relies on SMS, email and the web to ensure delivery of exchanged cards. While our process does insert an extra step for some users, it eliminates significant hurdles for the vast majority to adopt digital cards.
Although we often discuss this design philosophy in our industry presentations, we though it would be interesting to share it with the broader community and have a dialogue about it.
Here then is a design manifesto for digital business card exchange that we’d summarize as:
- No Recipient Downloads/Logins
- No Device Restrictions
- No Carrier, Social Network Limitations
Or, put another way – Support Sender Ignorance
*A brief note: throughout this design discussion, we’ll use the word “sender” to refer to someone who sends a digital business card, and “recipient” for someone who receives the sender’s card.
1. No Recipient Software Downloads
When we set out to design rmbrME and beamME we realized that for the first few years of use, the majority of people in the world would have no idea who we were, or how to use a digital business card. By extension, digital card recipients would be unlikely to have our software on their phone the first time they were beamed a card by one of our senders. We also realized that if recipients needed to have software or an account before they could use a card, it would severely discourage the distribution of digital cards.
So our first rule became pretty obvious – both for usability and viral distribution reasons: recipients need no software downloads or account/login details to retrieve a card.
2. No Device Restrictions
While many beaming solutions have existed in recent memory – not the least of which was the Palm’s – they have all suffered from one seemingly insurmountable problem: external incompatibility. Since the advent of the iPhone, this problem has only gotten worse, with nearly a dozen applications for “sharing”, but almost all of them restricted to iPhone-iPhone transfers. With RIM’s huge lead in smartphones, Motorola/Nokia’s in traditional phones (dumbphones?), and an ever-increasing range of viable entrants (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Palm 4.0) you can’t build a solution that only works on a single platform and expect it to be usable.
From a standards viewpoint, it seems that email + vCard should be a sufficient panacea. After all, smartphones all have email – most can export, and most people have an account – even if offline. However, vCard has not been implemented uniformly, resulting in a huge failure rate for device-device transfers, and most of the traditional phone user base has no email access on their device.
This analysis became the origin of our second rule: a viable solution must work between any two devices.
3. No Carrier/Social Network Limitations
While it’s possible to add someone to Facebook directly from your iPhone or to send them a LinkedIn invitation from m.linkedin.com in realtime, the process is fundamentally clunky. Not only do you need to fire up the respective application or (gulp!) WAP page over EDGE, but you then need to authenticate, navigate, and obtain a contact point from the user that corresponds to one already in their profile. Moreover, it requires you to negotiate a social network up front – putting people at odds if they don’t like to use Facebook for business or LinkedIn for social contacts…worse yet if it’s Orkut you prefer. It goes without saying that limiting users to a specific carrier would be crazy – but just in case someone from Verizon or Sprint is listening – I thought it worthwhile to make the point more clearly: don’t do it.
Bringing us to rule #3: If you need to negotiate the social network or carrier before being able to use a business card beaming solution, it’s DOA.
And when taken together, it became obvious that we could unify our perspective on designing an effective electronic business card solution under a single golden rule:
The sender of an electronic business card must never have to think about the device, carrier, social network or software status of his/her recipient.
That is to say, like a paper business card – if you can read it, you can parse and add it to your address book. After all, paper card buyers rarely have to worry about fundamental legibility; whether M or C represents the mobile number is a minor concern compared to the digital compatibility gauntlet.
While reaching a similar bar is a challenge for a digital business card solution like beamME, it’s one we take seriously.
