Q: Tell me about the activities you participated in?

Kriss: On each of the two days I was the ‘Business Facilitator’ to a group of 8-10 Year 10 students. They were tasked with designing and pitching a new mobile app that allows young people to design their own t-shirts. The end results, in addition to various target setting and planning exercises, were a logo, a 60 business pitch, and a 60 second Youtube advert.

Q: What was your role?

Kriss: I was there to support and assist students in completing the tasks. I talked them through each task that was set, seeding ideas where they began to struggle, and encouraging students with their own ideas. Together, we defined group goals and personal goals. In the second half of the day, I took on more of a chairman role, ensuring that we stayed motivated and on time whilst preparing the business pitch and Youtube advert.

Q: What did your team create?

Kriss: My first team created an app called Marvin’s Tees. The second created O.T.Tees. Both apps were fairly similar in functionality but differed in their approach to the pitch and advert, some going for funny and some going for detailed and informational. Because of the audience (i.e. the rest of the school kids) the funnier stuff worked better.

Q: What did you learn?

Kriss: Largely I was surprised at some of the ideas that the kids came out with—things that I hadn’t thought of myself—that would be particularly effective in marketing their app, such as sponsoring a non-school uniform day in order to target a 14-24 demographic.

Q: What would you like to say to people considering volunteering in schools through The Tower Hamlets Business Partnership?

Kriss: This experience definitely exceeded expectations for me and was a wholly enjoyable couple of days. I won’t pretend that all of the kids were 100% interested the whole time, or that I didn’t find it frustrating when they fell short of what I thought they’d be capable of doing, but most are genuinely interested to try and find out about what you do for a living. Give it a try!

Kriss Watt from Tobias & Tobias volunteered through Tower Hamlets Education Business Partnership http://thebp.org.uk/

Why are forms such a chore? Designers from multiple industries have been trying to solve this problem for decades. Indeed, every layer of the experience when we use a computerised form has been meticulously crafted to reduce our stress – from the ergonomics of the keyboard & mouse to interaction components like dropdowns, radio buttons and auto-completed text fields. But the fact remains that they’re a stressful part of our everyday lives.

A recent example of design being used to ease the pain of forms is Funnel, a survey tool for iOS and Android.

Using Funnel for customer satisfaction surveys

Funnel uses an approach designers commonly take to the form problem, which is to make the process feel more fun and playful in the hope that users will warm to it. What’s the rationale behind this approach? Is it really more fun to fill out forms that are designed like this?

Making traditional form interactions look nicer

The interaction models are pretty conventional, just designed in a way that makes them less intimidating (assuming you aren’t intimidated by large smiley faces, of course). While this layer of design might be dismissed as superficial by people who focus on functionality, it definitely matters. The visual layer provides users with a subconscious cue as to the type of activity they’re about to undertake, and this will in turn affect their emotional state as they embark upon the activity.

Imagine two different signup forms, both asking for the same set of personal information, except one has been designed for a mortgage application process and the other for a music-oriented social networking site. They might even use the same set of interaction models – dropdowns, calendars, radio buttons – but we’d be surprised if the visual execution was identical. The mortgage provider should use visual design to convey an appropriate level of seriousness; after all, entering the wrong information may lead to rejection, or might count as fraud in extreme cases. However, this level of seriousness would seem oddly intimidating in the case of the social networking site.

Guess which one of these forms is a mortgage application

But is it enough to focus purely on the visual execution of forms, as Funnel seems to do, if we want to make them less painful? The visual, aesthetic layer design is slightly problematic in that it’s very culturally sensitive. A design that suggests playful informality in one part of the world might seem downright childish in another. This layer is also very subject to changing trends – a visual style that seems contemporary one year might become dated and corny very quickly. So perhaps it’s time to tackle the problem of forms at a deeper layer than purely visual design.

What are forms for? To gather information from users. Do we always need highly specific and granular data? No. Are we still dependent on keyboard, mouse and touch inputs? No. Can new devices and the data they can gather fundamentally change the form-completion process? Maybe.

Imagine a mobile form that works like a theremin, where the user lifts their device to change the value of a field, or tilts the phone to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Imagine a restaurant whose mobile app gathers feedback not with a slider, but by having customers express themselves with a smile or grimace and then taking a photo and algorithmically “scoring” their satisfaction. Imagine a rail company using location data to invoke a customer satisfaction survey when a journey ends, referring to timetable data to work out if the train was late and pre-populating the form as appropriate.

Some of these ideas may be less far-fetched than they sound at first. For example, the Happy Things project for Mac OS detects when you smile and automatically takes a picture of your face. It’s becoming easier for software to gauge our emotions as well as our location.

There’s a lot of scope for innovation in the way systems gather input from users, especially where mobile devices with richer contextual awareness are concerned. The process can become more powerful as well as more playful, as long as we continue to challenge ourselves as an industry and as designers. Why not exploit these capabilities instead of – or as well as – making checkboxes feel nicer?

This is why their marketing focuses so much on music, culture and lifestyle. It’s why O2 customers get priority tickets to concerts at the arenas bearing their name. It’s why Orange customers get half-price cinema tickets on Wednesdays. And it’s why T-Mobile runs that insufferable campaign about Josh and his ever-growing band.

Join the b(r)and: T-Mobile want to be associated with music and lifestyle

Customers are being encouraged to associate the brands of mobile operators with a certain type of lifestyle experience instead of just voice and data. This experience extends from the marketing to exclusive content services and even the interfaces and feature sets of the handsets themselves.

In this sense, mobile telcos are offering their customers a walled garden, in which the mobile internet is presented as part of a convenient package branded Orange, AT&T, T-Mobile or O2. If your internet memory goes back as far as the mid-1990s this might sound slightly familiar. But in the next ten years this walled garden is due to come under direct assault.

Charlie Stross has posted an excellent, thought-provoking piece looking at how the next ten years might pan out for the mobile industry – and making it sound in some ways like a technology rehash of the Great Game, with Apple and Google as the chief protagonists.

As Stross sees it, Apple and Google both want to destroy the walled garden built by telcos but for different reasons and in different ways. As a premium marque, Apple wants to work with telcos while preventing their brands from adulterating the Apple experience:

Apple don’t want to destroy the telcos; they just want to use them as a conduit to sell their user experience… [they] want to maintain the high quality Apple-centric user experience and sell stuff to their users through the walled garden of the App Store and the iTunes music/video store

Google, on the other hand, wants people to view more of its ads. To make this happen, Google wants to fundamentally reshape the mobile industry:

I think Google are pursuing a grand strategic vision of destroying the cellco’s entire business model… turning 3G data service into a commodity… getting consumers to buy unlocked SIM-free handsets [like the Nexus One]… and ultimately do the Google thing to all your voice messages [through Google Voice] as well as your email and web access.

These distinct strategies both threaten the mobile telcos, who stand to lose any emotional connection they have with their customers either way. But this doesn’t mean that Apple and Google are going to be bedfellows:

Apple’s iPhone has been good for Google: iPhone users do far more web surfing — and Google ad-eyeballing — than regular phone users. But Apple want to maintain…  the walled garden of the App Store and iTunes… [and] Google can’t slap their ads all over those media. So it’s going to end in handbags at dawn … eventually.

The piece (here’s the link again by the way) has me thinking that the coming decade in mobile networks will be much like the previous decade was in land-line internet service provision.

If Charlie Stross is right, the idea of the telco as provider of an experience will not last the decade, meaning that flash mobs, Orange Rock Corps and Josh Ward will become nothing but a dim and distant memory. And customers will hopefully have greater choice over how they use mobile networks, which would be nothing but a good thing in my opinion.

But an exchange during the following Q&A session stuck in my mind later. One of our directors asked a question: is the mobile app destined to be a transitory phenomenon, something that will fade away as mobile browsers become capable of delivering the same functionality?

The speaker was adamant that this was not the case and that mobile apps were here to stay. He felt that Google’s increasing preference for mobile browser apps over native apps was misguided and that Google were wrong on this one. Mobile browsers were so far from rivalling the functionality of native apps that it wasn’t even worth thinking about.

I was tempted to counter this point by bringing up the iPhone’s support for HTML 5 and starting a detailed discussion about in-browser capabilities. But this wasn’t the main subject of the talk and I’m in no way an expert on HTML 5, so I decided to keep my mouth shut instead.

In the weeks since the talk, however, I’ve often found myself turning this question over and over again in my head. And the more I think about it, the more I feel that mobile apps are basically doomed – or at least I hope they are.

Don’t get me wrong – they play an important role. It’s good that so many people today see phones as devices for more than just calling or texting, and the iPhone and its suite of native apps is largely to thank for this. But in the longer run, the publication and distribution model they are based on has to go.

The idea of tying software to a single hardware platform is anachronistic, uncompetitive and limits user choice. This is bad enough when you’re dealing with computers, but it’s even worse when the devices are as personal as mobile phones. People should be free to choose a different phone without needing to buy new versions of the software tools that have become integral to their lives.

Aside from user choice, there’s a more practical reason why the native app model is unsustainable. Developers won’t want to keep maintaining multiple codebases for the apps they produce, especially when there’s the option of building an equally functional in-browser app which any standards-based client can run. And although Apple might hope to render this point irrelevant by establishing monopolistic domination of the smartphone market, relieving developers of the need to consider other platforms, current research indicates that they won’t succeed.

The smartphone OS market will be more fragmented in 2012 than in 2009

A more fragmented smartphone OS market will increasingly compel developers to support separate codebases for Windows Mobile, RIM, Android, Symbian and the iPhone. But as mobile browsers become capable of delivering similar interactivity, serious developers will become inclined to start using the browser as the platform instead. This will be a good thing for users and the industry alike.

If I’m correct and native apps do fade away over time, we may look back on the era of pointless mobile apps as just one among many strange blips in the history of technology. But despite some early rumblings from notable developers, native mobile apps will be with us for some time yet – and, in the medium term at least, they still have an important role to play in encouraging mainstream adoption of the mobile internet.

Edit: This article was later reposted on Android and Me and attracted numerous comments. Click here to see the conversation on Android and Me

Edit 2: Stephen Fulljames shared a couple of links related to this post. PhoneGap is a toolkit for developing mobile apps in HTML & JavaScript. And this post from front-end consultant Peter-Paul Koch provides some background to his work with Vodafone on mobile browser compatibility and W3C widgets.