Chapter 1. Mobile: The New Generation of Information Technology

In this chapter we discuss the reasons that businesses want to develop mobile apps, and the impact that mobile apps have on how businesses operate. We also cover the challenges posed in the development of mobile apps, as an underlying motivation for the rest of the book.

This crucial shift in end user behavior has motivated enterprises to develop mobile channels for their existing business applications, and to plan for new kinds of applications that can exploit the unique characteristics of mobile devices. While there certainly is value in producing a mobile app user interface for an existing business application, the users of mobile applications have come to expect more from their mobile experience.

The avenue for innovative user engagement is not limited to mobile phones and tablet devices. The term “omni-channel” has been coined to refer to applications that offer end user engagement across a spectrum of devices, from phones to tablets to PCs to kiosks to automobiles, and many more forms of human-technology interaction. Each of these different application end points (“channels”) offers unique characteristics that enable valuable interaction with the user under circumstances best suited to that specific channel.

For example, consider the potential experience of an airline customer who checks in with the airline website two days before their flight and confirms their seat assignment and also requests an upgrade. Then less than one day before the flight, this customer uses the airline mobile app on their iPad Mini to check on their seat upgrade and “check-in” virtually for their flight (providing greater assurance to the airline that the customer will actually take the flight). Then, within a few hours of the flight, this same customer uses the airline app on their smart phone from the airport to check the gate assignment and double check the departure time for the flight (and check again the status of their upgrade request). The customer might also check if there is an airline lounge at the departure airport, and also check on their current frequent flyer mileage totals. The relationship established with this customer can continue.

During the flight, this customer may use one of their devices to buy WiFi access to the Internet. He might check the new estimated arrival time for the flight and email a colleague to confirm their plans once they arrive.

The interaction does not stop there. Once this customer arrives at the destination airport, he can use the airline system of interaction to track his luggage, check on ground transportation, and deal with navigation to a meeting. The connection with the customer can go on and on for days. He might need to confirm (or change) their return flight. He might want to confirm his frequent traveler mileage status or he might want to plan completely new trips. The customer might be using any variety of end user devices to connect to the airline IT systems and services at any time, day or night.

This is a system of interaction. It is ongoing, not a single transaction. It requires context to be effective. It is intelligent and learns from feedback from the user. It is an example of the “killer app” of the 21st century.

Mobile apps [smartphones, desktops, vehicles, devices, . . . ] + interaction

characteristics [ . . . ] = drives process innovation [detect, enrich, perceive, act]

The formula starts with mobile first. The mobile app is what interacts with the end user and can be deployed to more than smartphones. Modern “mobile apps” have deployment target devices as diverse as cars, TVs, desktops, body monitors, and many more.

Interaction characteristics are applied to the mobile app. We define the compelling interaction characteristics as:

• Omni-channel: Available across many different classes of end point device

• Context and social aware: To automatically tune the interaction to the place and relationships involved

• Connected to systems of record: Such as existing business services and data sources, as well as cloud-hosted third party services

• Experience driven: Able to learn and adapt to specific end user responses

• Highly instrumented: So that data for analysis can be obtained

• Rapidly revised: So that app developers can continuously improve interaction

These characteristics are applied by the system of interaction to drive business process innovation. The methodology that drives business process innovation must:

• Detect opportunities to engage customers and employees

• Enrich interaction context with historical data and trends

• Perceive via “in-the-now” dynamic interaction context from location, time, social media, and other events, and . . .

• Act on the insights gained to enable positive business outcomes.

Hence, the design characteristics for using mobile technologies to drive business innovation are simply: Detect, Enrich, Perceive, and Act.

Let us consider a quick example. We will use an app for hailing taxis to illustrate our formula for systems of interaction.

As a consumer, you download the app and set up a personal profile including preferences and payment information. When you need a cab, you press “Hail Cab” within the app. Your current location is captured, and in a few seconds you are informed that a driver named Mike is heading in your direction. This cab can be available if you confirm within the next minute. Perhaps some social factors can help influence your action here. Have your friends had a good experience using Mike for taxi service? When you confirm, you see Mike’s actual location as he approaches along with an estimated time of arrival (ETA). And Mike’s cab location is updated even if Mike takes a wrong turn along the way. When he arrives at your location, you get in the taxi cab and payment is established to Mike upon conclusion of the ride.

Let us see how our methodology might apply to this example scenario.

• Detect: Customer loads the app on their smart phone

• Enrich: Get customer profile, favorite cab, and favorite destination

• Perceive: Location of the customer, location of the closest cab, other nearby friends heading to the same destination

• Act: Connect the cab driver and the customer through notification and establish secure channel to pay through the app

You can see that this example app meets all of the criteria for a good system of interaction, providing all of the dimensions to deliver compelling value to the user.

Most of the rest of this book provides an in-depth view of IBM’s recommendations for planning, developing, testing, and deploying mobile applications. Some of those recommendations are echoed in the following paragraphs, and you can refer to the later chapters for more details.

Another obvious physical difference for mobile applications is that the mechanisms for user input are different. Mobile devices have pioneered the use of nonkeyboard “gestures” (e.g., touch, swipe, and pinch) as an effective and popular method of user input. Gestures must be planned for and supported for a satisfying mobile application user experience. In addition to tactile user input, mobile devices are a natural target for voice based user input. In fact, the traditional keyboard typing form of user input is probably the least effective and least popular mechanism for input to the new systems of interaction.

Besides gathering input directly from the end user, new systems of interaction have the capability to receive input from other sources such as geo-location from the GPS component of the device and image information from the camera typically built into the device. These forms of input make mobile apps more powerful and useful than applications with a more limited array of input possibilities, and they must be considered during mobile application design and development.

The rich variety of input methods available on mobile devices is another reason that early design work must identify and leverage more efficient ways for input data to be delivered than the simple “just type it in a form” design, which is a default for traditional web and PC applications. Designers must avoid extensive keyboard typing for mobile apps in order to reduce end user frustration (with drastically smaller touch keyboards and lack of traditional typing feedback). Yet, identifying nonkeyboard ways in which information can be gathered and delivered to the mobile app is a significant design challenge.

In addition, there is still a more subtle reason for paying extra attention to the mobile app design effort. The way in which end users interact with mobile devices and the applications running on them is different from how they interact with stationary PCs (and even laptops). Mobile device users typically hold the device in their hand while also interacting with the immediate circumstances of their physical situation. Mobile users typically cannot concentrate on the mobile app for very long before switching attention to their physical surroundings. The interaction model for users of mobile apps is short, interrupted, and “bursty” (meaning that they need to complete the application task very quickly before switching attention).

All of these factors drive the need for applying user-centered design very early in the mobile app development project. Ideally these usability and design considerations should be codified in the requirements for the mobile application, and then linked to the later stage development deliverables, along with the tests that validate that the user interaction and “consume-ability” of the app is as satisfying as possible.

The choice of implementation technology for a mobile project impacts other decisions related to the application’s development, including:

• Limiting choices for development tools

• Team roles and structure

• How the application is tested and verified

• How the app is distributed and delivered to the end user

So, the choice of implementation approach for a mobile application is crucial, and this early stage decision needs to be made very carefully.

Native application implementation has the advantage of offering the highest fidelity with the mobile device. Because the APIs used are at a low level and are specific to the device for which the application is dedicated, the application can take full advantage of every feature and service exposed by that device.

However, native mobile app implementations are completely nonportable to any other mobile operating system—for example, a native Apple iOS app must be totally rewritten if it is to run on an Android device. That makes this native implementation a very costly way of producing a mobile business application.

The disadvantage of pure web application implementation is that such apps have no access to functions/features that run directly on the mobile device, such as the camera, contact list, and so forth.

Hybrid apps are linked with additional native libraries that allow the app to have access to native device features from the single application code base. Because the bulk of a hybrid application is implemented using device-agnostic technology, most of the code for the application is portable and reusable across many different mobile operating systems. However, small segments of native code can also be integrated with the hybrid app, which means that the developer can decide how much of the app implementation shares a common code base (using the web technology) and how much is device-specific customization (written in native code).

An important element in agile development practices is continuous integration and builds. Application changes that are delivered by developers need to be processed immediately for all of the mobile operating systems on which the application is required to execute. If the mobile application is a hybrid or native implementation, several different builds of the application need to be triggered each time a change set for the application is delivered by a developer. The build setup and configuration for each supported mobile environment will be different from the others, and it is most likely that a small “farm” of build servers will need to be provisioned and available to handle these builds of the mobile application for multiple operating systems.

There are more variables for mobile testing that are not relevant for other kinds of software. The same device model may function in a subtly different way when connected to a different carrier network. And the quality of the network connection can have profound impact on the behavior of a mobile application. Even the movement of the mobile device itself may be an important factor in the behavior of the application (some applications specifically exploit device movement).

The majority of mobile apps are based on multi-tier architecture, with the code running on the device itself serving as the “frontend” client to data, and the services supplied by more traditional middle-tier and data center representing the “backend.” Effective and comprehensive testing of mobile apps requires that all tiers of the application be addressed, not only the code on the mobile device. The setup and availability of test versions of the middle tier and backend services can present very large cost and complexity challenges for the testing of mobile applications.

Many mobile projects start by using manual testing approaches, which is the quickest way to begin testing. But you have to buy all of the various mobile devices that you plan to support with the app, and pay someone (likely a team of people) to tediously go through a written script of instructions describing the tests on each of those devices for every build of the application. While manual testing serves an important purpose in providing crucial usability feedback for the app, it is extremely expensive and inefficient.

As an alternative, there are mobile app testing solutions that rely on running an agent program on the device for interaction within an automated execution. This approach has the flexibility of using either real physical devices or emulators for testing, with the added efficiency of automation. However, the test team bears the costs of setting up the devices to be tested and installing the test agent on them.

This book has been written specifically to cover issues and topics that arise when mobile app development meets corporate enterprise IT systems. The coauthors have decades of enterprise software development expertise as well as extensive depth of knowledge in the mobile aspects of their chapter topic. We cover the entire lifecycle involved in enterprise mobile app development, not just one activity such as coding or testing. The chapters are designed to be useful by themselves, but they all fit into a progression that roughly follows the flow of mobile development activities in a project.

One of the guaranteed elements in the software industry is change. We learn to deal with it by identifying the concepts and concerns that endure at a level above the detailed technical aspects. Mobile apps represent technological disruption in a very big way, especially for enterprise software and those of us devoted to producing it. The authors hope that you finish this book with a new list of enduring ideas for how to make your enterprise mobile app successful and delightful!