To mobile, or not to mobile
Susana Duran, Director and Technical Fellow, Sage
One year on, and even with all kinds of impressive new technologies emerging around us, smartphones are still at the center of our connected universe (…and life). 2019 was another year filled with trends and hype with emerging artificial intelligence still leading the charge once again at conferences and in the media. Virtual reality (mixed or augmented) changed the way we watch the weather or sports. T.V. is not the black box we nostalgically remember from our childhood, where you had to patiently wait for your favorite show or navigate just a few channels in order to find something that fits your taste or mood. On-demand services such as Netflix or Twitch have not only changed the way we watch TV, but they have lowered our threshold for patience, by building an on-demand culture.
For me, 2019 was a year for looking beyond technology and raising questions about the ethical impact of the tools we use, and to discuss privacy issues that assume a place in our digital (… and mobile) world.
But what is the common thread here? Well, the media we use needs to be accessible via an app and fit into the operating system of our smartphones- which are now owned by more than 75% of adults in advanced economies. Responsible for making some of them feel anxious when they are away from them, we need to think about this in more detail… is this a technology discussion? A marketing dream or nightmare? Or maybe it’s a design thing?
Many companies still think that to be ‘mobile’ simply means checking that their product is mobile friendly.
The mobile vs. desktop discussion is one of the most relevant conversations we have in the workplace today, but in reality, there is not much to discuss.
The facts speak for themselves:
o Half of all Internet traffic is mobile
o From July 2019 Google made mobile-first indexing the default for all new domains and starting in July 2018, slow-loading content became downranked
o We know that US and UK consumers spend more time on their mobile devices than they do watching TV
o Mobile is not enough for financial entities, new trends based on mobile are coming and banking and payments need to be ready
o More than half of the emails are read on mobile devices
For any company, being mobile means being where your users are or where they will be very soon. And this is not just about changing the way your product is designed or finding the best technology to build a mobile app… we need to question a few things before we start defining our mobile strategy:
1. Where are our customers?
This could be geographically speaking, whether they home or office workers, if they need to be hands-free
2. What generation do they belong to?
What is the current average age of your customers and the generation you aspire to reach — this is important
3. What are the daily tasks our customers perform?
Are the currently automated or are they mainly manual?
4. And finally, which social group do they identify with?
Blue Collar, White Collar and how does this impact their tech choices
The answers to these questions will give us information about the most common UX our users will need, and the design and complexity of the tasks should be included in your app, helping us define the technology and designing for today, as well as for tomorrow.
In a world dominated by smartphones being tied to the office to do work is a thing of the past.
