mobile ux

Several of our clients are deploying enterprise mobile solutions to their global workforce this year.  The pace of mobile adoption and change is accelerating much faster than what we witnessed during the adoption of web-based technologies in the late 1990’s. This phenomenon is forcing organizations to quickly adopt a mobile enterprise strategy that will have long term impacts on their users while striving to deliver true value to the business they support.    Mobile strategies will have long term consequences therefore it is important to ask key questions before finalizing your strategy.

Some critical questions to consider before finalizing your mobile strategy are:

Will you deliver native or web-based applications?

Many of our clients started out in the mobile space creating “Proof of concept” mobile apps (usually IOS) to prove they could build and deploy an iPhone app.    They quickly found that the process of hand coding even a simple application and deploying it was much more costly and time consuming than was originally planned. The good news is most users embraced the new mobile app and asked for more functionality and more support on a wide variety of devices.  Budgeting project costs became challenging and they needed to choose a limited deployment or choose a different strategy. With the evolution of HTML-5 many companies are revisiting the native vs. web-based mobile application decision and opting to deploy with HTML-5 and responsive design frameworks.  This approach offers many features previously only available in native applications with much broader deployment options and the ability to customize the UX for individual devices using CSS3 and MediaQuery detects to deliver a responsive mobile design optimized for each device and platform.

What devices will you support?

As I mentioned above, many companies hoped for an […]