The Hindu Business Line : Sending across a smart message

How do you design an application for a product you have not seen or whose capabilities you do not know? Ask Geodesic Information Systems Ltd, for this company designed a beta version of its instant messenger (IM) ‘Mundu IM: iPhone Edition’ for the Apple iPhone, even before the phone had hit the stores.

The iPhone does not have a native messenger application (built into the phone) and users have to download an application that will run on Apple’s Safari browser. “We had no idea of how the iPhone looked, leave alone what its browser capabilities were,” says Atul Chitnis, Senior Vice-President (Product Technology and Strategy), Geodesic.

The company took up this challenge as a brand building exercise to prove its capabilities to the world. “We all know that Apple will eventually permit native, third party applications on the iPhone. But we chose to give iPhone users an instant messenger application they could use now,” says Chitnis.

With this mission the company scrutinised every picture, video and article featuring the iPhone and used these to create internal guidelines for developing the IM user interface. Many educated guesses went into framing the guidelines. Sample these.

Geodesic was familiar with touch devices (having worked with phones such as the Palm in the past) and was comfortable with iPhone’s touch screen concept. “But we saw videos that showed us how people would use the iPhone differently. For example, they would tilt the phone and the display would automatically re-align itself,” says Chitnis. Geodesic built this capability into its IM application.

A vital design ingredient was estimating how many windows could be supported by the iPhone. Most chat applications work on a pop-up window model, where a new user joining the chat pops up on one’s screen. Apple did not mention clearly how many windows its browser could open. Geodesic decided to forgo the multiple windows strategy and built an application to fit one window. This means when new people join a chat, they are represented as bubbles above their names. This feature was lauded by independent technology reviewers, who rated Mundu IM: iPhone Edition superior to other third party applications.

Another detail that took time to figure out was the bandwidth that could be available on the iPhone to support an IM application. “We had read reports that said the iPhone had EDGE (advanced GPRS) and WiFi connectivity options. After a lot of thinking we realised that an iPhone user would use EDGE for his IM chat and not WiFi. He would use WiFi only if he was connecting via a laptop,” Chitnis recollects.

This implied that lower bandwidth was available for the IM application that would run on EDGE. The company, which had initially made the application 700 KB large, had to shrink it to 70 KB so that it was easy to download. (In EDGE, even 1 KB of download takes time, says Chitnis).

The result — an application that was smaller, user friendly and easily manageable. What is more, once downloaded, the application could facilitate cross-conferencing and interoperable chat across other IM services including MSN, Yahoo, AIM and Google Talk. Until August 10, the application had about 12,000 users and would be available free of cost. “We want more iPhone users to try the application. So that we can improvise on future products,” explains Chitnis.

archana@thehindu.co.in

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