Building Innovative Applications from the User’s World Experience - Part 1

In today’s application space, it is critical to understand the user and the problems that they have when creating new applications. This bottom up approach can yield to unexpected and innovative methods and applications that would otherwise not become available. During the next week, I will explore three users and the problems that they face, and describe solutions that Movius developed inside of an understanding of those end users.

The first user is the savvy business professional that is always on the go. This person continuously moves from location to location throughout the day; she is constantly on the phone and is expected to by easily reached. In her world, we have identified several problems that occur when attempting to be available anytime and anywhere – without being tethered to one place. A simple solution would be to communicate only on her cell phone, but after a two-hour conference and a thirty-minute debrief the phone battery is almost out, she is utilizing lots of minutes and she missed the text message that her son sent asking for a ride home after school. Alternatively she could use the desk phone, but if she has to leave she is tethered to her landline and has to interrupt the flow of the call to break off and restart on her cell phone. Movius’ Automated Presence solution is built to solve our user’s dilemmas with an elegant compromise. Automated Presence takes a follow-me number to the next level. Our user can provide her community with a single number that will find her in the office when she is there, on her home phone when she is at home (or in a satellite office), and on her cell phone when she is away. Automated Presence is fully automatic so once they have setup the application there is nothing for the user to do, except grab their phone and keys and head out the door. When she arrives at home, while on a call, the system will automatically (with or without prompting) switch the call to her home phone (Call Handoff) without disrupting the flow of the call she is on. There are more features in the Automated Presence suite – each targeted at solving a particular problem that our user has in her world experience.

The next few posts about users' world experiences will take us from a village in Africa to a businessman who is always on the go with his BlackBerry®. You will see how understanding communication problems that users face help drive development of innovative solutions that help people communicate with each other anytime and anywhere.