It takes time to adjust to creating experiences for a new medium. When television was invented, the first TV shows were primarily radio plays translated to a new device. It took a while for talk shows, game shows, sitcoms, and reality television to find their place. Early websites were brochures with links to other brochureware sites. It took a while for commerce, discussion, video and community-generated content to find a place.

Similarly, many current mobile experiences are shrunken or sometimes pared down versions of desktop experiences. But remember that mobile — phones or tablets — involves different types of experiences than desktops or laptops. We carry these powerful mobile devices around with us, and we use them in a huge variety of contexts — in many diverse locations and situations.

We interact with these devices in different ways than with desktops, through touch, gestures, and voice. With their small screens and tiny keyboards, they can feel more restrictive than a desktop, yet in many other ways they are more empowering — through tools such as cameras, microphones, accelerometers, compasses, or biometric sensors (e.g., fingerprint or face recognition).

Think about your mobile designs. Are they scaled-down versions of your desktop designs? What is the opportunity for innovation? Can the use of a mobile device actually enhance the user experience?

Information: What's Important to Mobile Users

Enhancing an experience for mobile may be as simple as providing or emphasizing information that is more helpful on mobile than on desktop. This information can be an in-store map, the location of a painting in a museum, or opening hours. Some types of content that are important and relevant on mobile, and should be easy to find and use, include:

  • Location-related information
  • Time-based or time-sensitive information (e.g., events, deadlines)
  • Emergency information
  • Phone numbers
Enhancing an experience for mobile can be as simple as providing easy access to information important to a user on-the-go, such Edward-Elmhurst Health’s Emergency Room wait-time information (left), or ride wait times from the Legoland California amusement park (right).
Prioritized mobile tasks might include checking your remaining wait time at a restaurant, shown in the Chili’s app for Android, or quickly booking a nearby hotel room for a single night, shown on Kayak’s Android app.

Integration: What's Possible on Mobile Devices

Consider the things a mobile device makes easy for users: taking a photo, logging in with a finger, paying with a tap, and so on. How can we devise experiences that take advantage of the features and functionalities available on these devices? Can these built-in capabilities make the experience better or more relevant? Can the fact that they can be used in a wide variety of user contexts change what experiences are possible?

Think about how much easier it is for an online seller to add photos to a sale listing if she’s using her phone’s camera within a mobile app. Or how scanning a barcode on a prescription bottle makes a refill far speedier and less error prone than entering a lengthy number. Or how GPS and accelerometers make skiing, cycling, running, or walking easily trackable.

An audio tour makes little sense on the desktop website for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but on the mobile design it enables users to listen as they walk through the galleries (and can save the museum some of the expense of providing and managing audio guides).
SideChef, an Android cooking app, makes use of audio controls to allow cooks with messy hands to follow the recipe without having to touch the screen.

Innovation: Thinking in a New Way

Consider opportunities to design a unique experience for mobile. Create something that wasn’t possible or was difficult on a desktop or laptop: a new solution to an old problem, a new approach to an old flow.  These innovations may be minor changes that result in a big impact, or may be a completely new idea. When you think about context, portability, interaction style, and integrated tools, what new experiences might be possible?

Google Keep for Android: Setting a reminder based on a location, rather than time, is a simple change to an existing activity, made possible by the phone’s GPS.
Wayfair’s shopping app includes a View In Room feature that allows users to “place” an image of the product in a room, using the device’s camera. Clicking View In Room in the left screen opens the camera with an overlay of the item that can be resized and repositioned in the room. Users can then take a picture of the room with the item “in” it.
The BeMyEyes app for iOS connects blind and sighted users. Users who are blind ask questions such as “Is this milk expired?” and sighted users can answer via video connection.

Innovation isn’t just for surface UI — important as that is — but also for deep design. Take the insurance business: a traditional insurance policy provides a year’s coverage and requires the completion of many complex forms. But mobile apps can allow providers to insure individual drone flights, for instance, at the touch of a button on the operator’s phone: the insurance rate depends on location-dependent real-time data, such as location, air traffic and weather. Flying in bad weather is more expensive than flying in calm skies. 

The Verifly app for Android allows drone pilots to insure individual flights.

Opportunities Abound

An improvement to the user experience doesn’t need to involve an earth-shattering change.

Mobile experiences should go beyond shrinking desktop designs and instead take into account the unique aspects of the device and its contexts of use. There are many examples of mobile designs truly focused on optimizing the mobile experience, but many more need to focus on what is different about the mobile user and mobile experience.