Go Mobile. It’s Time.

August 14, 2013
I recently had the great pleasure of attending An Event Apart in Washington, D.C. and was not surprised at this year’s overall theme: Go mobile.

We’re seeing more and more users browsing on what we currently consider “mobile” devices. But honestly, it’s only a matter of time before we’ll consider a “desktop” computer obsolete. That doesn’t necessarily mean users won’t be using desktops, however: It just means those desktops will be more like mobile devices. We are already seeing a high number of touch-enabled laptops and desktops, plus tablets that are closer to the size of a desktop. Yes, it is high time to make the transition. Read More…

Responsive Design & the Mobile Worker

June 24, 2013
What exactly is Responsive Design? The simple answer: Making digital media viewable across all devices and resolutions.

Take your company website, for example. It looks great on your desktop computer, right? But when you view it on your phone, it doesn’t look nearly as nice if it wasn’t developed using responsive design techniques. Images will be too big, the navigation may be impossible to tap and the download time may kill you.

Designers/developers must write the code in a way that looks great no matter what device it is viewed on. Basically, we have to use something called media queries. Media queries are pieces of code that allow us to put details around objects. So we can say if a web page is being viewed on a device with a 460 pixel width, display it like this. But if the web page is being displayed on a device with a 800 pixel width, then display it like that.

It actually goes well beyond just the width. We can decide what to display based on the following factors:

  • width
  • height
  • device-width
  • device-height
  • orientation
  • aspect-ratio
  • device-aspect-ratio
  • color
  • color-index
  • monochrome
  • resolution
  • scan
  • grid

We can tell your website if it should use high-res images for Retina Display or no images for a phone display. We have a ton of options. Responsive Design is in its infancy and we are discovering new ways every day to make this logical way of thinking possible. The sad fact is we haven’t quite developed the best way to do this yet. Right now we have to write tons of lines of code to account for all the different resolutions, as well as older versions of browsers that do not support the latest and greatest best practices. But each time we launch a new digital page, we get closer. We make it better. Read More…

Eliciting Requirements for Mobile Worker Apps: Recommendations From Real Experiences in the Field

June 12, 2013
In today’s mobile society, the current and future generation of “mobile” devices (i.e. smartphones, tablets, “phablets,” special purpose devices, etc.) and the applications that can be hosted on them provide a significant opportunity to improve the way we work. This is especially true for those workers whose job involves traveling during the day to work directly with customers “in the field.” In this post, I’ll share some recent experiences we’ve had in working with mobile field workers as part of an analysis effort to define requirements for a tablet-based application.

Approach:

The specific approach we used for this project was to “follow” or “shadow” the workers as they performed their activities and collect observations about:

  • The tasks they performed,
  • The devices and applications they used to support those tasks, and
  • The types of information and work products (forms, documents, etc.) they either collected or produced in course of performing the tasks.

We worked with both staff personnel and supervisor personnel, and we looked at both scenarios where customers would come into a field office and scenarios where the field staff would meet customers at a field location directly. We then followed the observation sessions with one-on-one interviews to review the observations and ask more specific questions.

Based on our experiences, we identified what we would consider to be some key recommendations for business analysts, product managers, or others seeking to elicit requirements for mobile worker applications. Read More…