Carriage number 7 is at position 7 at the platform – as printed on passenger ticket

As a UE designer, I often find myself looking at the world around me for ideas and inspiration. Ideas come from all kinds of products, services and experiences. I found myself observing many of these on a recent trip to Japan, where things are done differently to the western world.

Back in October I wrote about the Tokyo metro user experience. This next example is about the complete ‘end-to-end’ experience as a passenger on the Bullet Train service in Japan.

Looking back at the journey, it’s the small details of the service that compounded to make the journey flow so well. Especially when compared to previous experiences of train journeys in the UK and other countries I’ve travelled in.

In essence it was about two things: organisation and reliability. The best way to explain this is to describe the sequence of events that made the journey…

The journey experience started with the ticket – which has a carriage number and seat number printed on it in advance of the journey.

Once at the platform the carriage numbers are marked clearly on the platform concourse – so passengers can work out where to stand using the number on their ticket.

All of this helps the passenger to be more organised and relaxed for their journey. When lugging large cases etc. none of us want to walk up and down the platform more than we need to. It also removes the chance of people crowding to one door of the same carriage and so on.

Then, when the train draws into the platform it stops exactly at the right place for your carriage – the number on the carriage side matches the one on the platform.

Once on the train, the journey starts exactly on time.

And of course, the rapid speed of the train is a key factor – it gets the passenger to their destination so quickly and efficiently. It feels almost like air travel.

So what did I take away from the experience? Most of all, it’s clear that the service has been designed and implemented to a degree that creates a ‘near perfect’ passenger experience. That’s certainly something I don’t see every day!

Did you hear that? That’s the whooshing sound of 2008 running out of the door and slamming it on its way out.

Does anyone else feel like this year has flown by at the speed of a Peregrine falcon*?

For us at Taptu, it’s been a very eventful year with the key releases of Deadly Dart, Electric Eel and the imminent release of Frisky Fire (yes, we name our releases after fish…) and many other interesting moments in between.

Talking of interesting… At the end of 2007, Marc, one of our designers, admitted his favourite film was Titanic. He topped that this Christmas by announcing that his favourite band is Take That. We’re very impressed with Marc’s taste in music and movies (and are very grateful he’s not picking what gets added to the Taptu index!)

Our office manager Celia spent the year playing tricks on the designers by putting packing tape on the underside of their computer mouse, leaving them baffled for quite some time. We wonder what shenanigans she’ll get up to next year!

Now for the real events of 2008…

• In January, we launched the sharing functionality, letting you send results you find by email, Twitter and SMS as well as adding a heap of new channels to the search engine.
• In February, we were awarded the Mobile Monday Global Community Award at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
• In April, our first partner, Moblr, went live with Taptu powering the search on their site.
• In May, we launched Electric Eel, adding human-assisted results, the “I’m Bored” and received the MEX Design Award.
• September was an eventful month mainly because it’s my birthday with two more awards and Steve making himself pretty for the Sky Technofile cameras
• In October, we released the Series 60 quicklaunch widget, enabling Symbian S60 users to get to Taptu in a single click.
• We added itsmy.com, the mobile social network, as second search partner in November.
• And finally, things didn’t exactly slow down in December, with Wapedia for iPhone going live and shooting to #1 in the French iTunes App Store, closing Series B funding last week, and today, putting out our last release of the year, called FriskyFire!

Phew, what a year it was, and it wouldn’t have been the same without all the wonderful people we’ve met and received feedback from. So thank you from the bottom of our hearts for coming along for the ride this year, and we’re gearing up for an even better 2009!

[* The Peregrine Falcon is the fastest flying bird on Earth, with a recorded flight of over 200 mph. After much discussion, we're quite sure that 2008 has flown by faster than a swallow; African, European or otherwise.]

As 2008 comes to an end, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve topped off a year we’re incredibly proud of with some great news. We announced today that Andreas Bernstrom has joined Taptu as Chief Operating Officer and that we’ve secured a second round of funding. We secured £6.45 million with our existing investors, 3i and Sofinnova, who are as excited as we are about the past 12 months and Taptu’s growth potential.

Andreas joins us, bringing 10 years of experience working with TradeDoubler, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. He will be helping us drive Taptu forward and play an important part in developing our business presence overseas.

We’ll be inviting Andreas to introduce himself on the blog in the near future so sign up to our RSS feed if you haven’t already done so, to hear the latest news as they happen!

The full press release on the funding and Andreas Bernstrom’s appointment as COO is available here.

Andreas Bernstrom chosen to oversee global expansion and extend commercial opportunities for the fast growing mobile search engine

Cambridge, UK – December 16th, 2008 - Taptu, the pure-play mobile search engine, has secured £6.45m in series B funding from its existing investors 3i and Sofinnova investments and has appointed Andreas Bernstrom to the position of Chief Operating Officer (COO). Andreas will be part of Taptu’s senior management team, responsible for managing the company’s commercial growth and formalising Taptu’s mobile advertising position, worldwide.

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Yesterday, we announced that ZooVision, the US-based free streaming mobile video portal, has replaced its existing search provider with Taptu.

ZooVision is full of music, video, anime, cartoon, video podcasts, audio podcasts and live video streaming content, the kind of stuff our search engine absolutely laps up.

As Steve points out in the press release, this is the second partner we can announce in the last 6 weeks, and we hope we can provide ZooVision users with the best user experience possible on mobile.

You can find the full press release, as well as contact information here.

A few weeks ago, we released Wapedia as an application for the iPhone, hoping we could open up Wikipedia to more users than ever before.

The French were first to take fancy to it, catapulting Wapedia to the top of Free Apps chart on iTunes France for three days! We have since remained in the top 10 Free Apps in France, and have received some great feedback from users. Merci à tous ceux et celles qui nous ont donné leur avis sur iTunes ou ailleurs!

We’re working on a new version of the application, taking in account a number of suggestions we’ve received, so keep an eye out for the next version of Wapedia for iPhone. [iTunes link] If you’d like to share your feedback, drop us a line on iphone@wapedia.org.

Since August, we have been surveying Taptu users, asking them to answer a few questions on how they use the mobile web. We’ve gathered some very interesting results and we wanted to share a few highlights.

Of the 2,500 respondents, over 52% have only recently started using the mobile web, telling us they have been using it for three months or less. These figures confirm just how important it is for mobile sites to be user-friendly, easy to use and fast, since these new users are making their mind up about the mobile web. Give them a poor user experience and they may run away, never to come back. Give them a great experience, and you’ll see your user base grow quicker than mushrooms after the rain!

An overwhelming majority of 75% of users said their favourite content was multimedia, looking for images, audio and video on the mobile web. With unlimited data tariffs becoming more common, the mobile web isn’t just about reading the news or checking the weather in an emergency, it’s also about being entertained by the same quality content we can find on the web!

Our users are a curious bunch: 57% have previously downloaded a game, ringtone or some music to their mobiles, with half of them having paid for the download. Whatever the payment method, mobile commerce is becoming more ubiquitous and effortless, with more users happy to make a transaction on mobile.

In terms of demographics, a majority of respondents are between 19 and 35 years old, but there is a surprising balance of age groups. What can we say, Taptu isn’t just for kids, adults need their entertainment fix too!

In this survey powered by Winksite, our respondents provided us with insight on what they want on the mobile web and how they use Taptu and, armed with that knowledge, we can continue to develop a product that meets their needs.

Rather than produce a large yearly survey, we love to do short, simple surveys on a regular basis, as we do with our usability testing sessions. We’re also not too fond of spreadsheets and serious graphs (well, except for our stats guy, he seems to love them!) so we hope you like our pie chart above.

In partnership with the creator of Wapedia, Florian Amrhein, we recently created the first version of the Wapedia mobile wiki iPhone application. [iTunes link]

Wapedia launched in 2004, and provides a fast and mobile-friendly edition of Wikipedia, so it seemed logical to kick it up a notch and create an iPhone application to complement it.

We focused on making the app as fast as possible, by scaling images for the iPhone, showing a table of contents to jump down to a section of the page in a snap and paginating the very long pages to speed up loading. We wouldn’t want you to lose the pub quiz because we can’t get you to the answer fast enough, would we?

As Taptu staff, we’re all nuts about sharing what we find on our phones, we’ve made it easy to email a link to a friend or open it in Safari so that you can bookmark it for future reference.

The application is available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish, with 75 local language versions of Wikipedia accessible to browse. It can also be accessed at wapedia.mobi on any mobile phone.

This is the first version of the application, and we have a list of funky features we want to add that rivals Santa’s shopping list, but we’d love to get your feedback on it. What new features would you like to see in the next version? Drop us a line on iphone@wapedia.org.

Download the Wapedia – Mobile Wiki iPhone app in iTunes here.