Mobile Apps Enable Product Managers and IT Teams To Make Little Bets

In software, particularly in enterprise software that is released in quarterly or yearly cycles, it is hard to experiment. Executives in-charge of investment decisions expect clear projection of returns on every investment decision. It is hard to predict and prove the returns on every investment a product manager makes. Sometimes the product manager spends years collecting data or making up data to justify the investment. Senior executives have openly told me to make up the numbers so that the investment goes through. I find this ridiculous and always wondered if there might be a practical solution that might work.

Thinking mobile first for enterprise software might help address this situation. It is possible to think about features and functionality for mobile personal devices such as iPads and smart phones first, test them out with a few users, prove the need and build such functionality on a larger scale and on the web later.

For a example a custom application for a particular role or audience can be built with an investment of a $ 100,000, assuming the basic objects necessary to build the mobile app are already available. The feedback from such a mobile app can then be used to justify and thus prioritize the development of the web version of the product.

In many cases nimble partners might be able to share the risk with product managers to experiment, if they see long term benefit. Such an approach makes innovation and experimentation possible even in large enterprise software companies or installations.

Half The Participants Downloaded The Conference App At LinkedIn Talent Connect

The LinkedIn Talent Connect 2011 conference had a conference mobile app. To the best of my knowledge, audience could give their feedback to sessions only via the app. The audience was recruiters and i noticed almost all of them had a smart phone. Even then, on day 2 only 50% of the audience had downloaded the app. I thought that was an interesting statistic.

Even though I was carrying a smart phone, I did not miss the app much. I did not care about giving feedback to the sessions. Conference apps need to provide something more than just replicate information already available on paper or automate processes previously done using paper. Conference app designers need to think about taking advantage of capabilities only the mobile phone could provide.

Making Your Career Website Mobile Friendly Is A Better Investment Than Creating a Mobile Career App

At the recruitment innovation summit at the Facebook offices today, I got to listen to the UPS talent acquisition team. They shared some incredible numbers about their recruiting success hiring tens of thousands of hourly workers. They said that they decided to invest in mobile enabling their career web site rather than creating a mobile app. More than 600 hires came via their mobile site.

The experience was shared by Matthew Lavery, the managing director of talent acquisition and corporate workforce planning. Michael L. Vangel from tmp.worldwide was the partner who helped UPS with their social media and mobile strategy and execution. They claimed that the investment in mobile enabling a career website paid them back in four months.

They polled the 200 people in the audience and only three said that they have mobile friendly career websites.

MGM Thinks Mobile To Speed Up The Check Out Process

I stayed at the MGM Grand for the Talent Connect Conference and noticed that MGM uses an iPad for speeding up guest checkout. The receipt was mailed to my email address and I confirmed that I received the receipt before leaving the checkout area using my mobile phone. Great experience.

I also learned from a Nordstrom shopper that they use the iPhone and iPad to speed up the checkout process.The iPad is becoming quite a versatile device.

I took this picture with the permission of the MGM employee

Thinking Mobile First Helped Us Improve Web Experience

While designing Career OnDemand, we started by thinking mobile first for most of the use cases. This forced us to think about the most important information to be presented on a screen and the most important action to be performed on a screen. We did this even thought we had no firm plans of releasing mobile apps for all use cases in the first wave.

However, identifying the most important action on every screen helped us highlight the buttons or user interface elements in the web interface with bright orange color. This was received very well by people who experienced our interface design.

This is not a Career OnDemand screen

Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski

I attended a session by Luke Wroblewski on Mobile First today in the offices of Ning in Palo Alto. Since we have been thinking mobile first for the design of Career OnDemand with good success, I went to this meetup to see what's new. There are a lot of new things. Here is his current presentation. http://www.lukew.com/resources/articles/MobileFirst_LukeW.pdf  I highly recommend it. Please visit www.lukew.com for his upcoming talks. He has a book in the making named Mobile First.

In Career OnDemand, we designed every use case Mobile First. We painstakingly created prototypes for every sea level use case for the employee view and manager view. It helped us focus on the most important things, clarified the purpose of a use case and made the use experience significantly better.

When we transferred the mobile first design to the web, the main button that showed up on the mobile screen was displayed in bright orange color in the web page to indicate the most probable action to the user. It was received very well by users. I'll keep you posted.

People Centric, Collaboration In Context and Mobile First

I am working with several brilliant colleagues on the next generation of people management applications at SAP. After talking to hundreds of people, and tens of thought leaders and customers we have distilled out principles for the next generation of people managements apps to three things.

• People Centric
• Networking and Collaboration in context
• Insight Everywhere
• Mobile First

People centric thinking puts the person first and process next. We realized that, but for some special cases, meeting the needs of a person and providing instant value for a person is more important than ensuring the integrity of a process. While we will strive to ensure the integrity of all processes, we will address the needs of the person first and make our tools useful for the person and make it work the way they work, when they want it and where they want it.

Collaboration In Context brings collaboration to the context of the person rather than ask the person to take the context to a separate collaboration space. We decided to bring the most appropriate collaboration tools to the context of the work as and when required.

Mobile first: As part of our research we learned than it is matter of a couple of years before majority of access to business software will be from mobile devices. So we start our design process now-a-days by thinking mobile first. 

If you like our thinking and would like to join us in Palo Alto, please let us know. We are looking for people like you. Let's build disruptive people management tools for the idea driven economy.

Mobile Usage Of Your Products May Change Your Product Strategy

I met a friend who works at eBay, the auction site, yesterday. She shared an interesting story with me. eBay, she said, was slowly moving away from being an auction site to a fixed price online store such as Amazon. Then something interesting happened. eBay product designers and engineers created a mobile version of eBay.

People who use the mobile version of eBay started participating in auctions more than fixed price purchases. This behavior may influence eBay's product strategy, she said.

I find this remarkable. But I am not surprised. eBay auctions mobile brought the adrenaline rush of competition and gaming to you no matter where you are. Users were willing spend more time and pay more money for the experience of competing against each other to get what they want and were willing to pay more for the experience.

I firmly believe that mobile delivery will significantly alter the expectations and behavior of your users.

For designers of enterprise software, particularly human capital management software, this is a great opportunity. This is an opportunity to think mobile first, rethink your software as a tool that helps to connect people and move ideas from person to person rather than move documents from desktop to desktop.

I am cautiously optimistic about the possibility of enterprise software that people would actually enjoy using, may be even look forward to using.

Don't Just Port. Rethink The Mobile Version Of Your Business Applications

I had a chance to look at several mobile business application demos recently. It is great that enterprise software providers have acknowledged the importance of mobile applications. Unfortunately, several of these mobile application development teams treat mobile apps as a porting exercise.

Recreating a browser based business application in a mobile device without fundamentally rethinking the meaning of that application for a user is counterproductive. It is a bit like cramming a three course meal in an airplane tray table. It is not a very good experience.

I suspect this happens because the application design team hands over to the app to a "mobile team" that ports the existing application to multiple devices. The mobile teams usually have no context or domain experience. So they simply transfer the application features as-they-were designed-for-the-browser to the mobile screen.

My recommendation is to think mobile first when you design your products. Incorporate mobile scenarios in your user stories and rethink the meaning of the application for your mobile users.

To illustrate the need for radical thinking, I picked an alarm clock application that illustrates the possibilities of mobile design. Instead of cramming the screen with more features, the app designers have thought long and hard about what is the most important part of the clock.

Clearly, this app was not simply ported to a mobile phone. Go ahead. Think mobile first.

Constraints, Ironically, Help Produce More Ideas

In the book Made to Stick, the authors ask the readers to go through a mind exercise. They ask readers to write down all the white things they can think of in 15 seconds. Then they ask readers to write down all the white things inside their refrigerator. The authors say that people produce a longer list of white things when they start thinking about things inside a refrigerator.

I tried this at work last year. In my experience of designing several software products using tens of prototypes, I found that I was able to produce more and better ideas when I started thinking mobile first.

Simple Prototypes Lead To Complex Intelligent Conversation, Complex Ones Lead To Simple, Stupid Conversation

For the past several months, I have been showing prototypes of people management software to hundreds of colleagues, customers and research partners. When the prototype I showed was simple, clear and uncluttered, it led to complex, intelligent and meaningful conversations.

When I showed a cluttered prototype with too many ideas packed in a screen, it consistently led to simple, shallow, stupid and meaningless discussions.

This might be another reason you may want to think mobile first.

Millennials Prefer Native Mobile Apps To Browsers

Research of mobile usage suggests that people under 35 prefer using native mobile phones to get their personal things done. The research found that Mobile apps are already the dominant medium for access to internet radio maps, social networks, navigation and games.

My conclusion based on my research and personal discussions with tens of millennial students and young professionals is that they have a strong preference for using native apps from mobile devices and tablets. They consider browsers as tools used by an older generation.

Based on my conversation with a utilities customers, I found out that native mobile apps are also a big hit with blue collar workers, not just knowledge workers who do cognitive work.

This is another reason why every business applications designer might want to think-mobile-first for product design.

Don't Shrink Web Apps To Fit The Mobile Screen

I was testing the beta version of a mobile application last week and realized that the designers of the mobile application had provided all the features of the web version of the application in the mobile version, in the same layout as the web version of the software. They just shrunk the icons and screens to fit the smaller screen.

It don't think they took advantage of the interesting new possibilities of this mobile interface. That is a wasted opportunity to provide mobile users with a great user experience. Instead of striving to provide all features in the mobile version, which is clearly unnecessary, the designers could have focused on the features that users may want to use from the mobile device.

Image from : http://wireframes.linowski.ca

For some business reasons, if they must add all features in the mobile version, they could have buried the less important features behind a menu.

My recommendation to all mobile app designers is to be bold and provide only the features you think are absolutely necessary for the user in a mobile situation. Avoid the temptation to cram every feature available in the web version into the mobile version as well.

I Have A Few Minutes. What Can I Do With My Smart Phone Other Than Check Email?

One of my friends who came to visit us at home last week shared an interesting observation about mobile devices with me. She uses the iPad and wonders if she can do something other than browsing or check email, when she has a few minutes to spare.

This is a very interesting opportunity for mobile application designers. I believe if your app enables people to consistently accomplish something meaningful in a clearly defined amount of time, your app may be used more often than the other comparable apps.

You may have to break down your apps into chunks of applications that can be used to accomplish something meaningful in a clearly defined period of time. For example, to take a picture, add a comment and tweet the same I know that it takes about 2 minutes or less.

It believe that most mobile application feature can be  consciously designed to be consumed in a certain amount of time.

Thinking Mobile First with App Inventor

As a proponent of the Make-To-Think and the Thinking-Mobile-First philosophies, I have been creating mobile prototypes with html mockup tools such as Axure and wire-frame tools such as Balsamic. I have written about this in a previous post.

However, I wanted to create simple mobile apps to understand the new design possibilities and mobile usability. I researched App Inventor from Google a few weeks back. Today I created a few simple apps using App Inventor for Android.

The one that got me kudos from my wife, who is a mobile entrepreneur, is the one that I wrote for her. The app is named "CallHim". You guessed it. As soon as she launches the app, the app calls my mobile phone.  So I am literally one click away.

I am not a programmer. So I thought I will share the wealth with other designers and product managers and mobile enthusiasts who may not know or want to code, but like the idea of creating simple mobile apps.

App Inventor is a click and drag tool to write small yet very powerful mobile applications for the Android platform.

For example, to write the app that calls my phone as soon as my wife launches it, this is what I did.

I invoked the phone dialer components as soon as the app was launched and passed my phone number to it. Then I asked the dialer component to call that number. This is all done using drag and drop components. No coding. Because there is no coding, there is very little scope for error.

You can plug your Android phone to your computer while you are creating the app and see the app taking shape in the device as you are creating it. You can also test the app as you are creating it. I wrote the phone dialer app in about 15 minutes.

I think this is a great tool for designers and product managers to play around with, have some fun and understand how to think mobile first. Mobile apps force you to think simple and different. I recommend that you explore it. It will be worth your time. Go through the tutorials. They are very helpful.

I just read that there is book on App Inventor coming soon.

Think About The Time Of The Day, While Thinking Mobile-First

While thinking mobile first for your application, it will help to think about the time of the day when your app or a particular feature might be used by your users. Such thinking might be able to help you determine the features that you need to provide in a mobile app.

The picture below is an example of newpaper readership across smartphone, computers and tablets.

News readership across devices and time from WSJ



 

The time of the day may determine, the mood, the attention span and the expectations a person may have. In the morning, users may be looking to get quick updates and do things that help with planning the day. They may use their smart phone for this purpose.

During the day time, they may do things that require large chunks of time and a quiet and comfortable workspace. They may use the computer to do even minor tasks.

In the evening, they may be catching up on reading material, checking for some updates and closing out the day. They may use a tablet to do this.



Challenges While Creating Mobile Prototypes To Convey Concepts

I create mobile prototypes to convey the idea behind use cases. I explained why I do this in a previous post. How ever, I am facing a challenge for some time now.

No matter how many times I point out that the prototype is only to convey the concept and not to suggest that we should build a mobile version of the use case, I keep getting feedback such as "This may not be an appropriate mobile use case". 

So keep an eye out for such feedback and take apppropriate steps to communicate your intent.

Thinking Mobile First Need Not Always Mean Creating A Mobile App

I was chatting with a friend the other day when he explained the mobile features of the travel management application he is leading the co-innovation for. His application enables users to take a picture of a receipt and email it to the expense report system.

That does not sound like anything fancy. Several applications can take a picture and send somewhere. But the beauty lies in the simplicity of the solution. In fact there is no app to download, there is no API to connect with and they don't have to worry about data connectivity issues, device compatibility issues and upgrade issues.

All the user has to do is to add an email address to his or her email system. When he has a recipt, he can take a picure using the mobile phone's camera and send the image using the email application in the mobile device.

When you can solve the problems of a mobile user without creating a mobile app of your own, consider it. In fact it is the first thing you should consider while thinking mobile first.

Thinking Mobile-First Puts Space and Time Constraints on Your Design and Brings Out Creativity

Many product designers know that thinking mobile first, instead of designing for the web browser, forces us to focus on essential features. It is obvious that the physical space constraints imposed by the screen of a mobile device enables us to focus on the most essential features.

However, space is not the only constraint a mobile device imposes on the designer. Mobile devices also impose an attention-span constraint on the design. People use mobile devices while they are standing, walking, when they are among colleagues, while in a meeting, while at a noisy place, while in a crowded place and even while they are in places where mobile device usage is not acceptable or is prohibited by law.

Think about boring meetings where you check you blackberry under the table, restaurants where you check your email when your spouse visits the restroom, movie theaters just when the lights are dimming, the airplane when you check your email while hiding it from the stewardess, while in bed, while in the toilet and so on.




In mobile situations, people want to do a quick, yet important task that is meaningful and is of some value.

This is a wonderful constraint, that forces designers to think of large business applications as multiple small applications that bring quick, specific yet significant value. This is another reason why we should think mobile-first while designing business applications.

Thinking Mobile-First For Product Design

I am in the middle of a design project at work where we are designing enterprise applications for people management. As part of the project we went through our design research phase and built a web prototype. Once we completed the prototype, my colleague @MChewD asked me how the application will work for someone who does not have a computer or email, but carries a mobile phone and only uses one thumb to operate the application while standing somewhere.

It was an interesting challenge. So I decided to build every high level use case as a mobile application, even though there are no plans to release a mobile version of the application in the first release. It was the most interesting exercise I did this year.

1. Identifying the use cases became simpler
Thinking mobile first, helped me identify the key mental models I need to communicate to the product team. All I had to do was to wonder what a person will think about doing while he or she is walking down the corridor. For example, "Oh! I need to approve that expense report." or "I need to attend that training course". For more on mental models, the book by Indy Young is a great read. Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior

2. I was able to focus on the features that are absolutely essential.
Since the real estate available for me was limited, I was forced to think about the first thing a person needs to see when she launches the app. I was also able to focus on the main thing that the person must accomplish while in the app. Then I focused on the other 2-3 things the person can do while at the app. The limited real estate forced me to cut out everything that is not absolutely essential.

3. I was able to build small clickable prototypes in daily sprints
Since I was thinking about one problem and one problem only, I was able to sketch out the solution, discuss that with colleagues and build a prototype in one day.

4. The UI Design Conventions of the mobile client gave me a standard UI design framework.
I am not a User Interface designer. However, since I was using the UI framework provided by the mobile device, I was able to convey my ideas and thoughts without making any major interface design errors.

5. I avoided stepping on the toes of my User Interface Design colleagues
Since I was only building mobile prototypes, my UI design colleagues knew my intentions and understood that I was conveying a mental model rather than making an interface design suggestion.

6. It forced me to think about the details and identify gaps in my thinking
Because I had to build every screen of the prototype, I was forced to think about the steps involved in the process. I could not cheat, overlook or get lazy with my design. I had to take a stand, define it and be preparde to defend it.

I used Axure to create the prototypes and the mobile templates provided by Axure.

I recommend you give it a try. Thinking mobile-first may be a lot of work.  But I am sure you will have fun. By the way, this is a not a very novel concept. Some pioneering companies are already doing this.