4.4 Designing for Mobile Devices and Other Design Considerations

User-Centered Design

Businesses increasingly recognize the need to incorporate stakeholder feedback into the design process, which reflects a shift from traditional design and development practices. A way to meet this need is to incorporate user-centered design (UCD), an iterative, or stepwise, approach to development that considers the user’s needs, behaviors, and preferences. UCD aims to positively influence user experience, gaining user loyalty for continued use of the product. In short, the user is placed at the center of the design process and the user’s experience is factored into decisions where the business looks to align business practices and stakeholder research to create a design that aligns with the end user’s needs. Applying user feedback to guide the design process not only strengthens the output of the design, but it creates a relationship with the user. Consider some best practices for how to implement the UCD approach:

• Define the business goal: To arrive at a final solution, businesses need to define their organizational goals. These goals set the direction of the design process. What are the strategic goals of the business? What are the targeted outcomes (in the short term or long term) of these goals? How will the design of the business reflect these goals and increase its socioeconomic and financial value? How does the system user fit into the strategic goals of the business and how will the system reflect that relationship? These decisions should also consider the market forces that will help shape the design. Namely, the organization should identify its target market, the intended users of its product/solution, and its competitors.
• Understand users and align business goals: The customer is the driving force of the design as the customers or end users will ultimately support the final solution. Therefore, having insight from the user’s point of view is essential and foundational to UCD. This insight can include the user’s needs, abilities, and constraints—each of which may impact a user’s ability to fully interact with an information system’s design. Consider the task of designing a website for a client. To meet the needs of users who might have specific challenges or differing abilities, the site might incorporate variable font size, color options, or larger buttons. Anticipating the user’s tasks (current and future) is key for insight into the user’s abilities and the challenges users might face when using the tool.
  • Do thorough research. Initiate interviews, focus groups, surveys, and other types of customer research methods to solicit user responses. Invite users who may provide insight into different roles or functions of the design. Consider assessing who will use the website, the environment, how the user feels when using the design, and their needs, abilities, and limitations. Gather and analyze the data using analytical tools and analytics as the data will drive decisions for the design. Learn as much as possible about the users in order to craft a product that fits their needs.
  • Evaluate the business needs and requirements. Identify and engage stakeholders to further understand your organization’s goals, constraints, regulatory requirements, and budget considerations. Determine how to create the design and incorporate the data received from surveying users. Decide on the metrics that will be used to measure the success of the design.
• Generate the design solution and evaluate: Create a total solution that incorporates the user’s feedback. Explore design tools for web design such as wireframes, user stories, mock-ups, and diagrams to provide a vision of the full user story, leveraging business requirements and stakeholder feedback. Test the design end to end, re-creating the user experience. This process lends itself to the iterative, or circular, nature of UCD, namely, the cycling practice of building, refining, and improving a product, project, or initiative more than once. Be sure to account for and validate all the business and user requirements. Evaluate the design utilizing the identified metrics.
• Continue to refine: Continue to involve the user throughout the design process, refining the design as needed to assess its usability, a quality-related attribute that refers to a system or interface’s ease of use.

A popular social media platform, Instagram, provides an example of this iterative process. Launched in 2010, Instagram provided a means for people to connect through photos and until 2012 was only available as an iPhone app. The app grew in popularity, prompting the platform to evolve as users interacted with each other and with the app itself. The first evolution was incorporating the hashtag (#). The hashtag was already in use on X (at that time, Twitter) to cluster similar posts and provide a searching mechanism for similar content.

Another addition was integrating Android capability, which led to an entirely new group of Instagram users. Eventually, the app incorporated ads, and it replaced the chronological order of the posts with an algorithmic order. As the user base increased and its needs became more apparent, business pages were developed, plus the ability to add a “story” and multiple pictures in a post.

Subsequent developments included “reels” and business Instagram shops. All of these developments and new opportunities came about through the implementation of UCD—specifically, the use of tools that aimed to better understand how users were interacting with the system. Instagram, much like other social media platforms, is expected to continue to evolve as user needs change.

Special Design Considerations for Mobile Apps and Social Platforms

Accessing applications via mobile devices has increased as technology has literally shifted into people’s hands. The marketplace for mobile applications is crowded with all types. When considering how to approach design and development for mobile application use, recognize that applications differ in function and purpose based on their user bases. Despite their variability, mobile applications generally belong to one of the following categories:

• Social media applications: Social media applications allow community-based sharing via communication and collaboration. These applications lend themselves to connecting community members with shared content, expanding social networks. Users are driven to check in on such apps almost daily. YouTube, a popular social media platform, receives 2.6 billion users per day, and generated $29.2 billion dollars in 2022.³ Other popular social media applications include Facebook, TikTok, and WhatsApp.
• Games and entertainment: The gaming and entertainment application space has expanded as accessibility includes mobile devices, computers, televisions, and game consoles. These interactive applications house activities related to leisure and fun. They are where content creators, marketing professionals, and artists collaborate to create an enjoyable interactive experience that generates revenue. Popular applications include Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and Xbox Game Pass.
• Lifestyle: Lifestyle apps support and define aspects related to a user’s lifestyle. For example, users who watch HGTV can now access the HGTV application to watch shows they missed, get exclusive content from hosts, and even enter sweepstakes. Other lifestyle applications include VRBO, Expedia, and Uber. Health-care applications can also fall under the lifestyle umbrella. Many health-care organizations are incorporating services via mobile technologies due to their ease of use, convenience, and reduced administrative costs to the organization. The health-care insurance provider Humana, Inc., is an example of a company using AI to improve operational efficiencies via mobile technologies.
• Productivity: Productivity applications (such as Microsoft Office, Docusign, and Calendar) allow users to manage tasks efficiently and effectively, leveraging the application’s speed and convenience. Thanks to such applications, users may be able to handle basic banking transactions or sign an important document from a variety of locations or devices.
• News and information: News and information applications allow people to stay connected to current events by presenting news and information in unique formats that appeal to their users. For example, the Bleacher Report provides sports-related news and analysis, while Flipboard allows users to receive news and analysis on sports, politics, international relations, and other topics.
• Utility: Utility applications such as Calculator, Flashlight, and Weather may be preinstalled into a mobile device, generally serving a single, quick purpose.

Today, many users of technology need to access websites, software, and applications on various platforms. For example, employees who work from home may access a work software program via their tablet rather than their desktop computer in the office. Social media users often access their accounts through their phone, but they might also want to interact with an app through their smartwatch. It is important during the development process to design the system so that it can meet the user requirements on various platforms with nearly the same functionality. Specifically, website developers must incorporate making sure the website displays correctly on a mobile device into the development process.

Effective systems offer a seamless user experience between devices and platforms, which means that the functionality of the system is consistent for the user across various devices (such as phones, tablets, and personal computers) and platforms (like Android, IoS, and Windows). In some cases, users appreciate when applications are connected and integrated into other applications or software. This often occurs with products within the same company such as with Meta, who owns Facebook and Instagram. When a user changes their profile picture in one application, it is automatically updated in the other application. This can also occur with integrations of systems that are not under the same company. For example, payments held in an Apple Wallet on an iPhone can be integrated into a wide variety of shopping applications, and often that information is saved in the shopping app so the user does not have to enter payment information each time. These are just a few examples of how systems design has become more complicated over time as technology has changed and user needs and requirements have evolved.

These are a few practical design considerations for developing mobile apps and social platforms:

• Purpose and goals: Start by defining the purpose and goals for the application or platform. Do sufficient research. Discover the latest trends in design that may boost usability.
• Simplicity: Simple, functional designs with pleasing visualizations often generate buzz and increase the number of return users. For example, a good design might incorporate a color palette, features a status bar indicator to visually display the user’s progress, and directs the user to the next step through prompts.
• Reliability: The design should be reliable, meaning users should be able to access it successfully 24/7. To support this reliability, it should meet relevant speed and consistency standards. One dimension to consider is the data network architecture and infrastructure. In addition, review the policies of the mobile apps and social platforms to guard against misinformation (inaccurate or false information) and disinformation (false information given with the intent to mislead).
• Friendly navigation: Mobile app designs are most successful when they can be accessed well with friendly navigation. Users should be able to navigate the site’s functions via their fingertips, voice commands, or similar simple manners.
• Platform compatible: Consider different platforms in the design to create a seamless user experience. What works for iOS may not work for Android as the user interface may differ. Functional elements should be minimal and consistent with the website, as this builds trust among users when they access the application in either setting.
• Social media integration: As users become more inclined to share information with others in their communities and networks, social media integration may be a function that raises the design to another level. Here are some questions to consider while integrating social media into an application: How well does the application integrate with some of the popular social media applications? Would users want to play games or compare outcomes with their friends and share the results on social media? How would this functionality expand the reach of the application and its use? What types of push notifications or social media application alerts would users need to have an optimal experience?
• Financial: There is a broad range of money needed for mobile application development as features such as push notifications, real-time updates, and third-party integrations may cause significant variations in expense. These costs can range from $10,000 to $500,000, and projects can sometimes involve many years of development.