Men are lucky. We don’t have to buy make-up – it simply grows out of our faces. Most men, like me, choose to remove this make-up every morning in a ritual of lathering and scraping. But could there be an easier way to raise money than to neglect the ritual for a month and “do a Movember”?

That’s what I thought when I began to ‘grow my mo’ on November 1. It was easy enough to grow a few days’ worth of stubble. You just have to be lazy, which is precisely how you end up looking.

Then it started to get more challenging. I decided that, for maximum impact and money-raising potential, I would grow a moustache and sideburns combo that joined to create the shape of a W. The only way I could think of achieving this was by shaving with a naked blade – any foam and I wouldn’t be able to see what I was doing. This resulted in the most uncomfortable razor burn, which has stayed with me through most of the month.

As the facial hair began to come thick and fast, so did the backhanded compliments. Neighbours in Ealing started asking my wife if I’d turned gay; she defended me (I hope). A colleague suggested that I should cultivate hairs on the tip of my nose by shaving there or sprinkling it with hair tonic; his argument that the W wasn’t complete without the apex in the middle.So it hasn’t been that easy. But it’s been worth it, since at the time of writing I have raised £140 for research into cancers affecting men. But I would like to raise more, and have decided that the only way to do this is to make myself look even more ridiculous. Here is my plan:

• If I pass the £200 mark, I will die my moustache and sideburns green on the 1st of December to celebrate the start of the Christmas season.

• If I get £300 in donations, I will hang baubles from them.

Please visit my Movember page here

I grab an object on my bedside table and place it carefully in its docking position below my right eye. A beep prompts me to give a verbal instruction: I say “Fu Man Chu”. My razorbot beeps twice to acknowledge the command, then whirrs into action and travels across the contours of my face, buzzing and trimming, while I lie motionless on my back.

Yes, Movember (http://uk.movember.com/) is still going strong in 2020, and these days I don’t need to squint in front of a mirror to get a perfect shave. That’s a big bonus for me. When I bought the razorbot last year, it had to be personalised – so I set it to calibration mode and let it map out my face and neck. It then asked me if there was another ‘region’ that I wanted to calibrate; I politely declined.

After two minutes, my facial trim is complete. I haul myself out of bed and visit the bathroom to see how my Fu Man Chu moustache is coming along, and gargle with some plaque-busting nanobots.

I decided to put Hipstamatic through its paces on my recent holiday in Greece. For £1.19 you get the app, plus three lenses and three films – more are available to be purchased separately (and I challenge you not to splash out on a few more after having played around a bit). The lens gives border effects to your prints, while films give you the colour effect – black and white with delicate pastel tinting, over saturated or cross-processed (as you would have got in the old days from processing a transparency film in colour negative chemicals).

The app takes a little while to get used to, mostly because what you see in the ‘viewfinder’ isn’t what you get in the final print. You’ll see in the example below that the preview shows only a fraction of the final composition.

Another quirk is that the lenses and films have rather unhelpful, esoteric names like ‘Jimmy’ and ‘Blanko’ – you end up wondering if you need ‘Kodot’ or ‘Ina’s 1935’ to recreate that winning shot.

However, to criticise Hipstamatic for its usability would be missing the point. It’s the randomness of the images that makes them so charming – simple compositions work best and are given a timeless, editorial quality, thanks to Hipstamatic’s clever post-processing.

It’s an example of where even though something might be low on usability, it’s creative fun just enhances the customer experience.

You might think this would prove a healthy approach – any solution that takes into account the needs of its end users is more likely to be successful than one that does not. But the downside is that permanent beta can invite a ‘suck it and see’ approach by which the release version is acknowledged to be imperfect in the hope that free feedback gained from users will help to quickly produce a much improved follow-up version.

Tapping the same end user willingness to test the waters of free software, the most successful social media campaigns have inspired brand loyalty by providing free online content that is genuinely useful or just plain fun. Engaged users then join social media channels built in to these applications or microsites to virally spread the word. So the recipe for success is straightforward and easy to emulate. Or is it?

A brief visit to the iTunes App Store suggests that this isn’t the case. The store is littered with sponsored free applications that marketers were clearly hoping would be the next Kraft iFood Assistant or Carling iPint, both of which launched to much acclaim and were downloaded and used by many thousands of consumers. However, the truth is that far more applications fail to inspire us. App analytics firm Pinch Media claims only about 20 percent of users return to use free apps the first day after they download it, and that after 30 days fewer than 5 percent are using the app. Paid apps show a slightly steeper fall-off rate, so there is only a brief window to capture imagination, potential revenues and the viral marketing buzz necessary to inspire high download volumes. It’s very hard to shake off the negative reviews that a flawed first release is bound to provoke, no matter how much better you make the follow-up version.

So what is it that consigns so many apps, often the fruits of years of development work, to the dustbin? It seems that many of them do indeed fall into the trap of permanent beta – of hastily taking an idea through to development and launch without due consideration of the target users, expecting the fine-tuning to be done at some later date. Yes, you can get lucky, but far more often this approach will result in an application or site that is totally irrelevant to its target audience and therefore never takes off.

To increase your application or campaign microsite’s chances of success it’s critical to involve real users in the development process prior to initial launch. Organise focus groups to get feedback on and develop the proposition. Conduct usability evaluations to see how target users respond to a prototype of any level of fidelity. These are the best ways to ensure that any usability issues are ironed out before your product sees the light of day, and that your target audience will engage with it as you had intended.

This article was written as part of the April newsletter