MoDev East 2013 - Usability Matters, Even for a Captive Audience

I recently had an opportunity to present at MoDev East with my friend Molly Moran. Our presentation was about designing enterprise mobile apps with a focus on usability and human centered design principals. Our general thesis was that historically, enterprise applications have had a reputation for being complex, difficult to use, and poorly designed. Now that many corporate organizations are beginning to develop enterprise apps, there’s an opportunity to change the process of designing enterprise tools and to improve their usability. This is especially important for mobile apps because they will be used in new and unique scenarios with different constraints from traditional desktop applications.

The presentation included examples of how our team has focused on usability and design in the development of mobile apps within the Department of State.  Over the past year we’ve released two enterprise mobile apps that help to brief and inform principals within the Department. In both instances, the apps presented challenges in designing an interface that was intuitive for users and presented information in a way that helped to make connections and make the information easy to access. To overcome these challenges, we used human-centered design principles to identify the essence of the problem, and an Agile development methodology to quickly and effectively develop innovative solutions. We also work very closely with business units to iteratively design highly intuitive interfaces and positive experiences for our users, while ensuring our systems take into account needs and goals from all corners of the enterprise.

Overall, the conference was great and there were a large number of sessions focused on mobile applications within the enterprise. It seems like there are an increasing number of corporations and government agencies that are beginning to dip their toe into the enterprise mobile application market. Those organizations would certainly benefit by learning from the consumer mobile app industry and focusing on building simple, easy to use apps.