UX – the strategy for successful mobile solutions

[caption id="attachment_804" align="aligncenter" width="432"] UX – the strategy for successful mobile solutions[/caption]

“Mobile is the new face of Engagement” says Ted Schadler and John McCarthy, in their White Paper on ‘How enterprise mobile systems are going to empower customers and employees with context-aware apps’.  They estimate, by 2016, Smartphones and tablets will put power in the pockets of a billion global consumers. I am seeing wide range of articles and discussions on Enterprise mobility management, Enterprise Content access and collaboration solutions, and also on mobilizing UCC (Unified Communications and Collaborations) with Mobile Office Development.

It clearly shows the extensive range of opportunities for Mobile solutions development, and numerous start-up companies already started to work on cutting edge technologies to provide solutions.

As a part of my strategist profession, I also do reviews of many beta versions of such solutions; and I found a surprising gap between the requirement and solutions. It is nothing but End-User-Experience. The majority of the Mobile solutions are developed to solve the functional requirements of a business cases, but unfortunately they are missing the User Experience part of it.

[caption id="attachment_805" align="aligncenter" width="700"] The User Experience wheel [Image Courtesy: Diego Lago][/caption]Well, what is User Experience? Wikipedia says “User experience highlights the experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership, but it also includes a person’s perceptions of the practical aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency of the system.”

Being a mentor to many mobile development teams, I strongly suggest developers to use basic standards of User Experience in their solutions. Most of developers do ‘Coding’- and they think that’s all their job is. In my cases, I involve the developers in UI design phase too. They should understand at least the basics of clickable parts of the app, the application navigation from the end-user point of view, searchable content design, styling the UI components and visual feedbacks. In one of the recent discussion with an android app development team, I explained how they can design apps with multi-device compatibility using UI factors – which is an important strategy to reach more users.

The best User Experience makes the application user friendly, and it improves the usage of the application compare to other similar apps for same purposes. The User Experience is a business strategy too for impressing many users.  The organizations should focus to train their developers on User Experience through their designers or though a design expert. This cross functional training will definitely help in improving quality standards of mobile solutions.

Well, share your thoughts friends.

How foursquare can help branding?

[caption id="attachment_798" align="aligncenter" width="432"] How foursquare can help branding?[/caption]

I am using foursquare. I use it in every important place I check-in. It may be offices, client places, public meeting places, vacation sports, restaurants, shopping spots, business seminars and sometimes even on the way to a relaxing location in weekends. One of my business clients noted and followed all my check-ins in foursquare [Thanks to Facebook Activities] and showed interest about it. He wanted to understand how this tiny app can be used for his Smallbiz brand promotion. Well, it’s an opportunity for me too – by explaining about personal branding and Smallbiz branding strategies.

Let me share few key points I discussed, and I am sure this will be useful for any personal branding and Smallbiz branding practices.

I am using the status message of foursquare check-in to mention about my business services mostly. For example: if I am in a client place for UI design assignment, I ‘Check-in’ and put status as “Working on UI Design of a brand new mobile application here”  - that messages helps me to advertise my services in all foursquare connected social networks too (mainly Facebook). Friends & Friend of Friends notice it, and through that I get more business connections.

I create places in foursquare, and I frequently check-in to those places. I post photos of that place, advertise information about that place (well, free of cost) – and that makes me the “MAYOR”. The Mayor badge is not having any special benefit from foursquare (looking for some impressive offers J), but It helps me to access the management of that place and introduce myself, mention about how I am promoting their place and services. Many times, I received positive feedbacks – and this improves my connection strength high. Of course I get official discounts too along with business opportunities.

Promoting “YOU” as a brand is very important in social media – for various purposes. What is your life-style, what you do, what you like, what you say – everything is having a meaning in social media. It improves followers and friends. It improves your personal and business value [For ex: Robin Sharma – my Guru]. Foursquare is a way to track our business / personal activities and share a thought though it. Remember – your brand value is your value in business and now days, it is also your personal value.

So, that’s about it. The recent good news is, today morning I got a new opportunity to build a personal branding website for the client and that will be used to display his social activities too.

Microsoft ASP.NET - Platform for Mobile WEB Apps

[caption id="attachment_794" align="aligncenter" width="432"] Microsoft ASP.NET - Platform for Mobile WEB Apps[/caption]

Mobile WEB Apps – the next big business word for Start-up Smallbiz communities. Well, everyone is talking about these web apps, accessible through mobile devices for quite long time – but how many Indian start-ups really made business out of it. There are few mini social networks and shopping sites showing good growth but very less in other areas for example: productivity, travel, etc.

Mobile Web App is not just porting the existing Web app into mobile device for flexible access. I see many products are not considering about benefit able UI for mobile device, performance issues, etc. When I discussed in forums, many companies accepted that they are using the same web development strategy for their mobile web apps development too.

Recently I met a small team of developers at Coimbatore. They are in .NET programming for past 3 years – pretty fresher community, and I discussed with them on best practices in mobile web apps development through ASP.NET / SQL Server as technical background.  They invested for a Windows Web Server hosting and their products are mostly on LBS + M-Commerce.

Microsoft ASP.net for Mobile is an excellent platform - you can download Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Express or Microsoft Web Matrix for Development and start developing apps. Build you knowledge in HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript / Jquery for advance Mobile Web Forms Development and rest all with ASP.net & SQL server programming  [of course you have to do a little study on mobile web controls too]. I used Microsoft visual web developer 2010 express for my practices. MSDN support is always available and developer community meetings provide great help.

The UI and performance strategies should be improved and there, I am supporting the Smallbiz teams. They take care of development of a product and my job is to make it perfect for users. For more information on using Microsoft ASP.NET Mobile WEB development – send me an email and follow me on twitter.