Getting Started With Mobile

Creating a new mobile product? Updating your current mobile brand presence? Here is how we go about it, from strategy to execution and back again.

The same design process allows us to help our clients launch the next great mobile solution, application, web site, or device. When you need experienced, creative, professional help, we will be there to work with you. Contact us for help.


Developing Your Strategy

You’ve got a corporate strategy. You’ve got a business strategy. And now you want to go mobile: what type of product should you build? Who is the target audience? Should it be web or app based? What features should it have?

Bringing a product to mobile is not just about making it small enough to fit on the screen. Mobile is a different computing experience, where users are always connected, and always carrying the device. The context in which they use the device, and your service, matters. It also varies by region, by type of user, time of day, and by the task they expect to perform.

To make the right mobile product, you need to start by understanding your market, and your customers. You have to research the competition, review existing research, interview likely users, and see how they would use your product; not in a lab, but in their homes and cars, at the store or at the park. Only then can you decide if you need to build an app, or for the mobile web, or maybe something else like an SMS service.

Little Springs Design works hand in hand with your team to develop a mobile strategy that meets the needs of your company, your product, and your customers.

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Understand the context and social use of your devices, apps and services.

Designing the Product

Once you have the basic strategy solidified, it must be fleshed out with more specific information. A great way to do that is to use demographic information, and interviews with actual users you would like to have to develop personas; personas which can represent the ideal customer for the rest of the process. Also, be sure to talk to every part of your business to find everyone's capabilities, goals, and constraints. Then, you can begin modeling the basic product, and how it will integrate with your existing business processes.

Little Springs Design has developed this process over hundreds of projects, and are ready to use it to create the best mobile experience for your company. Our design process is also intended to meet your specific needs, and uses many methods and representations developed from our experience.

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Mobile is the device of choice for many users. How does your site, app or service integrate into the rest of the user's connected devices?

Creating Good Mobile Interaction Design

Mobile is all about interactivity, and the key to any successful design is good – and appropriate – interaction. Concept designs and storyboards can be used here, and are helpful for both creating and communicating ideas. The complete information architecture of the entire system is designed at this point, including all touchpoints with existing data or services.

This way, every way the user interacts with the product will be designed to enhance the overall experience, from the arrangement of items in each page to the use of keys, gestures, haptics and sound. Every design should also undergo usability testing to assure it works and makes sense to your users.

Whether it's in conducting usability studies, developing rich user interfaces, or in mapping out your system's information architecture, Little Springs Design can help deliver the highest standard of interaction design services.

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Appropriate interface design depends on the type of product, and who the audience is. Games for kids will not look or act the same as a business tool.

Finding the Right Interface and Visual Design

Everyone seems to be talking about making delightful, beautiful interfaces. The question becomes, though, what does that mean? Well, it depends on your product, your customers, and the way they will be using the interface.

Your mobile product has to match, or create, your brand, and correctly express the sort of information it is presenting. A game-like expense reporting system may be beautiful; but is it trustworthy, or quick? Consider not just the most applicable colors and shapes, but how effective and functional the design is with those shapes in it. Even something as simple as typography can make or break your application or site.

Little Springs Design can help tie your company's brand identity to your mobile product. Our designers will work with you to develop style guides, graphics, and mobile typography; all while adhering to principles of human factors and information processing.

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Networks, operators and all the intermediaries can add power and functionality, as well as extra effort, to your mobile product.

Rolling Out Your Technology

Even for something everyone knows well – like the web – mobile presents unique challenges. That is because even the best mobile design is meaningless without excellence in development and deployment.

Even after considering everything else, you have to go beyond the obvious development technologies, and into supporting technologies. Things like SMS provides push notifications for web services, and billing is a complex issue outside of the Apple app store; content also needs to be transcoded intelligently, and users should be trackable between mobile and desktop.

There's lots to do. You need to update your business logic, adapt your back-end systems, write your presentation layers, and host content. After that, you still have to submit to various stores, get SMS approved, quality assurance test, and usability test. Little Springs Design can help provide you with technical consulting, implementation and hosting for the entire range of mobile products.

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Validate your inferences, marketing research, forum comments, server stats and other information with usability lab studies.

Working With the Product Lifecycle

Even once your product has launched, and it's successful, your job has only just started. Mobile is an especially fluid, ever-changing environment and you will need to keep up on new trends, demographic changes, and technology changes. Be sure to install useful analytics tools – that work for your platform – and refer to them regularly.

As you work towards the next release, the next market launch, or the next product offering, you need to make sure it's charting new territory, meeting the ever-changing needs of your customers, and is not just another me-too offering. To keep abreast of the industry, read mobile-centric blogs, like the ones Little Springs does every day:

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With this peek into how we approach each opportunity in mobile, you can get an idea of what it means to go mobile. This page also includes links to many articles and blogs we have written on some of these topics. We hope you find it valuable, interesting, and certainly hope that it will help you to launch the next great mobile solution, application, or device.

When you need experienced, creative, professional help, we will be there to work with you. Sign up for the monthly newsletter to keep up to date in mobile design, and contact us when you are ready to get started creating great mobile user experiences.

Updated 12 July 2010 - 02:33PM CDT