everest review v1 20130226 tm tmnet4 - cargocollective.com · ui/ux and service philosophy,...

MyWishGuru + Tiago Marques

Competitor WalkthroughEverest

Tiago MarquesFebruary 2013version 1

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Presentation Brief

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Task is to observe the Everest iOS-based application, its current UI/UX and service philosophy, understand its strength as a competitor and how their work can inspire us to design a better MyWishGuru platform. This review has been conducted using third-party articles and screenshots, as a hands-on reviewing of the app was not possible due to it not yet being available in the European market.

Presentation Brief

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1. About Everest

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Everest is a lifestyle / motivational / goal-focused app for iPhone and iPod Touch designed to help its users define their goals (called “Dreams”), break them into smaller steps for easier tracking and managing, share them and gather support and challenge from their social network.Sales pitch:Everest helps you live your dreams and achieve personal goals. From traveling the world to getting in shape to learning Italian – Everest is a place to capture all your dreams, big and small, and focus on a few. Break goals into small steps, build step streaks, learn from others, and beautifully capture your journey from dreaming to doing.Slogan:Everyone's got their Everest. Climb yours.

1.1 What Is Everest?

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1.2 Visual Sales Pitch

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1.3 Features and Example Dreams & GoalsFEATURES• Capture an unlimited number of dreams and goals• Focus on up to three goals at a time• Plan steps within your dreams and goals• Set individual or repeating reminders to help build habits• Use notes to record thoughts, quotes, tips and progress• Capture moments with photos • Stay motivated with step streaks• Never get stuck; learn from others with similar goals• Copy other people’s steps into your dreams• Receive suggestions and encouragement through comments• Follow your friends and heroes• Accept challenges that take your dreams to the next level with guidance from pros• Beautifully track and capture each dream’s journey• Control whether your dreams are public or private• Share your dreams and progress on Facebook / Twitter to inspire others

POPULAR DREAMS & GOALS• Exercise three times a week• Roadtrip across the US• Start a business• Learn to cook 10 healthy meals• Write a book• Wake up without hitting snooze • Run a marathon• Meditate for 10 mins daily• Travel Europe• Learn to speak Italian• Pay off my loans• Volunteer once a month• Learn to play guitar

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1.4 Reviews and InsightsUltimately, Everest is an app that requires a certain amount of motivation and determination to fully reap the benefits from. It does, however, offer some great foundations to making such things feel worthwhile, especially for hefty goals that require a steady supply of motivation. Adding a form of gamification to life is a particularly handy way to get inspired, and one that should work for many, myself included. (...) It’s a pretty nice app, too. Immediately simple to get to grips with, (...) Everything about this interface is pleasant to use and look at.

AppsLooking.com

One of the biggest reasons I decided to check out the app was the interface. It’s just simple, but beautiful. In my use so far, everything is responsive, intuitive, and quite useful. The design also reminds me a bit of Path, due to the way things are laid out.(...) I’m really enjoying this app so far, and I’ll be putting it to use with this brand new year. However, it would have been great if the app did not require an account to use, because I do know that some people would rather not share their goals with others (it can be quite personal). I’m not sure why I got an error during Facebook signup, but hopefully that gets better (or maybe it’s just for me). While the design of the app is beautiful, it can become a bit tedious to navigate through creating and editing steps for dreams. Hopefully this can be optimized in the future as well.

AppAdvice.com

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1.5 Reviews and Insights (2)They stick to a simple promise: «Live your dreams», which is a great positioning concept if you can provide with solid arguments. (...) Everest product positioning is both functional (organizational tools to «plan your steps, receive reminders and get unstuck when you’re not sure what to do next») and symbolic (social esteem enhancement, affective fulfillment, inspirational and life-changing), which clearly set them apart from the competition. (...) Why did they choose to name it after the world’s highest mountain ? Not very along ago, climbing the Everest was like going to the moon. And still today: despite all their training, many people are no match for the extreme challenges of Everest. Generations of climbers have dreamt - and are still dreaming - of it. It is an accessible, yet challenging and impactful dream. But how to appeal to consumers ? By one very simple statement : «Everyone’s got their Everest. Climb yours» – which is fucking brilliant.(...) They managed to get 2k likes on their fan page, already receiving a good social attention despite the product not being launched yet. A strong, consistent and coherent brand personality, together with a simple community building strategy (in their case: sharing inspirational pictures on their fan page + blogging community-sourced «meaningful experiences» + Twitter), is all it takes to make the consumer, as Ogilvy could have put it, «notice your [app], remember it and [hopefully] take action» (either subscribe, download and/or share).

AppMarketr.com

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1.6 Reviews and Insights (3)(...) How many good apps out there failed to reach their market ? Having a good product is not half of it, especially if nobodies knows it. Brand image, product awareness, online engagement are crucial to make it happen – not mentioning all the other things a good launch strategy requires (targeted audience, pricing strategy, sharply defined objectives, …). We should also say for the record that they (among others) launch campus clubs, sell prints and give conferences to spread their vision – but here I recognize it’s not accessible to all.(...) Implementation is not all about the product, or the communication strategy. For example, you must team up with talented, complementary and committed people; which is not as easy as it seems (I’ll try to interview startupers about it). And it’s even better if you conclude partnerships with blogs and/or companies, or if you can find digital influencers, mentors, business angels, entrepreneurs, willing to accompany you on this path.(...) One more thing. One last (and valuable) lesson one could learn from Everest is that implementing and marketing an app takes time. The people behind this idea have been working on this for -at least- a year (maybe a year and a half since the germ of the idea). Hopefully for the best. So if you plan to set up a business, keep it in mind.

AppMarketr.com

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1.7 Reviews and Insights (4)The functionality of the app is seamless and it’s very easy to use. My favorite part of the app is that when you create a new event, it is called a dream. Then when you go to ‘Explore,’ it says, “Caitlyn started a new dream.” (...) I have been through personal transformations before and I can tell you that support means everything. This app is (...) an essential tool for anyone who wishes to make change in their life.

MacSources.com

This app is well put together; at the time of writing this is only the second revision of this app. The reviews by other users are glowing and I agree. This app can help people set goals they want to achieve. It would be very nice to see an iPad native version of this app.

iTouchApps.net

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2. Using the Everest App

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2.1 First Time ExperienceThe app starts out by suggesting ideas of things the user might want to aim for. These are sourced from other users’ experiences but provide a wide range of ideas, such as to read regularly, write a book, and even go into Space. The user can simply tap to add an idea to the their list of Dreams.

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After creating the account either using email or Facebook, the app walks us through a brief tutorial.


2.2 First Time Experience

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There are four main sections to Everest: My Story (“Me” on an older release), Steps, Add, Explore and Challenge.The My Story section is essentially the user’s profile, where we can monitor our progress in our Dreams. On this screen we can also access the Settings menu. With a tap on the settings wheel (top-left corner), the screen turns and reveals a list of selections for customization.As we start coming up with Dreams, we can place the focus on three in our profile. These should be slightly more important than the rest, and we can place them in the focus area by dragging them there.


2.3 My Story

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For each Dream page, we can view our current journey, and any Steps that we have assigned ourselves. We can also see how many Steps we have completed, and there’s a section to write about why the Dream is important to us. For more inspiration, we can add a photo or get the app to surprise us with a random photo of Everest.


2.4 My Story > Dream

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To add a Dream, we tap the Add icon. A pop-up with five different selections slides on to the screen for the user to add a Step, capture a Moment, make a Note, start a new Dream, and declare a Dream real. When starting a new Dream, the interface enables us to add details like What, When, Categories, Sharing, and Security. For What, When, and Categories, there is a complementary interface to allow us to set different timelines, establish ongoing pursuits, and add to the appropriate category. The user has extensive customization options, yet from what I’ve read these tools and functions feel efficiently presented, quick to learn and easy to control.


2.5 Adding a Dream

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Adding each Step of the journey is also done via the Add button, and provides the benefit of ensuring the user feels like they’re making progress. We can choose to make it repeat, establish a due date, schedule a reminder, and share. For each item we add, we can establish whether it is private or shared with the Everest social network. Comments can be added by both the user and others browsing their profile (at this point there’s no functionality for something such as a ‘like’ button which might have been appreciated).In the words of the Everest site, this section allows the user to “easily plan your steps, receive reminders and get unstuck when you’re not sure what to do next.”


2.6 Steps

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2.7 Moments and NotesMoments are photos we can add to our Dream timeline, to record a milestone or simply include an inspirational image. We can snap a new photo from Everest (or just import from our Photo Library), give it an optional caption and select the Dream it should be saved to. Notes are pure text that can be added to a specific Dream.

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2.8 ExploringIf we are unsure of what Dreams we should start, the Explore tab is a great way to get an understanding of what others are using the app for. We can view their Dreams, Steps, Moments and Notes, comment on their progress, follow and keep track of specific people or the entire Everest network, as well as copy their Steps into our own Dreams. (Currently there’s no way to copy other people’s Dreams and add them as our own.)Depending on whether we’ve set our Dreams as public or private on our profile, they can be seen by others who may want some inspiration too... I couldn’t find out if it is possible to share our Dream progresses with specific users instead of the entire network, though.

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2.9 ChallengesFurther incentive comes from the Challenges section which gives users the opportunity to be inspired (alongside others) to achieve a particularly significant goal, thus adding an element of gamification to the already positive message conveyed by the app. Encouraging friends to join the app and following each other should prove quite beneficial as it encourages working together to achieve goals and be inspired.The challenges feed contains Dreams and Steps to accomplish, curated by brands and well-known figures (for example, there is a cooking dream inspired by Julia Child that you can copy and make your own). The categories include Challenges in philanthropy, finances, health, personal growth, learning, relationships, and more.

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3. Recommendations and Bibliography

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3.1 Further Reviews RecommendedDreamdo.do Path.com

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3.2 Research Materialhttp://www.148apps.com/reviews/everest-review/http://www.appadvice.com/review/quickadvice-everesthttp://www.appmarketr.com/case-study-everest-iphone-app/http://www.appsafari.com/social/20464/everest-live-your-dreams-achieve-personal-goals/http://www.appslooking.com/apps/everest-live-your-dreams-achieve-personal-goals-review/http://www.courtneyelizabeth.com/2012/12/social-media-app-everest-invites-you-live-dreams-goal-share/http://www.everest.com/http://www.evr.st/investorshttp://www.iosnoops.com/appinfo/everest-ndash-live-your-dreams-achieve-personal-goals-for-iphone/581016826http://www.itouchapps.net/everest-app-review/http://www.kristinapifer.wordpress.com/2012/09/30/whats-your-everest/http://www.macsources.com/app-review-everest/http://www.topapps.net/apple-ios/iphone/everest-an-iphone-app.html/

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Confidential & Proprietary • MyWishGuru + Tiago Marques

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everest review v1 20130226 tm tmnet4 - cargocollective.com · ui/ux and service philosophy,...

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