To create an app, or use browser-based delivery, that is the question.
Organisations are rushing to create mobile apps for their sites and services. However, is this really a customer driven decision or simply hopping aboard the smartphone and tablet bandwagon?
Tasks and Context of Use
Rather than address this at a technical level and suggesting multiple device specific formats such as serving Flash on PC and HTML5 on Apple products the decision can be made by looking at what the user wants to achieve and the context in they will use the service which includes device specific features. I use PC in this case to distinguish laptops or desktops from mobile devices regardless of Operating System.
At the browser end of the App/Browser Spectrum we can see that a simple brochure site can support the tasks of say, looking up the services provided by a company so a vanilla, HTML site will work in all contexts.
At the app end of the spectrum, a game such as Scrabble can be played on both PC and mobile but the tasks and context of use are quite different. A browser can support the task of moving tiles around by utilising the mouse functionality which is normal within the context of use of a PC. Although the task is the same on a mobile the context is different as it is dictated by the device. In order to move the tiles around you’ll need to use advanced features of the touchscreen so clearly this requires an app rather than browser based delivery.
Of course things get a little trickier in between these two cases…
The Creamy Middle
It might appear that a site like eBay could just serve its regular site to a mobile device as displaying products and tapping buttons to bid are tasks that are easily supported by standard browser interactions. However, the tasks of a person browsing and bidding for products during their lunch hour at a PC can be very different to someone who is shopping on the high street and wants to see if the same product is cheaper online. Here, they won’t want to spend too much time standing in the street and typing on a small touchscreen keypad so how about allowing them to take a photo of the object (or barcode) and quickly search using that? So the search task is subtly different because of the context of use, i.e. standing in a street, and we’d go for an App here too.
Another reason to opt for an app over browser is that 3G is crap. Ok, that’s a tad harsh but in densely populated areas there is a high contention ratio due to the amount of people on the network. This can severely hinder download speeds. You can forget looking at a content-heavy restaurant review site while standing in Leicester Square. So designing an app that requires less data to be downloaded can be highly beneficial. Ensure your app supports the key tasks, e.g. show nearby restaurants and make filter functions simple so they can be easily be performed in context. LinkedIn on mobile offers reduced functionality to minimise downloading information. However, it has been mentioned that they haven’t quite got the right tasks supported for mobile interaction.
Just to confuse matters further, let’s distinguish between smartphones and tablets such as the iPad. IMDb has an iPad specific app with slightly reduced functionality but not enough to affect download times. The standard site renders perfectly on the iPad so I would assert that this type of App development is wholly unnecessary.
And finally – news sites. Do they really need an app to show the headlines and stories or should the regular site just work on mobile? What do you think?