Apps were a $5 billion business in 2010
Last week I facilitated a session on mobile apps, for various interested parties. We were joined by Jamie and Mike from the Improvement Service, as well as Gordon and Niall, developers of the Android and iOS apps for the popular Edinburgh My Bus Tracker.
It was a really interesting session, with lots of great ideas thrown around. Below are some of the headlines and common issues.
I headed up to Aberdeen yesterday for a Scottish Knowledge Management event organised by the Improvement Service. A poor mobile signal prevented me from my usual live-tweeting, but below are the headline messages I took from the day. Also see the Twitter Hashtag #skmn.
Dave Briggs (@davebriggs) told us that people scatter their knowledge in various places, as unconnected snippets, and the job of Knowledge Management (KM) is to connect up those snippets and present them in a meaningful way.
Lesley Thomson (@lelil) underlined the importance of conversation and reported on last year’s highly successful ScotGovCamp, inviting others to run similar events (also welcoming volunteers to organise ScotgovCamp11!).
Annie Robertson of Subsea 7 showed how a well-developed KM process can lead to a rich repository of ‘lessons learned’ which add huge value to large organisations, harnessing internal knowledge and overcoming geographical barriers.
Annette Thain from the NHS outlined their approach to KM and how they convert this into action to change lives in the real world.
Jamie Kirk (@jamie_kirk) from the Improvement Service showed how mobile browsing is the future and told us about his upcoming research project on mobile app usage in North America.
David Friel (@ISreporter) told us a bit about his job as reporter for the Improvement Service and asked us to consider the relationship between KM and comms.
Finally, Mike Mclean (@michaelJmclean) gave an update on the forthcoming Knowledge Hub, which is looking like it has huge potential.
Apologies to the speakers if I haven’t done you justice in these one-liners. Feel free to leave a comment to flesh things out!
Jakob Neilsen has just announced his 10 best-designed Intranets for 2010, and as always it’s a goldmine of information and advice. I haven’t yet forked out for the full report, but the summary alone offers plenty to think about.
One particular point that will raise eyebrows is the continued advocacy of separate sites for mobile devices. There is an ongoing debate about the pros and cons of such an approach, brought to the fore by Neilsen’s post last February comparing Mobile Web 2009 with Desktop Web 1998, and concluding that a separate site is best. Many of us were not convinced, and as Henny Swan argued at the time:
It also hints at repeating the mistakes of desktop web design circa 1998 where we thought the answer was to design for one browser, use proprietary technology, build text only websites for disabled users…the list goes on. So let’s not make that same mistake and instead fast forward to one of the principles of good web design that dug us out of the dark hole of 1998: progressive enhancement.
Henny described how a ‘one site fits all’ approach can be achieved using media queries, and it’s certainly a far more attractive solution than designing and maintaining separate sites.
But this all relates to websites in general, rather than specifically to Intranets, and I was interested to look closer at the suggestion of a separate mobile Intranet.
Intranet on the move?
More about mobile Intranets, and why a separate site may be justified
I’m desperately trying to get my organisation to realise that mobile browsing is fast becoming very popular, and that we need to design accordingly. Mobile phone penetration is immense in the UK, reaching 100% in 2005 (i.e. one mobile for every person, on average). This near-ubiquity makes them a vital target technology.
However, a debate has been sparked about how best to provide for your mobile users. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen has just published an article comparing the Mobile Web 2009 with the Desktop Web 1998. Ultimately he calls for the creation of separate sites for mobile devices, and therein lies the debate.
Henny Swan discusses why building a separate site is not a great idea on her blog. This follows on from Bruce Lawson’s own musings on whether mobile web development is compatible with the One Web.
I’m definitely against the ‘two sites’ approach in most instances, and many devices nowadays have decent browsers which render pages just fine anyway. For this reason I hate it when I get directed to a Mobile version of a site, often with greatly reduced functionality. By all means offer a stylesheet optimised for mobile browsers, but make it my choice to switch to that (I’ve seen good examples where the main page says “we have detected that you’re using such-and-such device – you might be interested in viewing the mobile version here”).
One issue brought back to the fore when building for mobile devices, though, is the need to keep page sizes down. Designers have increasingly been discarding that ethic with the rise of broadband, but we need to keep building lean sites with clean code to help those who are paying by the MB to browse (as well as for all the other reasons)!
Of course, we’re also seeing a proliferation of apps designed for mobile devices, often allowing them to bypass the standard websites completely (for example, I have Y! Mobile on my device which pulls in my Yahoo e-mails, weather and news etc, without actually visiting the Yahoo website itself). This is a whole new way of enticing mobile customers to access your site’s functionality.
All of this is really about the wider issue of usability. I’d like to do some decent research on what disabled users expect from their mobile devices before taking a definitive stance on the accessibility issues. For now, though, I won’t be building any separate mobile sites – just concentrating on getting the main one right.