Forrester Research did some digging into the field of mobile app development, strategy and presentation and gathered up “The Good, the bad, the…”. By exploiting flaws in the plethora of mobile media applications available to users today, they in turn did a great favor to my development phase of research and design strategy. Exposing the issues that competitive mobile apps have in the greater marketplace of choices entitles future developers to take those mistakes and apply that collected knowledge into the construction of their own unique app. When researching my capstone project for The Dallas Socials app, I tirelessly analyzed the competing mobile apps in the field and tried to emulate the good that I saw and violently flee from the frustrations of their UI eyesores.

The Forrester presentation provided a model for mobile strategy to feed off of. The word P.O.S.T, or People, Objectives, Strategy and Technology, is the way in which the journey of app development should set off with in mind. The information provided to me in the presentation not only made me laugh as they picked apart apps that I saw nothing wrong with but stunned me with some statistics and wants that still were not being provided. For instance, certain apps lacked the ability of the user to swipe seamlessly across screens. At the time of this presentations release, there were still mobile applications that were sloppily slow and staggered painfully during the usage period. Using this knowledge, I wanted to truly focus on a presentable and marketable UI that at first glance and use would provide the consumer with the same abilities and accessibility that they have with our blog interface.

Another set of important topics to cover were Usability, Consextuatlity and Visability. Of course, with The Dallas Socials app, I want to provide the user to have the ability to interact with our posts, event listings and UI so that they can customize their experience to their liking and in a way that they feel like we are catering to them. The issue of context comes into play when we think about our audience and their experiences when pairing those alongside with the evolving and up to date content we provide to them. We must stay within the bounds of the walls we’ve constructed around our blog. The topical and communication based barrier pose the question of how can we take things from outside of our blog realm and spin them in a light that seems fitting and useful. Lastly, visibility is key. We are lucky to have a large following and readership rate that when the app goes live it will be supported my a loyal set of readers and social media participants. For a lifestyle application like ours to reach its visibility potential, we must take every available social and offline resources to grow the awareness and reach. If done right, the application will reach its intended and previous supported audience and we will have achieved a successful launch.

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