The mobile phone has become an indispensable part of our lives. As mobility continues to offer great business opportunities, software developers are being faced with a new challenge.
The mobile phone has become an indispensable part of our lives. As mobility continues to offer great business opportunities,
software developers are being faced with a new challenge. Not only do they need to cater to new platforms for their applications, but also a new concept in design. Apart from the standard challenges faced during adoption of a new technology platform, mobility presents its own unique challenges.
Earlier, the apps were developed based on the technicalities involved in the backend, ensuring the application performed as required. Things are different now. The look-and-feel as well as the functionality of the final interface is as important as the backend. Users today demand an engaging consumer user interface when utilizing their mobile devices, one that meets their needs and expectations, not what is being provided to them. It is this requirement that is forcing the development industry to tackle the design process it has never had to explicitly deal with before. The interface has to attract the end-user from the first moment the application starts.
As the world goes mobile, the priorities, considerations and focus of the developers have shifted tremendously from where it was in the web or client – server world.
1. The client is now personal – Earlier, the users would access a program from multiple locations like home, work, friend’s computer. While the computer may have been different, but the browser technologies were quite similar. That is no longer the case. The client interface is in the user’s pocket, and he / she wants the best experience from that device. The coders today need to support multiple experiences for each type of mobile client, in a cross platform way, which can be even more challenging than cross browser support.
2. Battery utilization and data throughput – unlike the personal computers or even the laptops and netbooks that were plugged in and connected to a wi-fi network most of the time they were used, smart devices are essentially wireless and carrier network dependent. This brings adds a never before considered factor of power and bandwidth utilization in to the picture, which the programmers have to develop and test against. The consumer will discard a power or data hungry app very soon.
3. Screen size – users demand a good experience on such a small screen. This required unlearning the erstwhile User interface techniques that allowed complex scrollable designs. The shortage of screen real estate calls for minimalistic design, with simple navigation. Another screen related challenge is that they vary in sizes, resolution, and pixel density. Therefore, the testing and optimization process is long.
4. Sensors – The fancy devices that users carry today have a lot of features that might have seemed like science fiction, at least James Bond – ish 10 years ago. Not the least of these are the many sensors like accelerometer, barometer, camera, and motion sensors. Now having all these fantastic attributes and not using them is not justified. So the owners of these expensive devices what the programmers to create code that can use them. The programmers have t rise to the challenge and Need to master specialized libraries and adapt their apps to device capabilities.
5. NFC – NFC is a set of standards for smartphones and similar devices to establish radio communication with each other by touching them together or bringing them into close proximity, usually no more than a few centimeters. This magical feature has so many applications like beaming data from one device to another, wireless charging, profile settings based on location, mobile payments etc. However, from the coding side, it means complex back-end integration to securely share user data and manage transactions
