Designing a Mobile Application

How to create the right approach in your company for success in building mobile applications.

More often than not, clients who I work with do not adequately plan for the amount of design work that goes into producing a good mobile application. It’s not that they are trying to cut corners or save money, it’s more that they envision the process to be a simple exercise of “porting” their existing application to mobile.

Commonly, people have the experience of visiting their favorite blog site on their mobile phone and seeing a mobile-friendly version of the content load fast. They take this experience to understand that making something work on mobile is just a matter of doing it, and thinking it likely there is off-the-shelf software to make this process painless. The reality is, the challenge of developing your company’s application for one or many mobile devices requires a design team who understand and can execute on the core requirements to make a mobile application a success.

When developing a mobile application with a new client, my first task is always to get them to understand the primary goal: create good experience for a real person. The key is getting the client to conceptualize someone actually using their application and trying to accomplish something. I will commonly write on the whiteboard:

Good experience = (interaction design + information architecture +engineering) * excellence

The point being that you really have to consider a variety of skillsets when developing a mobile application and understand they all have to perform at a high level to really meet user’s expectations in today’s market.

Designing a solid approach

After I get them to understand the roles and responsibilities of each member of the design and development team, I help them to understand the key (even though sometimes obvious) things to focus on while designing:

Don’t start with your current desktop or web design

Unless you have an interface as minimal as Google search, starting with your existing application design is a recipe for failure. Why is this? We don’t have a mouse on a phone. People use their own application thousands of times more than their users. They know how to do everything. As a result, they fail to remember that people need to use their fingers to achieve tasks, so we can’t have all of the buttons and menus we have on a desktop application to complete those tasks.

A good interaction designer will help you to envision a true mobile version of your product that helps people stay focused and accomplish tasks with ease. In mobile design, it’s common to not expect a user to go more than 2 pages deep to achieve a goal, so you have to have an interaction model that can condense your process into just a few different pages.

Focus on what is critical

Again, people don’t have the luxury of a large monitor to browse around and discover your application. They have a few square inches in reality and your eye can only really focus on about 30% of that anyhow. It’s imperative you identify the order of importance in what you want to display for a user. Buttons, menus, search boxes, and settings have to be large enough that someone can maneuver with ease. Amazingly, I come across dozens applications that have buttons 25% too small, and are very hard to push. This is an extremely frustrating process for a user.

A strong visual designer from places like Software & Cross Platform Mobile App Development | Pumex Computing, can help you to understand and design user elements that are sufficiently usable and theme buttons to be consistent with the action you intend the user to accomplish. For example, if you have a delete button, it should be isolated from other buttons and usually embrace a red coloration to reduce mistakes in pushing the button, and warning the user about what they are about to do.

 Don’t forget about connectivity speedsl

One very common mistake I see people make is to develop an application entirely in an office setting with extremely fast connectivity through the company wifi. People are very commonly not in office locations when using mobile devices and are accessing applications over 3G or wide area networks, which can really be reduced to dial up speeds at any point in time. If you have an application that is not overly conscious of this, you can very much run the risk of delivering an experience to a user of your application being broken. One such example was a real estate application that used Bing Maps as the interface for displaying homes in the area. The application tested decent in the downtown of the city, but when realtors took the application to suburban areas, the application would wait for 10 or more second for the maps to load. Many users complained that the application simply did not work.

A good engineer should take all connectivity and data transmission scenarios into account. You should be cognoscente of a “maximum allowance” of data you want to send over at any given time, and ensure that the maximum allowance can perform under dial-up conditions. If you absolutely have to send more and hurt performance, a good designer can help communicate this to the user, giving them a friendly dialogue saying that “the application is getting data from the server which might take a minute.” This will help a user to understand that the application is busy and they will give you a break and not consider the application broken and complain.

How are you going to learn?

I always demand to know how clients are going to learn from how people are using their applications on mobile devices and make those applications better. While asking people their feedback through your application can provide you data, you really need to build in to your application the ability to learn trouble situations people are encountering. Obviously, this does not mean spying on people, it just means that you have the ability to be told when your application is longer than a reasonable amount of time to load, when people consistently only complete half or your critical feature, or anything that tells your product team that something is wrong. Your application is likely communicating constantly with your server, so you need to educate engineers on what data scenarios you need to be informed of to make your long-term strategy for developing your mobile application a success.

In conclusion, it’s important to remember that a mobile application is a very unique piece of your technology offering. Failing to adequately plan for the amount of design and good resources that go into developing a good user experience on a mobile device will jeopardize your users experience with your product and their future expectations of your offerings.

iLink-Systems, the 2011 Microsoft Mobility “Partner of the Year” has an award winning staff of Interaction Designers, Visual Designers, and Mobility engineers to help make your mobility project a success.