So you want to take your business mobile?

@alisonheittman @dcww #gomobile

So you want to take your business mobile?

February 26, 2013 for DC Web Women at iStrategy Labs

1Wednesday, February 27, 13

Alison Heittman, CEO Solertium

✤ Former corporate librarian

✤ Information architect

✤ Woman with many hats & collaborative problem solver

✤ I build web and mobile applications for outstanding brands



The Reference Interview

Conversation between a member of the library reference staff and a library user for the purpose of clarifying the user’s needs and aiding the user in

meeting those needs.

- Bopp & Smith, Reference and Information Services, An Introduction

The great thing about being a librarian is you don’t have to know everything, just how to find everything.

- me



Your expertise is required.

✤ You have expert knowledge of your industry

✤ Your developer should have expert knowledge of application development

✤ You + Developer = Your App

elephant tracker

frequent traveler award voting

citizen science/bird monitoring

burger, burrito, and boulangerie

Emirates cultural project

iPad restaurant point of sale



Your team

✤ Internal stakeholders: expert knowledge of the problem & market

✤ Marketing: branding, promotion, market research

✤ Graphic design: asset development

✤ User experience: leverage platform features to provide best UX

✤ Software developers: expert knowledge of platform(s), development

✤ Quality assurance: testing

✤ Project management: keep everything on track@alisonheittman @dcww #gomobile


Need vs Want



Why do you want to have an app?

✤ Save staff time

✤ Reduce costs

✤ Increase revenues, visitation, loyalty

✤ Attract new customers

✤ Insight into customer behaviors



Who is your app for?

✤ Your clients?

✤ The general public?

✤ Other businesses?

✤ Your staff?




Smartphone & Tablet Ownership (MM)Source: comScore MobiLens & TabLens, US, 2003-2012


Have you asked your users what they’d like you to build?




Top Mobile Media Activities by Share of Smartphone and Tablet UsersSource: comScore MobiLens & TabLens, US, 3 month avg ending Dec ’12


Find the pain, then solve it.



Market research

✤ Do you have first mover status, and is that good or bad?

✤ You get there first, so yay✤ How hard will it be for your competitors to catch up?✤ Can you learn from your mistakes as easily as they will?

✤ How much is achieving parity with your competitors worth? Can you do it better?

✤ Evaluate successful competitors

✤ Evaluate failed competitors@alisonheittman @dcww #gomobile


What can you leverage?

✤ Customer portal?

✤ Internal tools you could expose to your customers?

✤ Desktop tools that your employees could benefit from accessing on smartphones & tablets?

✤ Paper forms?

✤ Digital media?



5 Whys


✤ Get money

✤ Save money

✤ Achieve mission

Should result in:


Where do you fit in?

✤ iTunes App Store: Books, Business, Catalogs, Education, Entertainment, Finance, Food & Drink, Games, Health & Fitness, Lifestyle, Medical, Music, Navigation, News, Newsstand, Photo & Video, Productivity, Reference, Social Networking, Sports, Travel, Utilities, Weather

✤ Google Play Store: Games, Books & Reference, Business, Comics, Communication, Education, Entertainment, Finance, Health & Fitness, Libraries & Demo, Lifestyle, Live Wallpaper, Media & Video, Medical, Music & Audio, News & Magazines, Personalization, Photography, Productivity, Shopping, Social, Sports, Tools, Transportation, Travel & Local, Weather, Widgets



How will you stand out?

✤ more than 775,000 apps

✤ 300,000 native iPad apps

✤ 500 million active accounts

✤ 40 billion total downloads

✤ 20 billion downloads in 2012

✤ 2 billion downloads in Dec

✤ 649,155 apps & games

✤ 25 billion downloads from Play

✤ 504,988 free apps, 146,475 paid

✤ largest installed base

✤ 1.5 billion downloads/month

✤ plus other Android stores

Sources: Jan 7 ’13 Apple press release; Feb 25 ’13 AppBrain stats, and Google at developer.android.com @alisonheittman @dcww #gomobile


Ask yourself the hard questions

✤ Why would someone download/use your app?

✤ How will they know you have an app?

✤ Why would they open it a second time?

✤ How likely are they to stop using it?

✤ What bad things will they say about your app?



How will you measure success?

✤ # of downloads, installed base

✤ size, frequency of orders

✤ media coverage

✤ customer feedback (both in iTunes/Play stores and in-app)

✤ brand awareness



Have you asked your users what devices they use?


✤ Mobile web

✤ iPhone, iPod Touch

✤ Android smartphones

✤ iPads

✤ Android tablets

✤ Android eReaders (KindleFire, NookHD, etc)

✤ other OS: BlackBerry, Windows, Firefox, etc.



Share of Browser-Based Page Traffic by Hour for Computer, Smartphone and Tablet PlatformsSource: comScore Device Essentials, U.S., Monday, Jan. 21, 2013


Go native or mobile web or both?



Have you asked your users what they want?



Your audience may surprise youFrequent Travelers overwhelmingly carry iOS devices! So far, less than 10% of mobile voters in this year’s Freddie Awards are using Androids.



Native apps: pros & cons

✤ Litmus test: You need access to hardware features of the device that you can’t get to via the browser

✤ Pro: Launcher icon = constant brand presence

✤ Con: harder and therefore more expensive to build

✤ Con: harder to approve and deploy

✤ Con: cost multiplies by the number of platforms you support




What do these have in common?Hint: litmus test


Mobile web: pros & cons

✤ Litmus test: You have to build something that is standards-based and equally accessible to everybody

✤ Pro: nothing to install = less activation energy

✤ Pro: more forgiveness by users

✤ Pro: no deployment lag

✤ Con: inferior user experience; slower, doesn’t have access to all the platform features (but this is changing)




Seasonal appFreddie Awards desktop voting app, used annually Feb 15 - Mar 30



News Portal with a mobile audienceelephantsinperil.org, leverages Twitter Bootstrap


Hybrid apps

✤ Can be the best of both worlds, when built correctly

✤ There are online tools out there that can help you to build these

✤ Industry-specific

✤ Technology-specific




Developer lunchExample: open source conference app code on GitHub


User support

✤ App store reviews

✤ Social media (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.)

✤ Blogs

✤ In-app Feedback Forms

✤ Google Play allows developers to reply to reviews

✤ Exception logs

✤ Analytics

User managed You manage



You want to hear from your users



And now.... The Talk



Planning your roadmap

✤ Initial Release

✤ Identifying & prioritizing new features

✤ Frequency of updates

✤ How will you deal with changes in technology?




How much does it cost to build an app?How much does it cost to build a house?

Source: Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Highclere_Castle.jpg


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Highclere_Castle.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Highclere_Castle.jpg

Questions?


Twitter: @alisonheittmanGoogle+: alison.heittman

email: [email protected]


Documents

So you want to take your business mobile?