As mobile developers, part of our job is to offer insight into the mobile landscape and share articles, viewpoints, and recent findings about app development.
Forrester’s Mike Gualtieri’s latest report provides an uncommon look at mobile app development. He discusses design, with an emphasis on user engagement, user experience, and keys to creating a mobile app that’s useful, usable, and desirable.
Gualtieri stresses that making an app desirable and usable means taking into account the five dimensions of the mobile context. By Gualtieri’s definitions, “usable” suggests apps should be easy to operate, and desirable suggests users should develop an emotional connection to the product.
Gualtieri’s five dimensions of mobile contexts include:
- Location: through the use of GPS, users have the ability to use their apps in a wide variety of locations
- Locomotion: mobile device users are “on the go”; devices with an accelerometer can detect movement
- Immediacy: users need immediate reaction
- Intimacy: designers should understand each person’s relationship with their device
- Device: consider specific features and capabilities the device offers (voice recognition, camera/video functionalities, etc.)
The research takes these design principles a step further and proposes the creation of user personas. Gualtieri says designers should define target app users and identify distinct traits that are relevant to that user population, creating several segments of personas. Afterwards, designers should use that target market’s needs, demographics, and the five mobile contexts above to solidify 3-6 segments to target. Once preliminary data is collected, mobile app development can start, continuously incorporating learned information about end users.
