Keep Mobile Apps Simple, Say IT Managers

[Janak Parekh]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.computerworld.com/mobiletopics/mobile/story/0,10801,93531,00.html' target='_blank'>http://www.computerworld.com/mobile...1,93531,00.html</a><br /><br /></div>"When IT managers develop mobile and wireless applications, keeping them simple and small is usually the best route to take, according to several experienced users who spoke at Mobile & Wireless World. Even though mobile devices can mimic most of the capabilities of a desktop PC, such as handling attachments and rich text documents, plain text is usually a better choice for sending data, said Ralph Nichols, a service program manager at Pitney Bowes Inc. in Stamford, Conn. Nichols developed a purely text-based mobile application that is being rolled out to the mailing equipment maker's 3,500 field service technicians."<br /><br />Most of this short article is common-sense, but it's an adage oft forgotten -- when you want to deploy tools on a mobile device, <i>design</i> for that device. While as a power user I want to eke out the full functionality from my PDA, that's not necessarily true for the average corporate end-user. I suspect that's one of the reasons why MS is pushing .NET CF: it's designed to be a tool for rapidly deploying PDA-centric solutions that can easily interface with web services and other platforms on the server-side.

[Kevin Daly]

There is a lot of sense to this, on the other hand I suspect the case is being overstated.
It was after all a representative specimen of the breed in question who, back in my mainframe days, assured me there would never be any conceivable place for colour (as in not-black-and-green-or-amber-if-you're-special) or a windowing UI in a business application.
There is no particular reason why we should assume that IT managers know diddly about mobile devices, they are among the last people on earth to look at one.

[ctitanic]

I suspect that's one of the reasons why MS is pushing .NET CF: it's designed to be a tool for rapidly deploying PDA-centric solutions that can easily interface with web services and other platforms on the server-side.

Another reason is because applications created in .NET don´t need to be changed to be used in QVGA landscape (Windows Mobile 2003 SE) and only has to be done a few changes to be used in VGA and that's only in few occasions.

[felixdd]

Yes simplification is good -- but don't go excessive about it. At a certain point, what is simple to one person is incomprehensible to the other -- and that's when you have oversimplification. WM 2003's connection manager comes to mind -- work? internet? Just give me a no-frills network manager!

[Don Sorcinelli]

I think that to worry about this article serving as a sort of blanket statement is a bit premature. Each application *should* (I prefer "must", but I'm a realist :wink: ) be properly scoped out, and usability should be carefully designed and tested before deployment. Every situation is different, and presumptions regarding functionality and/or usability are the shortest path to grief.

As ridiculous as the thought of "squishing a desktop UI into a PDA" may sound to some, I have seen countless examples of it over the last few years. Add to that the number of character/terminal developers I have dealt with who simply "ported" their old procedural-driven applications to an event-driven GUI environment without a thought of the impact on usability, and you can understand why I don't take this subject too lightly.

Bottom line - No matter how brilliant your application is at solving a business need, if it is not usable to the end-user it is likely doomed to failure. "Not usable" does not have to equate to "not functional", either. One difficult to navigate screen is enough for an end-user to reject the entire application. Design to the platform, but also design to the users of that platform and your software.

DonS

[farnold]

Mates, let's read this article as what it is: a desperate approach of someone who is paid by the amount of words he can combine in decent sounding sentences without any content whatsoever :roll: - and it's not any better that the next issue of "What I encountered on my last school holdays" written by any 10-year-old...

An easy way to recognize nonsense like this: turn every statement into its opposite... it works perfectly with this article and shows that it has no content whatsoever.

[gohtor]

Yes simplification is good -- but don't go excessive about it. At a certain point, what is simple to one person is incomprehensible to the other -- and that's when you have oversimplification. WM 2003's connection manager comes to mind -- work? internet? Just give me a no-frills network manager!

lol I wish they would just have a dummy mode and normal mode switch on the back of the pocketpc. =)

[MikeInDallas]

As a software developer myself, I have to stand up and ask what seems to me to be an obvious statement...since when do IT managers develop software?

There are times when the manager IS a developer too. Those tend to be the best companies to work for because the managers have a clear idea of what they're asking of their head counts. However, in the larger corporate environment, IT managers tend to curtail development for many reasons: bottom line, risk, and in some environments, fear. Bottom line is the obvious top, and it includes the cost of supporting a new, and possibly useful, addition.

With that said, I couldn't agree more with the overall premise, and it's not true only for mobile development, but for everything: a simple design is the most elegant and typically trouble-free. But as another person noted, simple doesn't necessarly mean feature-lean.

The industry as a whole was leaning more and more towards puting the power in the hands of the user, but begining around Y2K, this seems to have taken a backstep, and I'm discouraged to see users get less and less options. More development efforts targeted towards "support risks" rather than functionality.

The best way I've seen around this is to deal with independent developers (shareware types) as much as possible. For example, one of the most used apps on my iPAQ 2210 is TreNotes. Herbert at Fann Software has been very good about responding to requests I've made, especially if I give a good use case scenerio. You just won't get that kind of attention from a mass vendor like Microsoft, at least not with a business case with a "black bottom line".

Mike Welch
PC/PPC Developer
Dallas