The idea behind your Ping! application is attractive.
Ping! allows users to send SMS-like messages anywhere in the world, and for free. This means users get a much greater value through Ping! than they do with
standard SMS.

SMS has one major advantage though - it's already on your phone, ready to use. You just select a contact from your address book, write your message, and send.
To do that in Ping! you have to:

1. Create a user ID
2. Get your friends to download Ping!
3. Have all them create Ping! IDs
4. Exchange ID info between everyone (using some other messaging service!

Only after all that can you message your friends.
Given the effort required to make the Ping! system work, only people with a great need for affordable, international texting would go through with it - people with rela-
tives abroad, for example. The majority of people would be more likely to spend 5 bucks a month on a 200 message plan, rather than invest a significant amount of
time getting everyone else to use Ping!. You lose.

To make this app explode, you'll have to eliminate or significantly reduce the challenges I've outlined above. One idea to do this:
Use the person's phone number as an ID, detected automatically ***. This will work, because each phone number is unique. And since all your friends' numbers are
already in your address book, there's no need to exchange user IDs. With this method, all users just need to download Ping! and it's ready to use right away. Now
your app can really compete with SMS. Users will focus on the huge advantage of your system - that it's free to use and it’s worldwide. You win.
That said, you would need to explore all the details and the feasibility of building such a plan. It's certainly not the only way to streamline and simplify your applica-
tion. The point I want to make is you can use the logic outlined above to find other paths to a user-friendly solution.

Some other minor issues
This screen is overdesigned - see my article on overdesign more detail on this. Whoever did the UI design for this probably spent a significant amount of time on this
screen. Not a very good investment.




Neither native SMS nor Ping! provide an easy way to get rid of the keyboard and see conversation fullscreen. This might be helpful for the users who are typing something and then want to see what has been said before. It’s a good idea to slide keyboard down once user taps on messages section of the screen and bring it back if she taps on message input.