Ever since we moved from smartphones with physical keyboards to full-screen displays, keyboard applications have become a staple part of our lives. A lot of effort goes into identifying the end-user requirement and coming up with an innovative solution to address them. However, if you have a dedicated community that can help you drive innovation then there is no doubt that your work gets instant traction.
We connected with the good folks behind Bobble and Mint Keyboard to understand the entire product cycle and the factors that drive innovations that improves user experience. Interestingly, Bobble likes to call itself a conversation media platform, rather than just a plain keyboard app. Hence the first obvious question was around this aspect of the business.
Not just a keyboard but a conversation media platform
Conversation media, first coined by Bobble, brings together different modules that build up an ecosystem with the keyboard app at its core. It covers textual, voice-based, graphical and various languages etc. as different modules that help users communicate their thoughts and ideas effectively.
According to Ankit, the generation aged between 18 to 34 form the core user base for Bobble and they prefer to interact using another graphical or other media rather than just typing. The increased use of audio, images and gifs adds value to the conversations held online.
Identifying users’ requirements keeps you ahead of the curve
Assessing user habits and typing experience, it became easy for any product team to identify the trends and requirements. Bobble identified that emojis are an integral part of any communication these days and hence making them easily available can enhance user experience. This drove the idea of introducing an emoji bar right on top of the keyboard. Interestingly, after Bobble incorporated this, a lot of popular applications added a similar bar in their applications.
Features that are considered to be small but are important from a user experience perspective like understanding Hinglish (a mix of Hindi and English) messages, allowing users an option to choose the level of auto-corrections so that a duck remains a duck while you chat, multilingual input option apart from incorporating cricketing terms in chats etc. have been some of the highlights of Bobble’s communication platform.
Allowing users to personalize the communication by letting their images create an avatar and use it as gifs or stickers in chats is yet another example where Bobble has led by thinking out of the box. Recently Facebook also introduced their version of the personalized avatar.
Community driven innovation
Getting feedback directly from end-users and understanding specific product feature requirements can be easily achieved if you have an active user community. These communities not only drive innovation but help any product company deliver exactly “what the user wants.”
India has over 60 million visually challenged people out of which 40 million users are seriously impaired while 8 million are completely blind. Bobble is creating features that cater to this community. They came up with features that can actually help them drive communication. Bobble has a dedicated community that is actively involved in giving feedback about the existing features and shares ideas around new ones.
Several new features introduced by Bobble came from this community's feedback and Ankit revealed that a group visually-challenged users take up Bobble as their primary mode of communication on their smartphones and form an integral part of their user community. Double Tap with talkback is one such accessibility feature that was suggested by this community. Talkback feature reads out the key that is pressed and to use them, users can simply double-tap letting the keyboard type the message.
New age communication
Visual communication is the standard now as people have moved away from the textual to newer ways that helps them express themselves better. The fact that out of 70 billion messages shared every day, approximately 7 billion emojis and 700 million gifs are used shows the changing trends in communications and helps make the chat more interactive as well as adds the fun quotient as well.
This has also opened new avenues for brands to reach out to their audience without being intrusive or tracking user data. A branded image of a coffee mug or a pizza box can be ideal opportunities for them to reach out to their direct audience directly.
In conclusion...
On an average, a user gets on the keyboard for about 30 minutes each day. It is now up to the smart minds at Bobble to figure out how much more they can create out of this limited opportunity.
For starters, Bobble plans to add several impactful features for its burgeoning user base, especially the specially-abled community, because it creates both a social as well as economic impact, reasons Ankit while revealing that regional languages are the way to move forward.
Because, for Bobble, every tap on the keyboard provides a lesson to be learnt and a solution to be built.
