Mobile vision includes deciding - mobile app, or mobile Web?
If you’ve been a frequent reader of Mobile Masters, you’ve probably noticed that many of us spend a good deal of our ink communicating things like vision and planning. It’s not just that we all have the same one-track mind – this stuff is important. For many customers who know they have mobility needs, the task of moving forward can seem quite daunting. It helps if you create your mobility vision first.
The mobility world is complicated. You have users that are out of sight and often nearly impossible to control. You have a broad spectrum of mobile devices to contend with, and you have an ever increasing number of business challenges that could probably use a well-crafted mobile solution to help address them. No matter how you slice it, things are complicated and they’re not getting any easier any time soon. So what do you do to prevent yourself from imploding under all the pressure? Create your mobile vision as a first step.
In past blog posts I have harped on planning and doing a bit of analysis to help focus on the most important things first. That puts you on the right path for the projects you are aware of, but what about the unanticipated stuff that could be lurking down the road? What would happen if you had a tremendously successful new product launch? What would the impact on the organization be? How could mobility help? What if the opposite occurred and you had a product recall? Could the same mobile vision help address these challenges too? Maybe.
The first step to creating your mobile vision is to identify what you are trying to accomplish as an organization. In the early days of the Internet, most companies just threw up a Web site so they could check the box and show they had one. How many actually knew how to take full advantage of the Internet and what it could do for them? Not too many. Mobility is starting to smell the same way. We have lots of companies throwing out mobile apps that probably didn’t need to be an app in the first place. Why build an app when a mobile Web presence is a better approach? Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and place for mobile apps and mobile Web. The rub is figuring out which one’s which.
The moral of the story is to examine what you need to accomplish and ask yourself a few questions. What am I trying to achieve? What is the best approach to achieve that goal? Does this solution need to be a mobile application or would a mobile Web presence make more sense? If a mobile Web presence is the desired path, how do I manage the user experience across multiple device classes? What should be the deciding factor when it comes to mobile Web or mobile app?
If you look at your world with a critical eye and target the solutions that provide the maximum value with the minimum effort or impact on the organization long term, you will be much further ahead of the game.
Tags: Brian Philbin, Mobility - General
