Eight years ago I worked for a company that sold sms services – ringtones, icons, downloads of all kinds and chat. My suggestions might be out of date, but we made terrific amounts of money, so some of them might still hold.
1) Best practice in designing an SMS information service Yep, you've got the best practice format right there. Use italics/bold/color differences to illustrate what part of the sentence is instruction and what part they should actually send. I'd suggest using bold or italic rather than caps for the codes. Typing in caps is a pain (even on the iPhone) and people *will* take your instructions literally. If your target audience is familiar with sms services, they'll need minimal instruction. "Send *weather* <your city> to 1234" will do just fine for them. If you can, get a good CPA (content provider access) shortcode (that "1234" number you're using). Try to get a decent number (2121 is easier to remember than 2391, for example). Send people a free vCard with your shortcode (if that's kosher) so they have you in their phonebook. If you're in the US, you could always find a nice word acronym: 3287 is "ebus", etc. Those codes don't work very well in Norway (and in most of Europe, I believe) so I never had the chance to play around with them. 2) Common errors People misspell stuff all the time, and sometimes their T9 dictionary turns a minor mistype into a completely different word. Try misspelling your codes with T9 and regular keyboards and add those words as aliases. Also, go through the log each morning to see what kinds of errors happened in the previous 24 hours, and add those as aliases as well. If a user-entered code makes no sense at all, you can call the user (you have their number, remember?) and ask them what they were up to :-) Complex sequences are hard to perform. Consider creating a guide that people can use when typing in a code. Checking bus schedules via SMS is *not* a great experience, but if the alternative is ignorance, it'll do. Print stickers, single or folded cards or even a z-map-type fold out poster showing how to do it. If you're doing this for a public transportation company, have them place stickers on the backs of seats with instructions on how to send the message. If you're dealing with bus services, etc then make sure you're forgiving about time input. Accept 5, 5pm, 1700, 17, 17:00 and even "five" if you are able. Also, make the syntax as easy as you can (it will never be easy-peasy, no matter what you do). If the user doesn't add a time, make a guess and give them the next five (or however many you can fit into the message). Separate entries (departure times, etc) with carriage returns (lines). Choose service names (weather, bus, etc) wisely. "Bus from central station to main street at 5 pm" is what I'd recommend but I'd make sure it worked with "Bus central station main street 5" as well. You'll have to spend a lot of time figuring out what works from you from your logs. That means learning at some regular expressions and perhaps a database tool, or you can chop things up in Excel. In any case, pay close attention to what's happening. 3) Craft well-made, context-appropriate error messages If people mess up the service name, tell them You typed "qeayjrr" but we couldn't figure out what that meant. For a list of our services, please reply with the word "Help" in your message" (or something along those lines). If people mess up the syntax, first try to parse it on your end, and if you can't send them a response akin to Are you looking for the bus schedule? <!-- new line --> Send: <!-- new line --> Bus from <your location> to <where you want to go> at <time> <!-- new line --> to 2121. This help message was free of charge. That's right: make sure that help messages don't cost the user a dime. They'll have to pay for the next message, but that's not (exclusively) your fault. 4) Similar web services that have been adapted to SMS Any sort of information-request or entertainment service will work, provided there are no workable alternatives. iPhones, Blackberries and Palm Pre's aside, most people are using handsets that support SMS well and the web rather badly. Bus times are much easier to view in a rich application, but SMS is incredibly robust. Note that shortcodes will usually work only for local users, as your phone sends all SMS messages to a carrier-driven gateway that handles all the local shortcodes. I can't easily use Dutch SMS services, for example. We've had SMS services running in Norway since the middle of the nineties. Content provider access (i.e. you can charge a user to receive a message) came in 1999, so there's been quite a bit of experimentation. I'd suggest getting in touch with some of the companies here and other places in Europe and Asia to collect further best practices. Please do be aware that the most popular services are the less constructive ones. One of the guys I worked with literally made millions selling speed trap alerts to his subscribers. Bus services are a nice idea but they're a lot like command-line interfaces (with a lousy and pay-per help command to boot). I never saw huge take-up of that service, and in recent years, real-time electronic timetables have come up at well-used bus stops. Plus, there's the iPhone app, which geolocates you to suggest what's moving nearby. A huge hit, of course, was white pages lookup (by name, address and phone number – the last one was a killer). Lastly, since the interface/command-line is such an annoyance, subscriptions are often a good idea. Prepend or append some subscription command to services like weather, traffic, etc so people don't have to send-to-receive every time, if that's suitable for them. Let me and the list know how it all works out. - Fredrik ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
