2. Mobile Applications:
Opportunity and Options
Tim McGovern, Director of Online Communications, The Heritage Foundation
December 1, 2010
2
Presentation I gave last December to some New Media folks over at
Koch Industries. With some input from Steve, I’ve updated it to share
with you.
3. Trends - Growth
Growth of overall internet traffic, smartphone market share, internet connected mobile devices
3
I have interns who have needed to be coached away from this behavior.
5. Trends - Growth
Smartphone Market Share
5
45% of smartphone solid in 2nd half 2010 were smartphones. RIM,
Apple, Android are all approximately one quarter of active phones.
One number that has me concerned about future of the country. WinMo
is 14%. I think that’s amazing b/c 1 in 7 people have the same awful
taste as Jadon.
6. Global vs. Local
✤ Global Market ✤ Washington Market
6
Difference between global market place and Washington.
Nokia is an afterthought (if that) in US-centric discussions, Symbian
while only 3.5% of US Market, is leader globally with 35+% of market
share. They have 7 of the 10 most widely used phones globally. Makes
the recent MS Phone/Nokia announcement very interesting. No
comment on whether the international market discussion was included
after our resident Brit offered his comments on the presentation.
7. Why?
✤ Maybe because there’s so many of
these guys in Washington.
7
I say this because I’m an iPhone user.
8. Trends - Growth
Global Smartphone Market Share
8
Growth from 2009 to 2010, Android and Apple are clear leaders with
Android just crushing it. This chart must make Google giddy.
9. Trends - Growth
Mobile Internet Data Growth
9
From Smartphone marketshare to mobile traffic patterns.
AT&T grew traffic 50x in 3 years -- That’s really astounding and may
give you a little more sympathy for the challenges they faced in keeping
their service fast + reliable. Although this is of little solace to me when
waiting for a connection/something to download. This was clearly
driven by the iPhones, but will happen on other mobile platforms as
Android devices are gaining market share.
10. Trends - Growth
Mobile Internet Data Growth
10
Some jaw dropping numbers from Morgan Stanley. The dark blue charts
are from Morgan Stanley’s impressive Mobile Internet Report, published
a 12 months ago. All the major resources are available as links in the
closing slide.
11. Trends - Growth
Mobile, Internet-connected Devices
11
Simple version of a more complicated chart. Overall connectedness is
way, way up.
Clever folks will not that only 6b ppl in the world.
12. Trends - Growth
Mobile, Internet-connected Devices
12
In Q2 2012, on track to have more mobile, internet-connected devices
than desktops. Whitebackground with green accents, Luke Wroblewski
> credited in last slide.
14. • Broad trend - the trend is not Windows Phone 7
• What is consistent about the vignettes in the video?
Next trend
Can you guess what it is from the video?
14
Next trend - play a video and then give you a chance to guess at the
next trend.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHlN21ebeak
15. Trends - Ubiquity
Devices are immediately accessible, wherever we are
15
I saw someone doing exactly this biking down East Capitol Street. I was
going to take a picture with my iPhone, but I was in the middle of
composing a text.
19. 19
This is the reason Mike’s been wearing his arm in a sleeve, his Dr. was
only half paying attention.
20. Trends - Ubiquity
• During a typical day:
• 84% at home
• 80% during misc. times throughout the day
• 74% while waiting in lines
• 64% at work
• Lots of brief opportunities for interaction
• speed is vital
20
You can see the stats here on where people access their mobile devices
from. The important takeaway is that interactions need to be as quick
and painless as possible. We’ll return to the speed question later.
22. Trends - Capabilities
• Push: real-time notifications “instant” to user
• Location detection
• Near Field Communication
• Audio: input from a microphone; output to
speaker
• Video & image: capture/input from a camera
• Application cache for local storage
• CSS3 & Canvas for performance optimization
22
Mobile browsers don’t have all the backwards support challenges of
other browsers. They invest more in upcoming standards.
Katie Harbath at the NSRC wrote an article in December that mentioned
that the campaign eventually started using push messages rather than
SMS messages for sending alerts to their users.
23. Trends - Capabilities (cont.)
• Device positioning & motion: from an
accelerometer
• Orientation: direction from a digital compass
• Device connections: through Bluetooth between
devices
• Proximity: device closeness to physical objects
• Ambient Light: light/dark environment
awareness
23
24. Trends - Capabilities (cont.)
• Multi-touch sensors
• RFID reader: identify & track objects with
broadcasted identifiers digital compass
• Haptic feedback: “feel” different surfaces on a
screen
• Biometrics: retinal, fingerprint, etc.
24
25. Capabilities Convergence 25
Convergence of these capabilities.
Anybody familiar with Yelp’s Monocle component on iPhone application
Yelp Augmented Reality app Camera, location, detection, accelerometer,
input capabilities, orientation, push notifications
26. Platforms
✤ iPhone
✤ Android
✤ Blackberry
✤ Palm Web OS
✤ Windows Phone 7
✤ Other: Web, iPad
26
Other: Web as an alternative, iPad offers a different user experience
based on its form factor and you may want to consider a different UI
and capabilities for iPad. You also may have different products that
make sense on the iPad - ie, Book-type products.
27. Technical considerations
Planning
✤ Factors:
✤ Cross-platform plans
✤ Number and complexity of integrations
✤ device-specific integrations, integrations with your own
infrastructure, third party integrations
✤ Frameworks
27
✤ are generally less expensive
✤ can be expensive if you have to extend your server side capabilities
✤ tend to be more expensive (especially if you want to design your applications to
degrade gracefully in the event of network unavailability)
28. Technical considerations
Application development practices
✤ Speed
✤ Network access can be costly
✤ HTML5 offers solutions to minimize network access
✤ Reduce requests and file sizes
28
You never know when you’ll go from 5 bars to a half bar. Network
speeds, while improving are still generally well below desktop speeds
and the entire point of the Win Mobile 7 commercial is the time
sensitivity that needs to accompany the ubiquitous presence of these
devices.
Frequency requests/latency
29. Technical considerations
Application development practices
✤ Touch
✤ Touch target size
✤ Touch gestures
✤ Hover is no longer an option
29
Apple has produced HIG to direct size of touch points, distance from
one another and a laundry list of other considerations. This is a good
place to start in investigating potential design shops. Don’t ask if they
follow them, no one will say they don’t. Ask who the person in the org
is that’s most familiar with the guidelines and how closely will they be
involved with your project.
30. Technical considerations
Testing and deploying applications
✤ Packaged and delivered software, not instantly delivered like the web
✤ Cross-version testing is the new cross-browser testing.
✤ Between provisioning and testing, quality assurance is significantly
more involved.
30
31. Thank you
Time for Q&A?
• Tim McGovern
• @mcgovern
• tim.mcgovern@gmail.com
• http://www.linkedin.com/in/timmcgovern
• Credits
• Luke Wroblewski - Mobile First
• http://lukew.com/ff
• Morgan Stanley - The Mobile Internet Report
• http://bit.ly/5BqHuj
• Stack Overflow - iPhone development costs
• http://bit.ly/HHaLb
• The Mobile Device Is Becoming Humankind's Primary Tool (Infographics Feature)
• http://bit.ly/eR9rbW 31
32. Costs to Develop Professionally
✤ Factors (cont.):
✤ Design
✤ Good application designers who have a strong visual design
skills and are well-versed in touch screen interaction design (a
relatively new field) are highly valued talent.
32
Every organization has differing levels of understanding about the
appropriate level of investment in design. There is visual design and
there’s application design. Thinking through the on-device capabilities
and understanding the ability of these capabilities to help your meet
your project goals is a vital part of the design process.
33. Costs to Develop Professionally
✤ Factors:
✤ Cross-Platform Support and Feature Parity
✤ Feature parity - is the idea that across users can do the software
has the same capabilities across platforms.
✤ This is often seen by software purists as a holy grail of sorts, but
is not a necessity.
✤ Be prepared for user sensitivities.
33
In her presentation on iPhone, Android, and Windows, Oh My! What's a Mobile App Designer To Do?on Google's campus last night, Suzanne Ginsburg (author of Designing the iPhone User Experience) outlined several approaches to designing native mobile applications.
■ In July 2008 Apple released API t build native apps. Mobile Web was all that was available before. Following that, more app stores were released including: Oct 2008 Android, April 2009 Blackberry App World, Oct 2010 Windows Phone.
■ Do you need to design apps more than once to account for all these app stores?
Do You Need a Native App?
■ Figure out if you need a native app first. Web apps can be a viable solutions in many cases.
■ Unless your solution requires access to OpenGL, hardware access, or device content –you might not need a native app. Web apps can store data offline, access GPS info and more enhancements are coming.
■ People assume Web app wonʼt be found but there are over 300,000 apps on Appleʼs store. It's not that easy to stand out there.
■ Does your application require multi-tasking support? If you want things to run in the background while the user does other tasks –you'll need a native app.
■ What is your monetization strategy? If you are planning on using subscriptions or one-time payments, you may find it more profitable to use a native app.
■ Device access, multi-tasking, and micropayments are the primary reasons to go with a native app.
Three Options for Native Apps
■ If you do need a native app, there's three approaches to consider: One Trick Pony, OK Corral, or Trojan Horse
■ One trick pony: build for one native platform if your user base is mostly on that platform or your must-have features are only on that platform.
■ • OK Corral: design your app for 2-3 flagship platforms. Use this approach if your users are on a few platforms and you want the best experience possible on each. If you follow this approach make your first sketches device agnostic then compare differences across devices and OSs to see how they impact user experience.
■ Potential differences include: display size & resolution, device integration with display, supported gestures, UI controls, animations, and landscape vs. portrait. On iPhone, you need to add a horizontal mode. On Android itʼs turned on by default.
■ The navigation differences between single hardware and multiple hardware control devices can lead to usability issues.
■ Look at what is similar between devices vs. whatʼs different –itʼs a lot more consistent than not. iPhone uses switches for on/off checkboxes, Android & Windows Phone has checkboxes and switches. Core gestures are pretty similar across core platforms.
■ Trojan Horse: you create Web apps with native app capabilities by wrapping Web apps within native application code.
■ Device/OS customization depends on App genre and capabilities. If you are designing a game it could be consistent across platforms. Some features might need to be turned off on some platforms.
■ Trojan tools: Phone Gap, Titanium, Rhomobile provide the promise of cross-platform support. They provide a bridge for Web developers moving to mobile apps.
In All Cases
■ Learn the UI guidelines & deviceʼs technical specs. Windows Phone has great documentation on design guidelines.
■ Explore related apps in depth
■ Sketch, prototype, and test a lot! Donʼt download templates right away –they may limit your ideas.
■ Sketching is pretty consistent across platforms but prototyping between platforms requires different tools. You can use paper, HTML, or presentation software like Keynote & PowerPoint to do rapid prototypes across platforms.
■ Microsoft Expression Blend is a prototyping tool for Windows Phone that can evolve to running code. Apple prototyping tools include: Review and Briefs. Android: Android App Creator is in Google Apps
The Fourth Approach
■ Make a Web app!
■ Web app tools: Sencha Touch and jQuery Mobile
34. Costs to Develop Professionally
✤ Factors (cont.):
✤ Frameworks
✤ AppMaker
✤ TapLynx
✤ PhoneGap, Titanium
✤ Sencha Touch
34
Online service, Xcode plugin, Cross-platform services, Web as Platform
Frameworks like AppMaker and TapLynx have limited interactions
models, based on reuse, but have done the heavy lifting of interaction
design for those models.
35. Heritage’s experience
✤ 90% of product developed internally, testing and bug fixes were
outsourced.
✤ First two weeks saw over 2,500 application downloads
✤ Downloads dropped off from there as promotion ended.
✤ Currently working on upgrade to collect in-application analytics
35
■ People assume Web app wonʼt be found but there are over 300,000 apps on Appleʼs store. It's not that easy to stand
out there.
36. What we’ve learned
✤ Have specific user goals for your smartphone application
✤ Make your decisions based on the goals you have set
✤ Set success metrics for application downloads and in-application
actions (eg, article views, social sharing, etc.)
✤ Get high level buy-in to your approach to building applications on
multiple platforms (or not) and communicate that approach broadly
within your organization.
36
As with everything, goals should be tied to broader organization wide
strategy. George Scoville of Cato wrote a great article on The Next
Right that makes this point well. I recommend reading it and sharing it
with higher ups if you’re making decisions about mobile apps in your
organization.
