Friday, February 24, 2012

USER EXPERIENCE IN MOBILITY



Change is in the air; or more rightly said in the airwaves. A desktop has been replaced by light laptops; single colored phones are replaced by touch screen phones and tablets. Today’s mobility world is entirely user centric and multitude of Smartphone devices enables not only access to information on the go but also quick decision making capability.  
With the devices becoming user centric; the mobile applications are becoming more and more User experience driven.

User Experience

In simple words, User experience (abbreviated as UX) is how a person feels when interfacing/interacting with a system. User experience highlights the experiential, effective, meaningful & valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership, but it also includes a person’s perceptions of the practical aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency of the system. User experience is subjective in nature, because it is about an individual’s persona & user behavior. User experience is dynamic, because it changes over time as the circumstances change.

User experience design won’t work in every situation for every user because, as human beings, we are all different. What works for one person might have the opposite effect on another. The best we can do is design for specific experiences and promote certain behaviors, but we can’t manufacture, impose or predict the actual experience itself.
And just as we can’t design a user experience, we can’t replicate the user experience for one application exactly on another application. User experience is the differentiator or unique selling proposition (popularly known as USP) for today’s mobile applications. A design must be tailored to achieve the vision, goals, and values of the final app.
Endeavour’s definition of UX can be summed up as a combination of Utility, Desirability & Usability.

Here is a check list of some of the aspect of UX that should be considered while developing a successful UX mobile solution:
  • Usability– How easy to understand and operate does the product need to be?
  • Appeal– How professional does the product need to appear? How much does the audience need to enjoy using it?
  • Accessibility– What audiences need to access the product? On which devices?
  • Performance– How well does the application need to perform? How fast does it need to load and respond to input?
  • User Assistance & Help– How easy does it need to be for the audience to get assistance when they get stuck?

Intrigued?  Want to know more?
Join us in a free webinar to take a deep dive into UX and its importance in mobility. During this webinar organized by UX Lab, Endeavour; we will take you through the trends, opportunities and horizons that UX can unlock for your organization’s mobility landscape.
Endeavour recently hosted a Webinar on “Role of UX in Mobility Landscape” which provided insight into the Importance of UX in Enterprise Mobility, perceptions about UX and the approach to User Experience in Mobility. The recording of the same is available here:




Endeavour is a specialist Mobility Company, providing strategic consulting and product development for Mobile enabling businesses in the Manufacturing, Media, Print, Healthcare, Consumer solutions, Telecom and Business Intelligence verticals. Endeavour has a strong mobile application development team on all mobile platforms in the market today, including, RIM, Apple, Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, micro Linux, Brew. Endeavour is based out of Austin, Texas, Bangalore India and London, UK. 

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Android 4.0 – The Ice Cream Sandwich


The yummier the name; the more powerful and astounding are the features and new improvements. And yes it is Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich we’re talking about. With the Google team wishing us Happy Holidays came the revealing of the Android 4.0. Let’s take a dive into the world of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Android 4.0, the Ice Cream Sandwich, marks the start of a new era for Google’s mobile platform. The release has brought in some of the biggest changes and new features since the launch of Froyo in 2010.

Expert Speak
Basavraj Birajdar, Endeavour’s Android expert comments on Ice Cream Sandwich, “Two features that will help Android ICS to take lead on other mobile platforms are NFC (Beam app) and face unlock. Android already has first mover advantage in NFC but with the introduction of Beam, it will definitely become leader in NFC technology. By just tapping on each other, Beam app allows Android devices to share data like contacts, URLs, web pages, maps and many more. Another distinguishing feature of ICS is face unlock which was introduced for first time on any mobile platform. You can make your device more personal by securing it with your face.
He further adds, “Moreover, Android Ice Cream Sandwich has amplified the focus on you i.e. the user; giving the user richer profile information, large profile picture, phone numbers, addresses and accounts, status updates, events, and a new button for connecting to integrated social networks.
Ice Cream Sandwich is all about you!!

Let us dive a little deeper & look at the key features offered by Ice Cream Sandwich.

THE UI
Simple, Beautiful and it s all about the User (WOW) Experience.

Android Ice Cream Sandwich has a vibrant, sophisticated and more visible (with the resizing feature for widgets) UI. With gestures coming into picture and enhancements to the new magazine style interface, swipe navigation, virtual button, high native resolution the user will just be happy and a speedy swiping navigator.  
                                                           
MESSAGING & VOICE INPUT
We are listening!

The addition of the new keyboard that was in the pipeline since a long time and it’s here now; all new and improved!  With features to enhance the users messaging experience the smart word predictions are not only pretty accurate and quick; but also to add to the benefits it brings along, an auto correct options that underlines potentially wrong words.

The voice input or speech to text function that has been revamped and you don’t have to wait for the phone to finish typing word; cause it’s real time now!  Hands free typing is what I’d like to call it.
 
VISUAL VOICE MAIL AND UNIFIED CALENDAR
At your fingertips!
Your incoming messages, voice transcriptions, and audio files from one or more providers are integrated together in the phone app, as Visual Voicemail. You can easily playback voicemails right from the list and also manage the playback speed.
Third-party applications can integrate with the Phone app to help you add your own voice messages, transcriptions, and more to the visual voicemail inbox. So now you can wake your loved ones with a smiley recorded message!!

An updated Calendar app brings together personal, work, school, and social agendas. With user permission, other applications can contribute events to the calendar and manage reminders, for an integrated view across multiple calendar providers. The app is redesigned to let users manage events more easily.
   MULTITASKING
All what you need at your fingertips!
Android 4.0 offers an improved multi-tasking or switching between open apps with a long press on the home button. A list of active applications will be displayed with a small thumbnail of the window, similar to the feature in Honeycomb. Holding the dedicated button on the System bar brings you with this scrollable list of running application and allows you to easily switch between them with a single tap.
  

CAMERA
Rich and Versatile!
The Camera app includes many new features such as; after capturing images, they can edit and share them easily with friends. When taking pictures, continuous focus, zero shutter lag exposure, and decreased shot-to-shot speed help capture clear, precise images. Stabilized image zoom lets users compose photos and video in the way they want, including while video is recording. For new flexibility and convenience while shooting video, users can now take snapshots at full video resolution just by tapping the screen as video continues to record. An improved Picture Gallery widget lets users look at pictures directly on their home screen.
Also now your camera will work just as any other digital camera with added advantages of face recognition, tap to focus and the best part – single motion –panorama mode.


CLOUD-CONNECTED EXPERIENCE
Cloud Access!
Android has always been cloud-connected, letting users browse the web and sync photos, apps, games, email, and contacts — wherever they are and across all of their devices. Android 4.0 adds new browsing and email capabilities to let users take even more with them and keep communication organized.
And for the Finale..
ANDROID BEAM
NFC, NFC, NFC!
Android Beam is an innovative, convenient feature for sharing across two NFC-enabled devices. It lets people instantly exchange favorite apps, contacts, music, videos — almost anything; just tap to send.
For sharing apps, Android Beam pushes a link to the app's details page in Android Market. On the other device, the Market app launches and loads the details page, for easy downloading of the app. Individual apps can build on android Beam to add other types of interactions, such as passing game scores, initiating a multiplayer game or chat, and more.
AND Last but not the least …
FACE UNLOCK
Your Face is the KEY.. ohh literally!!
Android 4.0 introduces a completely new approach to securing a device, making each person's device even more personal — Face Unlock is a new screen-lock option that lets users unlock their devices with their faces. It takes advantage of the device front-facing camera and state-of-the-art facial recognition technology to register a face during setup and then to recognize it again when unlocking the device. Users just hold their devices in front of their faces to unlock, or use a backup PIN or pattern.





So What does Android ICS offers from a MOBILE DEVELOPER’S PERSPECTIVE!

Early returns on the Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” software development kit have mobile developers praising the unified perspective and capabilities of the Google mobile OS — but their ability to test new apps is constrained by the lack of Android 4 devices, which also limits the market for apps that use the new OS. Android 4 unifies the OS and the SDK for both smartphones and tablets, replacing the Android 2.x OS for smartphones and the Android 3.x OS for tablets.  The mobile developers are in complete praise of the UI for Android 4.0. The API changes in Android 4 seem more evolutionary than revolutionary, which is a good thing for mobile developers. In addition to the Beam and Wi-Fi Direct APIs, Android adopts the “Honeycomb” security and device management APIs. Two new APIs that mobile developers are eager to try out are ShareActionProvider and Calendar Intents. “The ShareActionProvider is an abstraction around the very common desire for sharing a piece of data. For example, sharing a photo via SMS or sharing a URL via email.

THE BOTTOM LINE

With the clash of titles for the best OS Android Ice cream Sandwich appeals to the usability not only because of it s ease of use features and maneuverability but because it’s power, features, usability and security has attained new heights. This could definitely be a massive game changer in the clash of the OS. But as of now the users and the mobile developers are simply impressed by the enhancements and additions of the Android 4.0.

Looking forward to what Android has to surprise us in future!!

Endeavour is a specialist Mobility Company, providing strategic consulting and product development for Mobile enabling businesses in the Manufacturing, Media, Print, Healthcare, Consumer solutions, Telecom and Business Intelligence verticals. Endeavour has a strong mobile application development team on all mobile platforms in the market today, including, RIM, Apple, Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, micro Linux, Brew. Endeavour is based out of Austin, Texas, Bangalore India and London, UK. 

Monday, December 12, 2011

NFC, the buzzword everywhere, but what is the hype all about!!


NFC, short for Near Field Communication is a short-range wireless RFID technology that makes use of interacting electromagnetic radio fields instead of typical direct radio transmissions used by technologies such as Bluetooth. It is being predicted that gradually this technology will transform our mobile phones into a wallet loaded with payment cards from multiple sources including credit cards, health cards, loyalty cards and many more. As compared to its prior technologies such as RFID and Bluetooth, NFC is considered to be more intuitive, versatile and security ready, both with respect to technology as well as standards.

The NFC Ecosystem – Key Stakeholders
The kind of stakeholders involved in successful adoption of NFC are disparate & have to ideally come together to make this dream a reality. The diagram represents key stakeholders for successful implementation of NFC:
Some of the key challenges worth mentioning here include: consumer adoption, merchant adoption, standardization, and interoperability and last but not the least, the evolving business models such that the players/stakeholders are working with and not against one another.
The year 2011 was indeed pivotal for advancements in NFC. We saw the launch of Google wallet, the commitment of handset manufacturers and credit card companies behind ISIS and the cooperation of NFC reader manufacturers like VeriFone, which started building NFC into all of its new payment terminals. Payment gateway players such as Visa are also getting involved & taking the lead to explore NFC. Though currently there are only two cards that are NFC enabled, Citibank Master Card and a prepaid card issued by Google, but others are expected to follow soon.

NFC beyond Mobile Payments
NFC is way beyond mobile Payments. The general association of NFC with mobile payments is perhaps due to the fact that solutions from large players such as Google, Verizon came with solutions primarily focused around financial payments. This is however now true. NFC is way beyond Mobile Payments and has business opportunities across verticals, industries & domains. Some of the popular use cases could be:
-     In healthcare wherein the users have a health card which enables storing information about the patient’s health, billing & payment of insurance premium and many more use cases; 
-        In retail with smart shopping card;
-        Features such as exchanging personal information, virtual fingerprinting strengthening security
-        Mobile marketing; and many more

Challenges for NFC in 2012
The key challenges which we foresee for NFC in the year 2012 are:
1.     Lack of clarity to consumer
The consumers are still lost and confused about the complete concept. For NFC to be successful a comfort level needs to be created for the consumers and they have to be convinced about security of contact less payments via NFC. Also there are variety of devices enabled with NFC technology with no standards to set interoperability across devices & merchant kiosks. This will pose as the biggest challenge and the ecosystem will have to derive standards to see NFC in the year of 2012. The biggest concern currently is “All Wallets may not work on all Devices, all Networks & all Merchants”!!

2.     Market Battles
The market battle is ON! Mobile Platform’s are competing to leverage the first mover advantage, while service providers & merchants are competing to jump a leap ahead of their competitors.

3.     Merchant’s Dilemma
Merchant’s dilemma is “Which Wallet to Support”! Also they will need to make a huge investment in terms of upgrading their POS systems & kiosks to enable leveraging full capability of NFC technology.

4.     Profit Issue
Who is making the money, is the billion dollar question? Every stakeholder is trying to leverage as much as possible and be on the winning end. The point all the stakeholder’s are missing is, we all need to work with and not against one another to make this a win-win situation for all of us.
Future of NFC
We predict the future of NFC in years to come is extremely promising. This will however depend on how the relationship between stakeholders of NFC ecosystem evolves but all said and done, the key players involved will use all possible carrot-and-stick approaches to convince merchants to adopt NFC.
Irrespective of the challenges NFC will face, the industry will evolve with new standards to embed NFC chips into SD or Micro SD cards. We expect new type of NFC tags to store more data, NFC enabled SIM cards and SIM based NFC payment solution.


Endeavour recently hosted a Webinar on “Insider’s Insight into NFC” which provided much more details about NFC, its future & trends. The recording of the same is available here:

 
Also Read our previous post

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Mobile weds Cloud - The perfect marriage?


Everyone in technology world is talking about Cloud & it’s perfect marriage with Mobile. Cloud computing has grown from a pie-in-the-sky vision to a major IT movement and is surely having an enormous impact across industries, changing the way we access and store data. But it holds special promise for smart phones & tablets, which serve as the gateway to our most important content.

The wants of Consumers, Enterprises, and Application Enablers!!
Today consumers & enterprises are looking for information to be available anytime, anywhere and without any restrictions on the devices being used. In such a scenario it was not the “Need being the mother of invention” but “Need being the motivation behind the marriage between Mobile & Cloud”.

From consumer’s perspective, they would like the ability to store and access unlimited media irrespective of the device limitations. Enterprises want to enable wide range of IT functions to enhance employee productivity and to keep them connected across regions thereby enabling seamless sharing of information, delivering services & effective collaboration. With regards to service providers & application enablers, they would want to build apps which are platform agnostic and which can be supported on multiple devices.

Lot of enterprises are moving on to hosted solutions over “The Cloud” and are deriving significant cost advantages. A typical example of such offering is “Enterprise mobile cloud device management tool”. The solutions assists the IT teams at large enterprises in remotely managing the mobile devices by setting policies, performing security verifications, creating enterprise level sandboxes as well in securing virtual areas within the device to segregate personal and enterprise data.

This reflects “Mobility + Cloud” is changing the way mobile applications are developed, acquired and used within the enterprise, or utilized by the consumers for accessing enterprise & personal information. Research from Gartner & IDC further support this fact wherein Gartner estimated “Cloud Software as a Service” to be a $9.2 billion market in 2010, set to reach $10.7 billion in 2011. Another analyst firm, IDC, predicted a $72.9 billion cloud services market by 2015, with SaaS offerings composing roughly 75 percent of that amount.

Are the Current Trends Interesting?
Cloud services utilized by enterprises make mobile devices such as Smartphone & tablets more productive with reduced cost, enabling enterprise employees to access data centre resources that previously were only accessible via desktops, laptops and notebooks. Mobile devices with their ubiquitous, non-stop wireless access make cloud-delivered applications, data, and services more relevant and more instantly available anywhere.

App stores have seen a terrific surge in sheer number of the applications available for. Thereby some of the recent app stores such as HiSpace have moved on to the Cloud which makes it easier to seamlessly maintain, access and synchronize the applications across the range of devices owned by the typical user or household: TVs, PCs, phones, tablets, gaming devices, etc. The developer community is also challenged with developing and constantly updating for multiple OSs, and numerous flavours of phones and tablets. The Cloud enables some consolidation of this work stream.
Leapdrive” is a typical example of the way Cloud Providers are enabling content from the Cloud across various channels. The appication allows the users to remotely access, view, manage and share all their digital content as soon as it is uploaded to user’s cloud storage. All the multimedia – music, photos and videos – are available to the user while they are on the go. The solution supports streaming music and videos, access to photographs, files directly from the cloud space to the mobile device turning your mobile into a bottomless phone with access to “gigabytes” of space!!

Are we missing the iCloud?
Looking at the future, cloud will work its way even deeper into the consumer sphere beginning next year. The launch of iClould by Apple with iOS5 or better known as the iOS 4S , is essentially an admittance to the fact that iTunes/local storage/sync model is not acceptable in todays multiple device/content everywhere/web services world. After Apple’s iCloud, few other manufacturers are also warming up to the cloud storage and services. HTC was the first to kick of the cloud debate and Huawei is taking it a step further. Huawei provides cloud solution with a free storage of 10 GB in its new devices such as Huawei Vision & Mediapad.

Though application developers & service providers are considering the cloud as a much more compelling place to host one's applications with each passing day, Enterprises are evaluating Cloud with regards to few key challenges such as security & lock-in.
A number of open-source projects and products are now attempting to resolve the lock-in problem, but there's still a long way to go. Security, too, is the focus of much talk and a fair amount of activity from industry organizations, but it looks as if it might take a damaging breach to kick-start an industry-wide approach to resolving some core issues.

What lies in the future?
Consumerization of Cloud Services isn’t something that’s coming. It’s something that’s here.
As the mobility experts we foresee that very soon the browser will become “An Appstore” in itself and most of the consumer as well as enterprise applications will directly operate through the cloud. The advancements in network speeds and low cost Cloud Storage options will drive the integration of cloud and mobile applications thereby evolving cloud computing as the key. We’ll have people accessing social media and corporate apps from smart phones and tablets.

The Mobile Cloud will pave the way for the “Internet of Things.”!!

Our “10 Cents” on the prediction for the future of cloud & mobile’s marriage, is that they are going to live through this time of evolution and make it a “perfect” story. 

Endeavour is a specialist Mobility Company, providing strategic consulting and product development for Mobile enabling businesses in the Manufacturing, Media, Print, Healthcare, Consumer solutions, Telecom and Business Intelligence verticals. Endeavour has a strong mobile application development team on all mobile platforms in the market today, including, RIM, Apple, Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, micro Linux, Brew. Endeavour is based out of Austin, Texas, Bangalore India and London, UK. 

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Mobilizing the enterprise is imperative for businesses


People don’t treat Smartphone's the same way they do laptops, but these devices have become every bit as powerful. As an end user they would prefer having enterprise featured phone so that they can do online credit card payment and take advantages of mobile banking. Book movie, hotel & travel tickets while they are waiting at the metro station for the next train to arrive. Monitor their health & send the reports generated by the self health assessment mobile applications for diseases such as diabetes, asthma, and chronic illnesses to their doctors.
This is the consumer facing aspect of Enterprise Mobility, while the scope of Mobility within the Enterprise is humongous. Forrester recently released data showing 78% of information workers either use or want to use smartphones for work. So from a application suite for a fortune 100 organization in the space of surgical equipment development. Through the app a sales person will be able to access any information when making a sale and a customer visit in an online as well as offline mode. App provides critical information such as Marketing Content, Clinical content, Product Specs, Tools & Apps. This solutions help businesses automate tasks such as inventory control, sales processing, and tracking of customer interactions thereby enabling organizations manage customer relationships better.
Understanding the impact of mobile technology on enterprises is compelling several forward-looking companies to internally start deploying mobility technology solutions into their systems across verticals such as Manufacturing, Retail, Healthcare, Education Insurance, Banking and Financial Services.
A famous retail chain in US envisioned delivering a personalized, convenient shopping experience and at the same time reducing administrative cost and increasing employee effectiveness. So they built an Enterprise application system for their store employees. The solution enables store employees to assist customers by giving product demos, enhancing their shopping experience & increasing the sales. Field Force Automation solution in Enterprise mobility has improved a field worker’s productivity by automating the collection and validation of field data and enhancing customer service. The sales representatives are mobile empowered to access CRM system to document sales call details, process customer contact information and verify distribution of product samples, all in real time.
Endeavour mobile enabled the EMR- EHR-Practice Management Software. The application developed for one of the client helps the physician, Nurses or Physician’s aid to view the patient details, past visit records, health summary and also would help to manage medication refills and orders.  App is so strong enough that it can assist in Managing Patient Schedules, Demographics and Maintain Patient Health Summary & Visit Notes. The app gives quick access to Lab Results, refill requests, facilitate internal Messaging, complete Audit trails & generates the needed reports and Dashboards.
Clarity PPM Smartphone Application is one such app which implements the Timesheet module of the Clarity PPM’s enterprise project and portfolio management solution on the mobile devices. The solution simplifies workflow and enhances the productivity by bringing the concomitant benefits of location independence. The mobility solution helps user to access the timesheet module on the mobile device and to use the functionalities such as update, save and submit for approval. This mobility solution enables the top management and the users to save time in filling the timesheet and approving the same even while they are on the move.

Leading Business Analytics Software and Service Provider's have a challenge of getting access to uninterrupted business information & statistics to keep business goals updated. Endeavour’s Mobile Dashboard Application solution provides them with dashboards which help in knowing the pulse of the organization’s performance. Dashboards are created and maintained through an easy-to-use Web-based interface. All content is displayed in a role-based, secure, customizable, and extensible environment. The mobile client available on Blackberry & Windows Mobile has unique features such as app cache management, auto update and remote wipe off, search, alerts, support to multiple languages & access anytime any where capabilities.
The Inventory & Aviation industry is also heavily influenced by mobile technology. iPhone application Mobile Inventory Management  helps traders to monitor customer demands and can United Airlines pilots carry iPads which have replaced hefty flight manuals and chart books. With iPad, they are able to quickly and efficiently access reference material without having to thumb through thousands of sheets of paper and reduce clutter on the flight deck.
mazing invention of Virtual smartphone Platform which moves smartphone data to the enterprise Cloud by creating a clone of all of the data and applications on the phone. The platform gives IT and end users real-time intelligence and control over smartphone content, activity and applications. Read more about this and many such innovations happening in Mobile cloud computing space in our next blog post.
 Endeavour is a specialist Mobility Company, providing strategic consulting and product development for Mobile enabling businesses in the Manufacturing, Media, Print, Healthcare, Consumer solutions, Telecom and Business Intelligence verticals. Endeavour has a strong mobile application development team on all mobile platforms in the market today, including, RIM, Apple, Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, micro Linux, Brew. Endeavour is based out of Austin, Texas, Bangalore India and London, UK.