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Situating the mobile user experience for business apps

Situatedcontextmobilebusinessapps200512
I'm currently working on an Ark Group report on developing mobile apps for internal business users and the business partners that organisations work with. There is a growing acknowledgement by designers that mobile apps need to be created with recognition of their situated use, however most of the research and discussion I've seen is focused on consumer apps.

Business users are consumers too and much of the thinking about how consumers use mobile is broadly applicable to the business users when designing apps. However, the business context does need special attention to take into account elements such as:

  • The overarching organisational context;
  • Constraints to the UX that might apply; and
  • The relationship between the individual worker and the people they work with.

This is a draft of a diagram to summarise that situated context for mobile business apps. I'm not sure if this will make it into the report or not at this stage, as the primary purpose was really to help me capture my thinking.

I've used a couple of sources to help inform the diagram, which you might like to review too:

Let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions for additional sources that examine the business context for mobile apps beyond what is presented here.

 

RN Future Tense: The Changing Nature of Work

What impact are new design practices and changing technology having on not just the physical office but also on the way we think about work itself? Is the idea of the individual office a thing of the past? In this program we explore the physical, social and cultural trends affecting the changing nature of the office and the way we work in the 21st century.
via abc.net.au

Another great episode from Future Tense. I was recently talking about activity based workplaces (ABWs) and this podcast provides a good overview of Macquarie Bank's Shelley Street building and the overall trends in open plan office spaces. Again, the role of technology is highlighted as a key factor but balanced by the need for the new leadership skills in the workplace, particularly as workplace demographics change. The show also discusses the impact on worklife-balance and our relationship with the people we work with.

Trying to fix how people use email can backfire

Some attempts to limit email haven't gone as planned. One client of Christina Randle, a workplace productivity expert with the Effectiveness Edge in Austin, tried remedying employees' email overload by banning staff from sending messages on Fridays. It backfired. Employees just stored outbound messages and sent them all Monday morning. "Instead of getting 100 messages on Friday, [people] got 200 in their inbox on Monday morning," she says.
via workforce.com

If you want to fix email in the workplace, you've got to treat it as a systemic problem.

Nicholas Carr: Flame and filament

Cleaner, safer, and even more efficient than the flame it replaced, the light bulb was welcomed into homes and offices around the world. But along with its many practical benefits, electric light also brought subtle and unexpected changes to the way people lived. The fireplace, the candle, and the oil lamp had always been the focal point of households. Fire was, as Schivelbusch puts it, “the soul of the house.” Families would in the evening gather in a central room, drawn by the flickering flame, to chat about the day’s events or otherwise pass the time together. Electric light, together with central heat, dissolved that long tradition. Family members began to spend more time in different rooms in the evening, studying or reading or working alone. Each person gained more privacy, and a greater sense of autonomy, but the cohesion of the family weakened.
via roughtype.com

Yes, even apparently small technology innovations can have a massive impact on society.

The Rise of the 3rd Generation Organisation

The impact of the physical workplace on how we organise is a fascinating topic. For example the transformation of factories thanks to electricity and electric light changed how they operated. Modern offices, in the shape of skyscrapers, are an example of another development that has also affected how we manage. However, both the modernisation of factories and the creation of the modern office primarily depended on overcoming physical constraints to create physical structures. This in turn helped to define structures for work that we became familiar with in the developed world during the last century (lets call them 2nd Generation Organisations).

As the digital era continues, my impression is that intangible features are playing a greater role in defining the workplace environment and creating what I would call 3rd Generation Organisations. One trend that is starting to show what a 3rd Generation Organisation looks like is the shift towards Activity Based Workplaces (ABW):

As the name suggests the work space is organized by spaces designed to support specific activities… This loosely structured physical workplace is supported by work practices that facilitate it.

Note the relationship between space design and how work happens - this is more than simply creating a pleasant office space to work in and shouldn't be confused with hot desking or hoteling either. I recently had the opportunity to see Commonwealth Bank's Activity Based Workplace, built out on the edge of Sydney CBD. Its interesting to see how in practice IT plays a defining rather than supporting role in making their Activity Based Workplace possible.  In fact, urban planning consultants Urbis advise that:

During the 1990s, wi-fi didn’t exist, so flexibility was limited. Now, a successful [Activity Based] workplace must consider the IT environment to deliver productivity gains. ABW is fundamentally linked to technology and any ABW project will require significant investment in IT as well as the fitout.

The benefits of ABW appear to be a combination of soft and hard benefits:

  • Employee engagement (better collaboration and productivity).
  • Savings from more efficient use of space, less use of paper and lower building running costs.

Of course implementing an ABW is no easy task for a large organisation - it requires capital and motivation to make the change. Yet at the small end of town co-working spaces are becoming popular too, like Hub Melbourne. Just like their larger enterprise counterparts they are also enabled by access to mobile, social, Web-based and cloud information technologies.

It is easy to doubt the transformational impact of information technology in the workplace - including social software - but equally we shouldn't ignore the symbiotic relationship to the physical workspace. It is the combination of the two that will actualy create a deeper systemic change to how we organise and will allow 3rd Generation Organisations to emerge.

From Forbes Magazine - A Review of the State of Social Business

According to Jeff Dachis, CEO of Dachis Group, social is the currency of engagement.  While social technology has introduced a seemingly endless array of new interaction methods, in the end it is all about solving real business problems.  Companies do not become social businesses for the heck of it. They embrace social to solve specific business problems because it offers a more effective way of doing talent management, supply chain collaboration, business agility, risk management, and more successful products to driving revenue.  Social drives adaptation.

The state of social is not what you might expect.  Sandy Carter of IBM shared that governments and regulated industries have the highest adoption rate of social.  Eighty four percent of the top thirty five banks have a social media strategy and all G7 governments have embedded social in their Government 2.0 initiatives.  At a country level, German companies are the leading adopters of social business practices and are the most successful at it.  These companies embedded social first internally by folding it into their processes and getting that to work before extending social externally to engage with customers.

Through the lens that social is about solving real business problems, the question becomes just how to wade through all the hype, myths and hubris to realize (and prove) its potential.   Embracing the organizing principles of social business comes down to change management.  You know the drill, you’ve been through it before - it starts with people, process and ends with technology.  The exact opposite of what is being advocated by the thousands of technology vendors and consultants shouting from the social bandwagon.

via forbes.com

Dachis Group's 2012 Social Business Summit seven city global tour kicked off in Austin this week (the Summit in Singapore takes place on the 26th July). Writing in Forbes magazine, Christine Crandell provides an excellent review of the Austin event and outlines some key points about what Social Business is and isn't. Its a great overview on the state of Social Business if you are still trying to get your head around the idea or maybe you are just little skeptical.

Social Business Design is about the social transformation of work

My question is simple: if we are going to think about our organizations as cities, what can we learn from people who “design” cities for a living? Those “designers” are called planners and their profession is planning. Who are they? What do they do? How do they plan?
via thoughtfarmer.com

For those of us who are look at social technologies as being situated in organisations that we treat as complex human systems, the design of urban environments presents some interesting parallels with the domain of social business design. As introduction to this idea, Gordon's post about his joint presentation with Thomas Vander Wal at E2Conf Santa Clara 2011 is well worth reading (and looking at). There is plenty of follow up reading in the post too.

A way of work, not just shiny new tools and fun

Kelli Carlson-Jagersma... social strategy team at Wells Fargo... [says they are]

...expending the bulk of its efforts on identifying use-cases for internal social networking tools and running small pilots in the enterprise to test different solutions and learn what benefits social can bring to the enterprise.

"It's not so much focusing on the tools as the use-cases," said Carlson-Jagersma. "What I mean by that is, what is this problem we are trying to solve? Unless we make it a lot easier for people to do their jobs, or create so much efficiency in the work they're already doing, or somehow integrate communications, having a tool such as NewsGator or Chatter or Jive just adds more noise or something more for us to have to do. So, right away we've been taking a step back and looking at the use-case."

One use-case Wells Fargo is considering is in the area of support centers. "With our service and support operations located all over our geographic footprint, we need to be able to collaborate virtually. We are evaluating current business processes and how can we use social tools to enhance collaboration--not replace what we're doing, but make it more connected and even more efficient." she said.

Carlson-Jagersma added that once the business needs have been identified, only then will her team consult with the business and pilot a social networking tool--or tools, because a combination of solutions is being considered--to implement companywide.

"I think of using social as a way of work, not just as a shiny new tool and something fun."

via informationweek.com

Kelli Carlson-Jagersma from Wells Fargo talks about their need led approach to workforce collaboration and evaluating software options. Nice to see this approach being championed, although isn't this how everyone approaches internal social business software projects?

Revisiting Grudin's 8 Challenges for Collaboration Software

Microsoft researcher, Jonathan Grudin, wrote a paper back in 1994 that looked at eight challenges for groupware [PDF] - they were: 

  1. Disparity in work and benefit.
  2. Critical mass and Prisoner’s dilemma problems.
  3. Disruption of social processes.
  4. Exception handling.
  5. Unobtrusive accessibility.
  6. Difficulty of evaluation.
  7. Failure of intuition.
  8. Adoption process.

Its interesting to consider what the current generation of groupware, what today we call Social Business Software or "Enterprise 2.0", has done to address these problems.

I think challenges 1, 4, 5 and 7 are definitely areas where we have seen improvement - primarily through the benefits of infusing the concepts of social software into the design of the technology solutions we want to use. All sorts of design patterns have come to the fore in recent years to make collaboration software more human-centred than ever before. Plus the accidental training ground of the World Wide Web means that more and more users are ready (if not demanding) a consumer experience inside the firewall.

However, I sense that right now we are looping back into old territory by considering again the importance of embedding the technologies into workflow and most of these challenges can only improve through iteration (sorry everyone, the goal of integrating collaboration technologies into the places and tools where people are actually working isn't a new one).

But the Difficulty of evaluation and Adoption process in particular are likely to remain major challenges (Critical mass and Prisoner’s dilemma problems and Disruption of social processes are also closely associated with both). The evaluation challenge might be dealt with eventually through better analytics (Dachis Group's Social Business Index is already starting to do this), but ultimately these challenges aren't technology based:

  • Organisations need to have a design mindset, in order to both implement and judge the success of such technologies; and
  • We already have tried and tested methods available to support their use, we just need to use them!

If we can assume the software will continue to get better and better, moving forward why can't we focus on getting the last few points right instead?