Bzzy is a mobile application that allows the user to choose from a selection of pre-defined or custom messages, that when engaged, are automatically sent as a reply to any text message received by the users cell phone. The Bzzy team worked tirelessly to release the app in the Android Marketplace for the start of Distracted Driver Awareness Month in April.

PixelMEDIA’s efforts piqued the interests of area police departments, who reached out to the company about showcasing Bzzy at safety fairs for young drivers. These opportunities to work in concert with local law enforcement have allowed the PixelMEDIA team to promote bzzy at a grass roots level, speaking with their target users directly about the dangers of distracted driving and explaining how easily an app like Bzzy can mitigate many of those risks.

CEO Erik Dodier accepted the award at the MITX event, taking the opportunity to briefly speak to the audience about PixelMEDIA’s efforts to raise awareness about the issue. “Distracted driving is a concern that impacts everyone; you as the driver and others on the road.  The BZZY app is aimed at reducing the urge to respond to incoming texts while driving, or anything else that requires your full attention.”

Free downloads of Bzzy are available on the Android Marketplace or via Bzzyapp.com.

Other nominees in the Mobile category included The Steamship Authority Mobile Site, by iMarc LLC for The Steamship Authority, TripAdviser Mobile, by TripAdviser, and The Brookings Institution iPad App by Velir for the Brookings Institution.

Begun in 1996, the MITX Awards has grown to become the largest and most prestigious awards competition in the country for technology innovations, and celebrates the best creative and technological accomplishments emerging from New England.

“The MITX Interactive Awards draw in digital and creative work of an astoundingly high caliber. Each year the applications grow increasingly impressive, and 2011 brought some of the best work we’ve ever seen,” said Debi Kleiman, president of MITX. “This year’s finalists represent true thought-leaders, experts, and innovators; they are the best and brightest our community has to offer, and their work bridges the space between creative ideas and technology. MITX is proud to serve as the foundation for this region’s vibrant digital community.”

Bzzy is an SMS (Text Message) Auto-Responder that allows the user to choose from a selection of pre-defined or custom messages, that when engaged, are automatically sent as a reply to any text message received by the users cell phone. Primarily aimed at curbing the dangers of distracted driving, an epidemic that takes thousands of lives each year, Bzzy can also be also be utilized during those other times where responding to a text is simply an inconvenience. Be it at the movies, enjoying a dinner with family, focusing on work or school, even napping; there are so many scenarios where immediately responding to texts isn’t a top priority, but still expected of us. Bzzy is a tool that “Tells your friends to Buzz off. But in a nice way”.

“We are thrilled that MITX has chosen to recognize Bzzy in the mobile category. The purpose of Bzzy is aimed directly at preventing texting while driving. This nomination helps us to continue to raise awareness about the dangers of distracted driving” said PixelMEDIA CEO, Erik Dodier.

PixelMEDIA will be recognized with the other finalists in the category of Mobile at a ceremony traditionally attended by over 1,000 of the region’s top interactive marketing and technology professionals. Winners will be announced at the ceremony, held at the Sheraton Boston on December 5th. Tickets can be purchased at www.mitxawards.org/interactive.

The MITX Awards are made possible by our wonderful sponsors. The 2011 MITX Awards Platinum Sponsor is PricewaterhouseCoopers. Gold Sponsors are : Boston.com, DLA Piper. Silver Sponsors include adbeast, Atom Group, Flashtalking, HireMinds, Onward Search, ShareThis, Velir.

About PixelMEDIA

Founded in 1994, PixelMEDIA offers a diverse range of professional services including web and mobile solutions, application design and development, user interface design, multimedia design, website hosting, and website management. PixelMEDIA provides the strategic, creative, and technical expertise needed to increase revenue opportunities and reduce costs. PixelMEDIA’s customers include industry leaders such as ECCO Shoes, Sam Adams, Bauer Hockey, Rubik’s Cube, Keene State College, and Logica. For information, visit www.pixelmedia.com

About MITX

Established in 1996, MITX — the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange — is the leading industry organization focused on the web and mobile, bringing together the digital marketing, media and technology community to engage in what’s next and how it will impact the marketing and business worlds. Connecting more than 7,500 professionals in New England, MITX is a dynamic community of thought leaders and collaborators in search of insight, education and opportunity. Creator of FutureM, MITX is headquartered in Boston, MA. For more information, visit http://www.mitx.org/.

Now through the end of April, download Bzzy for free during National Distracted Driving Awareness Month.

According to the Department of Transportation, 5,500 people in the United States were killed and another half a million were injured in accidents related to distracted driving in 2009.

“It only takes a moment of distraction to cause a tragedy,” said Jim Guest, president of Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports. “No text or call is worth a life.”

Now a Portsmouth, N.H.-based company has launched a mobile phone application that will let others know when someone is unavailable to text.

Download at www.bzzyapp.com

“Bzzy” is being offered as a free download in April during National Distracted Driving Awareness Month. Bzzy automatically responds to texts using either a pre-set or customized message.

Activate the application and incoming texters will be sent a response: “I am driving,” “I am viewing (a movie)” or a custom message.  All texts received are still available on the phone once the person is ready to respond.

“It’s about staying focused, on whatever you are doing, but especially on driving when your life and others on the road are at risk,” said Erik Dodier, CEO of PixelMEDIA. “Bzzy will remove the urgency we feel to reply back right away, and instead let those who are trying to reach us know we are unavailable.”

The goal is to allow people to focus on what they’re doing, whether it’s driving or even watching a movie or playing with their kids, without being distracted by texts.

“There’s something about a text that seems so instantaneous,” Dodier said. “But we all know there are times we should just let others know we’re temporarily unavailable.”

Dodier said 10 percent of any future proceeds from the product will be donated to efforts aimed at increasing the awareness of the dangers of distracted driving.

Bzzy is currently available on Android phones only, however, PixelMEDIA  is looking at offering Bzzy for iPhones in the future.

“Take a step toward driving safer, download Bzzy for free through April 30^th at www.Bzzyapp.com,” Dodier said. “It will allow a driver’s focus to stay where it should be, on the road.”

Note: This video is part of our Let’s Talk series of staff perspectives. You can check out more perspectives on our Vimeo Channel.

The practice of web analytics has been around for quite some time, and has evolved over the years to offer more and more insight into the user behavior on our websites.  Major players in today’s analytics market include Google Analytics, WebTrends, Omniture, and Urchin.  They allow us to measure the traffic to our site, user demographics, and browser statistics, as well as to track specific campaigns and their impact on lead generation and ultimately, our bottom line.

This is all well and good for your traditional website targeted for the desktop user, but does it hold true for mobile users?  Yes and no.  Of course, we want to track all of the same information as a traditional website, such as page views and browser statics.  But mobile users have different needs than your typical desktop user.  The parameters of their world vary greatly, and so will the decisions they make.  Their usage of your site will reflect these decisions — and analytics reports are your view into their world.

One differentiating factor of the mobile user is the device they use.  With the rapid growth of mobile communications worldwide, there are countless mobile devices and each one offers a different user experience.  Unfortunately, analytics packages such as Google Analytics and WebTrends lack the ability to track mobile-specific information.  Some of these tools rely on JavaScript to track data, a technology that not all mobile devices support.  If your users are lucky enough to have a device that allows JavaScript, the data you collect will not track the mobile-specific information that you’re most interested in, such as the device, manufacturer, and model.

Fortunately, there are solutions available that track exactly this type of information.  One solution is a free offering from AdMob called AdMob Mobile Analytics.  This solution provides a simple way to add code to your website that logs not only the most common analytics data, but the manufacturer, model, browser, operating system, and screen resolution of the mobile device in use.  These are the parameters that are most important to us on the mobile device, since they most directly affect the behavior of our users.

You can leverage this information in a number of ways:

• Develop features for your user base: If your mobile site is targeted toward business users, most of whom will have a mobile device that allows for a rich and interactive experience (e.g., an iPhone or a Blackberry), you can focus your development efforts towards these devices.  You can raise your minimum requirements and comfortably develop richer features, knowing that you’re not alienating a large percentage of your user base.
• Focus your testing efforts on the most common devices: Testing mobile sites can be daunting.  It is nearly impossible to test on every device available, but once you know your users and the devices they use, you can focus your testing on those and cut down on development efforts and costs.
• Watch user behavior: Mobile devices have smaller screen sizes and limited controls that will affect the way a user navigates through your site — and how long they decide to stay. Important content buried on your site may not get the traffic it deserves if users can’t find it.  See what areas of your site get the most traffic and build your site architecture to best allow your users to find the most critical information.

Listen to your mobile users by observing their actions, and observe their actions by investing some time into a mobile analytics solution.  The insight provided will give you the ammunition you need to develop the most effective mobile site possible — and to earn that pat on the back you deserve.

1) Decide which content to put on your mobile site

One of the first challenges when starting a new mobile project is deciding exactly what content to offer your mobile visitors. There are a few differing opinions in the industry right now; some people strongly believe in the One Web, while others believe that the experience should be re-shaped for the medium. This could mean a new website, new content, and a new information architecture as well as a design optimized for mobile.

2) Mobile enabling your site isn’t as simple as adding a new stylesheet.

CSS, the language used for applying styles to your website, currently provides a method for specifying where those styles should be applied. This functionality is provided in the form of a ‘media’ attribute applied to your stylesheets. Supported media types include screen (your computer), print (for printing a web page), and handheld (small screen, handheld devices). Unfortunately, support for the handheld media type is limited and buggy. If it were, it would theoretically be as easy to reformat your website for a mobile device as it is to reformat it for print. There would of course still be other considerations—hiding a large banner image via CSS will not stop it from being downloaded over a slow connection to a mobile device.

Because of the lackluster support for the handheld media type, we’re generally stuck with device detection: if a user hits the site from a handheld device, we route them to a separate mobile website. Websites built for mobile use a very similar markup language as regular websites. However, just like some desktop browsers offer different levels of standards support, so do mobile browsers—and there are a lot more of them!

3) Understand the different levels of mobile browsing

At least here in the U.S., we are just starting to see a big push toward phones that are really optimized for browsing the web. With devices like the Apple iPhone, Samsung Instinct, LG Dare, and the G1, every major wireless carrier now offers a decent phone for web browsing. While the iPhone (with its bundled version of the Safari web browser) is easily the winner for web browsing, the other devices aren’t far behind. All the major browser makers also have versions of their browsers that run on mobile devices.

However, there are still a lot of older phones in use whose browsing experience is basic, at best. Even popular devices like the BlackBerry tend to have a sub-standard browser compared to the devices listed above. It’s definitely a challenge to optimize your site to work on the small screens and bad browsers of the older devices, while trying to take advantage of the bigger screens and better rendering ability of newer devices.

4) Play to the strengths of the platform!

So, this should be fairly obvious—it’s a mobile device! Build a site that supports what a user needs to do when they’re on the go. Things like making telephone numbers into hyperlinks that automatically dial the phone can make all the difference to a user. Limiting content to what’s really important and removing images for faster page load times might be painful at first, but as you strip down to the essentials,  you’ll start increasing the usability and value of your mobile site.

5) Test on a range of devices

Testing is definitely one of the bigger challenges we have to deal with. There is simply no way to test on every device. However, with the right combination of devices you can get a great idea of how your site will perform across a wide range of different devices. On page 62 of Cameron Moll’s book, Mobile Web Design, Joe Shepter explains how Yahoo! employed this technique when developing a new mobile site for FIFA.

To make sense of the chaos, Yahoo!’s team first selected a target
group of ten phones. They were all widely distributed, and their
browsers ran the gamut from high-end to barely functional. As the
thinking went, if the site worked perfectly on all of them, it would
perform reasonably well on the rest of the world’s phones.
- Joe Shepter

The folks at MobiForge recommend a similar process:

One way to approach this problem is to focus on five classes of devices that span a range of capabilities. Of the hundreds of devices available, supporting five mainstream devices makes a great place to start. Obviously supporting more devices ensures greater compatibility with more devices and developers should always endeavor to do this, but supporting five devices disparate devices can do the job.

There are also plenty of emulators to help you along, but are definitely not a substitute for the real thing.

6) Use the resources available to you!

Ok, so I know I said 5 pointers, but everyone likes that last extra freebie, right? One last thing to keep in mind—there are resources available to help you along. Aside from the emulators to help with testing (which can be much quicker to use when still in development), there are some web sites that will help check your website to see if it’s ready for prime time.

• W3C mobileOK validator: Similar to their HTML validator, but results are specific to mobile sites
• ready.mobi: “evaluates mobile-readiness using industry best practices & standards”

And of course, partnering with a company who’s been through it couldn’t hurt either. We’d love to answer your questions if you’re thinking it’s time to make the leap into mobile for yourself. Contact us and let’s talk about it!

By looking at what content users need and want, we can begin to pinpoint the tradeoffs necessary for a quick and rewarding experience. Take the example of picking up a friend at the airport. From your desktop you can get detailed information about the flight: How long has it been in the air? What is its altitude? How many miles has it traveled? In a mobile environment on the way to the airport, that information takes a back seat to simply knowing what time it’s landing and which terminal do you need to go to. The same priorities hold true for most types of content, and identifying what they are is the first step to design. We can fit it all, but it seems far better to fit what is needed most by users.

Check out this example from a recent project:

Full web version

Mobile version

Not everyone has an iPhone or Blackberry Storm. A lot of users have simple smart phones, requiring careful thought into how deep content lies within the Mobile Experience and how many clicks it takes to get to it.

Information Architecture and Interaction Design for Mobile needs to take this into account and requires the structure to contain a number of “either/or” choices and tailoring the navigation (modified from the work of Christian Crumlish):

• If at all possible, limit the number of categories to five (5)
• To help users access links quickly, choose the top 10 per page to assign numerical access
  
• Minimize the number of levels of navigation: the deeper the content is, the harder to drill in and out
  
• Reorder the site categories by priority to best suit the needs of the Mobile audience. Speaking to users will help determine the best approach for this.
• Make telephone numbers links:
  <a href=”tel:+19995551234”>+1 999 555-1234</a>

Be prepared to spend time working through the navigation and interaction modeling for the Mobile Experience. In order to simplify the structure into an intuitive experience that breaks the content down into digestible chunks takes patience. Ironically, simplification is one of the more complicated processes, but the payoff at the end of the day is worth it. Just ask your happy users.