3 Ghosts of Christmas Eve Try to Design an iPhone App

Dearest Readers,

It’s Christmas Eve and I have a little tale to tell. Not a nice one about Scrooge learning the spirit of Christmas though. It’s a different sort to be sure. This year the 3 Ghosts of Christmas Eve have a more modern and hip task to accomplish. For some reason not completely evident to this writer, the 3 Ghosts have an iPhone app to design, build and launch and they’re eager to get started. Our Christmas tale for you Dear Reader will be a conversation between our Ghosts as they discuss how to scope out this holiday iPhone app. Please keep in mind that the Ghosts do not represent any persons in particular and if they did the writer wouldn’t never admit it. Our conversation begins.

Ghost of Christmas Present: “Hey guys, I’m glad you two could join me for this big paradigm changing project. We’re going to make history with this jolly iPhone app, we are. I’ve never really used the iPhone but I’ve heard all the people of London town will love it and will respect us for being so with it to develop our own app. Not only are we going to improve our reputations but we’ll make some major bucks with the useful features. Are we all up for this sucker?”

Ghost of Christmas Past: “Cough, sputter, cough. I dunno. We’ve crossed these tracks before in past Christmases when you guys wanted to launch some new fangled technology. Can’t we just build an html site and hope people will look at it on this iPhone thingy? Christmas Yet To Come can design it to make it look coooool and that should do it for this Christmas season. Cough…”

Ghost of Christmas Present: “Hmm, that’s not really what I had in mind Christmas Past, you know that. I wanted to something that would really shake people up this time. The iPhone IS IT! I’m sure of it. What do you say Christmas Yet To Come?”

Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come: “Golly guys, I’m sure we can design something totally fabulous. Let me just get my head around the user experience. So you want an app to count lost souls and promote our little business here, right? That shouldn’t be too hard. We just need to get the right vendors in place and we can knock out this baby. Don’t be such a wet blanket Christmas Past!”

Ghost of Christmas Past: “Sneeze, gasp… are you calling me a party pooper?! You designy guys always paint us in a corner and I have to get us out with my team of 1000 coder ghosts! Our backend infrastructure is older than I am and it can’t handle such fancy stuff. I dunno, maybe you should set up a blog, I’ve heard they’re Web 2.0.”

Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come: “My main expectation is that we focus on a fantastic user experience. A design that’s really cool and interactive and captures the iPhoney experience is key. For that we’re going to need a super talented, award-winning UI design vendor and it’s going to cost us. But you get what you pay for, my mama always said.”

Ghost of Christmas Present: “Well, Yet to Come, I agree with you up to a point. The experience has got to be great if we’re going to turn a profit on the lost souls opportunity. But how much are we talking about spending in the design company? I mean can’t you just get some software and do it your self?”

Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come: “Err… gosh… that sounds like a lot of work…”

Ghost of Christmas Past: “Let me just say that my IT vendor will take at least 99.2376% of the budget to build this thing. There’s no way there’ll be money left for your artsy hired hands. I’m sorry, we’ll just have to do without user experience!”

Ghost of Christmas Present: “Yes, for once Past I think you and I see eye to eye on something. Cheap and dirty and maximize profits! I can hear the money rolling in already, don’t you?”

Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come: “You guys, I can see the future, that’s one of my ghostly talents, and I see that without a decent user interface and iPhone-like fabulousness, our potential users will not touch our app with a ten foot pole. Instead they will download a competitor’s voodoo doll simulation game to torment family and friends. This cannot be what we want.”

Ghost of Christmas Past: “Wheeeeeeze…. Based on my past experience, if we haven’t done this sort thing before, we have no evidence that it will work. I think you two are dreaming. I bet you two haven’t even figured out what the scope is yet, have you?”

Ghost of Christmas Present: “Let’s keep it simple so we make sure not to run out of money and we can be sure Christmas Past has enough bandwidth to figure out this new platform.”

Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come: “As I said in my 50 page report with user scenarios and 3D color schematics, we need a soul search feature that doesn’t require users to use their hands be responds to hand sweat and heart rate to activate searches within .01 seconds response times. Users will love it and we’ll completely differentiate our app from the crap on App Store.”

Ghost of Christmas Past: “I request we hire a IT research firm to analyze the likelihood of success of hand sweat driven technology. This will cost at least 74% of our budget but will be worth every penny.”

Ghost of Christmas Present: “No no no no no!!! No spending money unless I see a positive NPV and at least 150% return on investment. You hear me?!”

Ghosts of Christmas Yet To Come AND Christmas Past: “A positive what???”

Ghost of Christmas Present: “Oh don’t act coy. We’ve got to make money and a lot of it.”

Ghost of Christmas Past: “Gurgle, spit… boys we’ve already talked about this for 15 minutes too long. Looking at my project schedule we now don’t have enough time to launch the app as we expected. I propose we scope down the whole app to make this tough timeline. We can only do an app that searches ONE soul. That’s all my team can handle and that’s with overtime.”

Ghost of Christmas Present: “Well, OK, I suppose I can accept that. Plus that make that one soul even MORE valuable, won’t it?”

Ghosts of Christmas Yet To Come: “Forget it! I’m going to design a fan app for Casper the Friendly Ghost. At least he has vision! I’m out of here.”

Ghost of Christmas Present: “That was a surprise. At least you act like an adult Christmas Past. Guess we’re going to have to get ourselves another prescient ghost who can handle these tough decisions. Alright, I better go down to the morgue and see if any creatives have died recently. Wanna come along?”

Ghost of Christmas Past: “Gurgle…splut…I guess I could use the fresh air. i haven’t been outside since 1962. What do you say we stop by and the computer superstore and see if they have any good deals on mainframes?”

Ghost of Christmas Present: “Yes let’s, tally ho old boy!!!”

(Our scene fades dark with only the sound of two jolly ghosts skipping and humming down the street to the tune of Little Drummer Boy.)

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