Developing a mobile app for an existing feature-rich product has its own set of challenges. The first question, and one that is fundamentally important, is: what features do you bring across from the product to the app, and in what form?
We're proponents of goal-directed design. A central part of goal-directed design is developing user personas and defining their goals and motivations for using the app. This process provides a vital understanding of users and what is important to them. It is a powerful technique for driving what features should and shouldn't be included in a product's feature list and helps prevent ‘designing for edge cases’ syndrome. Edge cases should be designed and programmed for, but they should never be the focus of the design.
Recently, we’ve been developing a cross-platform app for an existing enterprise Safety & Quality Management system. The system covers a lot of areas that we would not hope to, or want to, translate to the app. In fact, the app should be considered more as a companion to the system, drawing on the strengths of the mobile & tablet forms - mobility, imaging and geo-location. Rather than creating a direct replica of the system on the mobile, it is important to consider the way that it will be used, by whom it will be used and in what form. All of these elements together create a need for something essentially quite different from the existing system.
Alan Cooper, in his book About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, said “Since goals are driven by human motivations, they change very slowly – if at all – over time. Activities and tasks are much more transient, because they are based almost entirely on whatever technology is at hand.” By focusing on the goals of users, we are much more likely to arrive at a product that is both useful and long lasting.
In this case, some of the main features centre on incident reporting. A mobile device is perfect for capturing incident-related photographs, but we have to consider how a user would do this. Some would register basic incident information, then use the app to directly capture images, loading them into reports instantly. Others may capture the images into their device's gallery, then upload the images later, once they've created the incident on their computer. Often it is more convenient to use different devices for different activities, even when you have ready access to all of them. Considering the possibilities of multi-device tasking in the overall context of a user’s goals, allows us to open ourselves up to new ways of designing and developing user experiences, making sure that each device is optimized for what that device is best at accomplishing.
