Smart.fm:
iPhone apps

During 2009 our relationship with Smart.fm matured into a business partnership, with the iPhone / iPodTouch app store as our primary focus for 2010. For the release of these 7 paid-for apps we were lucky enough to be able to lead the whole process, albeit under the shrewd strategic and creative guidance of Smart.fm’s business directors. Usually we help market products or services that are already wrapped up and packaged. So it was a fantastic experience to be involved from the conception of a new product range, identifying the opportunity in the market, defining the positioning and user benefits, fleshing out the app’s user-interface (UI) and user experience (UX), through developing and submitting the apps to the store, as well as constructing and tuning the marketing machine that surrounds them. It is rewarding to know that with Smart.fm commercial success comes as a result of motivated students getting a great learning tools in their hands. Bilingual Japan here we come! Smart.fm app demo video

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Planning

We cannot give the game away on the whole business strategy :) but we are delighted to share some of the thinking that went into the app's value proposition, UI and UX. The learning community at Smart.fm is an open content platform, containing English Language Learning (ELL) content from numerous publisher partners. The content that Smart.fm created themselves is especially high quality and rich media to learn from. Comprising an 'item', for instance the word 'carry', there are usually 2 example sentences that use that word "She carried the box home" as text and native audio, and a photograph illustrating each example sentence so users can 'feel the power of the word'. Scale up to thousands of these 'items', and structure them intelligently into curated learning courses and you have the potential to revolutionize the ELL market in Japan. This is exactly what Smart.fm the learning community has been doing for several years, attracting 500,000 subscribers. But what if an app could allow users to interact with this rich and intelligent content while they are on the move, in Apple's uniquely tactile UX....?

Smart.fm on the App Store

Strategy

We had attacked a similar brief to this when we developed the podcast format, that resulted in 10m downloads in the first 4 months, and winning the 'Best Podcast' accolade in iTunes "Rewind2009" awards. So we knew we were onto something good with that, and it made sense to partially adapt the format into the new apps. The podcasts are based on a special audio-visual sequence that leverages the power of a photo to create an emotive context within which users can imagine using the English word, making it much more effective at learning words AND how to use them than standard memorization tools. Smart.fm have called this sequence 'Smart-Flow' (trademark pending). The apps make use of 'Smart-Flow', combined with customizable quiz modes, and photo-based visual browser mode, a feature that allows users to create their own custom sets of goals to study as well as the first "voice navigated UI" in an app, allowing users to toggle between a Japanese and English audio guidance for each menu and action in the apps UI, hence fulfilling the apps' positioning as a stress-free yet effective way to learn English. Launching with the strategically important 'Kiso English' (Core) and TOEIC courses, Smart.fm is set to become a dominant brand in this space.


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Business Results

In this case we had to grow the business from zero at launch with very low latent brand awareness at that point. Regular updates for usability improvements and bug fixes, listening and responding to feedback from users in social media, and improving presentation on the iTunes store over the first 9months all contributed to building reputation & sales, achieving #5 Top Grossing Apps all categories in December '10, and domination of the Education category.

Team Member Comments

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    James Hollow

    Strategist

    "This is a landmark partnership for Alien-Eye. We now make apps that are not just popular, but generate significant revenue!"

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    Francesco Romano

    Creative Director

    "We created an app that Japanese students of English can use anywhere with ease."