This mobile Monday at the DigIn! Radio Show, we talked with Matt Perry, Founder and CEO of Mobients, and John Schmidt, CIO of the company, about key best practices for developing effective mobile applications. Here are some of the top tips we covered:
1. Mobile for a Reason. There is a reason why you are choosing to develop information and content to be consumed on the mobile phone. Pay attention to what is unique about a mobile phone and take advantage of it: mobile, immediate, personal, goes with the consumer everywhere, reflects the consumers identity, has small screen real estate, is for short for consumption in most cases. Build your applications to meet needs of consumers when they are engaging with their mobile phone. When branding or advertising, remember that you have a small screen, 140 characters, limited patience of the consumer. Give them what they want as quickly and succinctly as possible.
2. Utility is more important than functionality. Make sure what you are creating meets a need, or is very cool, but there needs to be something compelling about it. Think about when your consumer will be using the application, under what circumstances, what they really want and what will be convenient for them. John gave a great example of a recent road trip in which he used his car GPS, computer Google Maps, and iPhone. The GPS navigation system interface was obscure and difficult to accomplish what he needed; the computer was too cumbersome; and he needed to wait until the iPhone actually had a high speed connection since he was in the hills. Ultimately the iPhone proved to be the most easily manageable and navigable interface, but even that had issues.
3. Know what you are designing for and stay focused on that through the process. It is easy to become distracted with additional features, and other "bright shiny objects" of performance. Stick to the core of what you are creating, and make sure that works first. You can always build from there.
4. Really know your consumer. Take the time to profile your consumers and place yourself in their shoes. Who are they? What are their characteristics? What do they wear? What do they drive? Where do they drive? What do they do during the day? How do they shop? Ask yourself a series of questions like this and profile 4-5 different characters/archetypes. Storyboard the characters. New ideas and new features that you had not originally thought of, will come to mind. There are so many different types of applications that can be developed. For example, a parent driving their kids' carpool may need to know of sudden weather reports and school closings, changes in sports practice, traffic alerts, have time to catch a quick update on stock feeds and news flashes, or want to completely escape for a moment in a flashblog novelette or mobile game.
5. Choose the right mobile medium for your target market. The mobile marketplace is still extremely fragmented. There are over 100 devices with different form factors, different operating systems, 40+ different WAP browsers, touch screen v. roller ball v. scroll, different carriers, etc. Each one of these has impact on shaping the target market which will eventually have access to your application. There are approximately 15M iPhone sold in the US thus far. The iPhone has a dynamic interface which makes it fun to interact with and fun to design for. There are 232M mobile phones in the US. Is the iPhone going to tap the demographic you want? Is it the coveted marketing "coolness" factor that you need? Is it going to give you the ROI you expect and want from the application? The mobile platform forces brands to ask hard questions of themselves and their true mobile objectives. There is much to be gained by going into mobile. Just target your first steps and grow from there.
6. Don't let your power users make your design decisions. More likely than not you have a team of iPhone owning mobile gurus who eat, breath and live mobile. That is great for knowledge and creativity, but they may not be your typical target user. Be cautious that they don't make the final user experience decisions. They may not be making the correct assumptions.
To hear Matt and John from Mobients give their advice first hand, visit the DigIn! Radio Show site.
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