Designing the Mobile Experience

Introduction

Work is changing—it is no longer defined by one locale or by long, focused periods of effort. Whether working from home, in transit, or on location, the current work force is more productive while mobile than ever before. Enterprise companies must provide the appropriate tools and software to meet the work style of an evolving work force, whether it is recent graduates, who do not own fixed telephone lines and grew up operating in a mobile context, or adapters of the mobile lifestyle, who integrate mobiles to stay in touch with family, friends, and the office. For Oracle, understanding how to optimize customers’ work quality, productivity and efficiency by fitting into individual work and life styles is fundamental to the success of the next generation of mobile applications. As technologies improve screen resolution, connection speeds, device management, battery life, and user interactions, the previous limitations of mobile devices are receding. The challenge for us, as designers and usability engineers, is to understand mobile enterprise workers, the context in which they use their devices, and the key tasks that they need and want on their handhelds.

Design Challenges and Advantages

There are significant differences in designing for mobile applications as opposed to desktop applications. Some of the characteristics of mobile usage are that users complete tasks in short spurts, are often on the move, and can be distracted by changes in their physical environment. For instance, a user completing a form while waiting for a train may have to negotiate a crowd when the train arrives. By the time he enters the train and finds a seat, he may have forgotten his next step. Therefore, tasks need to be succinct, easily recoverable, and fast—taking less than a few minutes to complete. Mobile applications are not just an extension of the desktop application, they can also support constant updates, decision-making, and even data entry. Due to lower costs, portability, and better computing power, mobile devices can become a platform for providing analytics, such as performance metrics for sales professionals, forms to capture car accident pictures, data for insurance adjustors, and stock price alerts for brokers. Whether connected or disconnected, end users need to complete their tasks and seamlessly sync with corporate databases.

When our designers transition from desktop to mobile design, they often focus first on constraints. However, mobile devices provide design interactions that are not possible on a desktop computer. For example, many phones that come with GPS can inform the application of where you are, reducing data input for driving directions and location-based searches. Mobile devices can leverage audio and vibration to inform users of types of alerts while they are attending to other tasks. Collaboration and communication continue to be central to the mobile experience; thus, incorporating SMS (Short Message Service), MMS (Multimedia Message Service), and phone calls can make task completion more efficient. For instance, when regional sales managers are reviewing results by store location, they should be able to drill down into a specific store and call the store manager by clicking a dial button. Designers of mobile applications must be constantly vigilant in seeking opportunities to leverage the mobile device’s form factor (size and display orientation), voice, touch, GPS, and SMS/MMS. 

The user experience of mobile applications will significantly affect user satisfaction, productivity, and motivation to continue usage. These design principles are fundamental to maximizing the adoption of Oracle’s next generation of mobile solutions.

Oracle's 10 Mobile Design Principles

• Contextual design. Mobile applications are used in trains, on oil platforms, in warehouses, and in taxicabs. Designs must work in the target work environment and leverage context awareness of the mobile device. A GPS-enabled device that tells a salesperson exactly where she is on a map helps her find her next appointment on time. A device that reads information about an asset, such as details of the last service, helps a technician bring the right parts and make the right repairs. Looking forward, integration of biometrics can affect how a user is identified when logging in to online banking or how a remote patient is treated after a DNA analysis.
  
  
• Scoping to the essential mobile task. A mobile application must be reduced to the essential task or tasks. Therefore, the predesign phase requires a sharper knife to eliminate all but the essential mobile tasks. When porting an existing application, the key task for the desktop may be quite different from that of the mobile. Mobile applications are frequently reduced to one task, such as posting pictures or creating contacts, which is represented by one icon and referred to as a widget.
  
  
• Multi-modality: Use multiple modalities (touch, sound, and vision) to complement the completion of tasks. Let a salesperson append notes about a potential lead by speaking and saving them into a mobile device. For a work list, assign different types of alerts, depending on priority: high = vibration, medium = message, low = nothing. Enable a user simply to ask a question, such as “Where is my next appointment?” and have the device navigate to and display the information.
  
  
• Flattened navigation model: Users should not have to traverse deep structures to find a task. Flatten the navigation model for quick access to key task flows. Once a user navigates to the place where she can begin her work, provide a clear understanding of where she is and how she can get back to where she started. Instead of having a user log in, access a section, find an object, and then perform a task, identify and locate access to the mobile task immediately after login.
  
  
• 3-minutes-to-get-it-done mobile work style: Typically, mobiles are used in short bursts, while PCs are objects of extended work sessions. Because users on mobiles need to get to the work faster and complete it more quickly, they have less room to make errors.
  
  
• Simple search: A search must make use of context from a specific area of the application, and that context must be quickly accessible. If a user is on an inventory screen within a handheld application and initiates a search for an item, all results should relate to inventory attributes. The location where search is executed automatically informs context and criteria for the search results. Additional search criteria input should be limited to a small amount of data entry.
  
  
• Collaboration: Embed collaboration into flows, and include triggers to call a person, use SMS (Simple Message Service), and use instant chat. The proliferation of email, instant messaging, and web-conferencing within the work environment demonstrates the increased importance of collaboration in relation to productivity and work quality. Mobility extends this trend by keeping coworkers in contact at more times and in more places.
  
  
• Progressive disclosure: Screen real estate is precious on handhelds, thus designers must carefully consider the type and quantity of data displayed. Summarize information and actions with concise writing and basic overviews, and then make details and further actions available in drill-down pages and panels. Information disclosure is used in Web 2.0 applications, such as airline systems, where flight listings include additional chunks of embedded details, such as plane type and layover cities. An example of feature disclosure is used by mobile email programs that simplify functions in the overview interface and require a user to first select an email and then provide functions for reply, delete, forward, and so on from the resulting email details screen.
  
  
• Business intelligence (BI). Analytics and BI are not limited to the desktop. Mobile users need analytics that work for small screens. A regional sales manager might see an exception screen that highlights store locations with the biggest sales delta from last quarter or last year. A color-coded grid of locations versus key metrics draws attention to good, moderate, and bad situations.
  
  
• Integration with native device. (Or, if it already exists, don’t design it again.) A user should be able to create a calendar event in the device’s native application and have that information sync with the Oracle application data. Likewise, events in the Oracle application should appear on the corresponding native application (tasks, calendar, email, and so on) of the device.

Building Usability into Mobile Applications

Usability is a core theme for the next generation of Oracle mobile applications. We are fully committed to understanding the mobile workforce, the key tasks they complete, how they merge their work and personal lives on their devices, and in which contexts they use their devices. It is important to conduct background research with our current and potential customers to make sure that strategic and design directions will meet business goals and end-user needs. A three-phase research program, currently underway, is comprised of product evaluation, customer interviews, and ethnographic research. 

This research program will inform the Mobile User Experience team about the mobile workforce, customer direction, the mobile context, and what users may expect, need, or want in their handheld applications and devices. From there, our team will work to develop a set of user experiences and interface interactions that lead to compelling applications that will empower mobile enterprise users and provide a competitive advantage.