Designing for On-The-Go Consumers

Here’s a part of the report related to designing for on-the-go consumers:

[...] A quickly evolving piece of the social-media trend is mobile connectivity. Smart-phone sales keep trending upward, and more people are accessing the web, playing games, and keeping their lives organized through a device that fits easily in their pocket. As of Q1 2010, Nielsen data shows that 23% of mobile consumers now have a smart phone, up from just 16% in Q2 2009. This trend not only affects how many consumers access traditional web sites through mobile means but also offers another way to reach consumers: mobile apps.

If your web site does not scale well for mobile platforms, your consumers are limited to accessing your site only when they are near a desktop computer. Ensuring consumers can access your site on the go requires designing for scalability and cross-platform capability. While some companies create separate, mobile versions of their web sites, others seek to build scalability into the main web site so consumers have one web experience whether it’s on a desktop computer or a smart phone. As this white paper explores in greater detail below, trying
to design for all browsers and all platforms is a huge undertaking, requiring talent that understands multiple coding languages as well as testers and debuggers for every platform variation.

Trying to appeal to the mobile masses can be technically and creatively challenging. However, increased smart- phone usage also opens the door to creating a more customized experience for your consumers through mobile apps. In addition to being another way to communicate with your consumers, it can be another revenue source.

Each Apple app-store user spends an average of $4.37/month on apps. In December 2009, 280 million apps were downloaded, generating more than $250 million in revenue, of which 30% goes to Apple and 70% goes to developers.

For small companies, mobile apps could be used to diversify business. If you design software, for instance, you could start designing software for mobile platforms, which would allow you to address a different range of users. For larger companies, going mobile can enhance consumers’ experience with existing products. For example, if you have a video surveillance system, there is an iPhone app for controlling these systems that costs $899 and is in the top gross in the United States. The app bolsters the original system by allowing mobile access and control to cameras from a user’s phone.

User Experience Trumps All

When designing a mobile app, user experience trumps all, says Alex Komarov, who recently launched his own design consultancy and was previously a mobile/ web design strategist at Empathy Lab, one of the most respected interactive agencies south of New York. With more than seven years’ experience developing user-experience design strategies for interactive agencies and Fortune 500 companies, he has learned that appealing to the consumer is what ultimately determines mobile success. Design decisions are driven by platform decisions, which are informed by copious research. Understanding the users, their goals and needs, and how they prefer to achieve those goals helps ensure the resulting app is applicable and genuinely desired by consumers.

Making the leap into mobile-app design is a large investment; strategy, again, is key. Ensuring that you create an app your consumers find enjoyable and useful—and will use repeatedly—requires having a greater understanding of your consumers before you begin. If your consumer market does not predominantly use smart phones, for example, designing a mobile app would be a waste of time and resources. It is also much more difficult to redesign an app if your consumers do not like it. Instead of simply updating copy or a graphic on a web page, for example, mobile apps require reprogramming, which can require additional testing. Understanding the user experience your consumers desire is crucial, and it takes a heavy investment in research to determine what type of app—if any—your target market really wants.

If you publish research or reports, offering a mobile app would allow users to access a greater portion of that content on the go, and you, in turn, could learn more about which documents are most popular among your consumers, how long they spend reading, and how often they access a report. If you discover your primary consumers also love playing games, you could create
a gaming app that coincides with a product launch, awarding coupon codes for high scores. Mobile apps allow you to create a highly specialized experience for your consumers; however, you may find that different approaches work better with different subsets of your market. After all, consumers are diverse. Thus, your creative team must diversify in order to satisfy the many different configurations mobile apps can take.

The diversity doesn’t end there. Between iPhones, Android phones, and Blackberries, there are several platforms for which mobile apps can be designed, and none of them lend themselves to cross-compatibility with their competitors. Figuring out which platform to target does not depend on your developers’ skills as much as it does on your consumers’ preferences. Each platform comes with its own design advantages and hurdles. If your app or web site uses Flash, you need to accept that people with iPhones, iPads, or other mobile Apple products won’t be able to view your design.
Each platform also offers a different user-interaction experience, with different navigation and screen- progression elements. This means an app designed for the iPhone cannot simply be installed on an Android phone and work; it will need to be adapted or even recreated from scratch.

“Usually, once an application is created for one mobile platform, it’s easier to port it to another platform,”

explained Komarov,

“but you still need to spend quite a bit of time porting it. In my company, we have a rule of thumb: it usually takes about half the time spent on an original project to adapt the design for another platform. For example, if you spend two months creating an iPhone app, porting it to the Android will take approximately one month, porting it to the iPad will take another month, and so on.”

Some companies try to get around the platform dilemma by creating web-based apps, which are essentially web sites designed to look and operate like mobile apps. The advantage of this approach is your web app could work on any phone that can access the Internet. If the phone can open a web page, it can also open your web-based app. The disadvantage is you cannot take advantage of any elements unique to a particular smart phone, such as iPhone 4’s second camera or the Android’s voice navigator.

“Another disadvantage of the web-based approach is the app will look the same on every platform and, thus, will not be perfectly familiar or intuitive to users on various platforms,”

said Komarov.

Once you understand the business goals, user goals, and how (and in what environment) users prefer to achieve those goals, you can make an informed decision on whether a mobile app is an appropriate pursuit for your company. If it is, you will need the right creative talent for successful design and development.

Translatable Skill Sets

The process of web development lends itself well to mobile-app development, with many of the skills applicable from one to the other. What changes is the idea of specializing in one or two coding languages and developing for a few browser types and screen sizes. If a common mobile platform, which would make mobile-app development much easier for designers, never comes to fruition, then understanding Flash vs. HTML5, JavaScript vs. CSS3, and other such coding differences and how they affect overall application design are critical skills to seek and develop within creative communities. Testing will also need to expand beyond browser types to include a wider range of screen sizes and platform types.

Before development and testing can begin, there are several steps between initial market research and final programming. The research will be key to creating usage scenarios, which map out an understanding of what tasks users will be completing with an app, as well as how they prefer to complete those tasks, and will reflect what the flow of tasks will look like. The usage scenarios are then used to create the application architecture, and the application architecture is used to create interaction design, usually beginning with wireframes.

Once the interaction design is mapped out, visual design comes into play. Web and print designers can obtain the skills needed for mobile-app visual design. It requires an understanding of the challenges of designing for mobile and the bigger picture of capturing consumers’ attention while it is most distracted.

The screen space available for mobile design is much smaller than traditional print or web. Smart-phone screen sizes vary from 1” to more than 3.5”, and the existing user interface on any smart phone determines how quickly consumers can use or adapt to your app. For example, an iPhone user is used to looking for buttons and preferences in particular places. If your app deviates too much from the protocols a consumer uses every day, that person may grow frustrated trying to learn your app and thus stop using it.

Smaller screen space and touch screens also affect spacing of visual elements. A small button on a 3” screen is much harder to tap with a fingertip. Several small buttons placed too closely together means the user may press the wrong button because the size of a fingertip actually spans two or three buttons. Spacing and the size of elements are important to adjust for visual design in mobile apps.

Iconography also becomes very important. With thousands of apps available in app stores, creating an icon that’s eye-catching and appealing is equivalent to designing great product packaging for the shelf. It needs to stand out to consumers as something attractive, recognizable, and relevant. The same goes for typeface selection.

“The resulting app needs to look aesthetically pleasing because users want not only to achieve their ultimate goal but also to have fun on the way there, so they don’t want to use an ugly-looking app,”

said Komarov

“The phones themselves are shiny, sleek, and attractive, and users instantly assume that the software in the phone should look similarly attractive. If the phone itself is beautiful and the app is ugly, that creates a disconnect in the user’s mind, making him uncomfortable. And, obviously, you don’t want to make users subconsciously uncomfortable while they are looking at your app.”

The last step is development, the actual programming to make the app functional. None of these steps is truly autonomous, though. For example, IT plays into platform and design choices, and creative plays into layout and scalability decisions. Social-media and mobile-app design require more big-picture thinking and constant reminders about the end users’ goals. This is why cross-collaboration in developing social-media and mobile-app strategies keeps emerging as a creative solution. The interactivity not only connects businesses with consumers more, but increasingly pairs creative departments with every other department involved in marketing, branding, promotion, and development. [...]