Steffen Hess

mConcAppt – A Method for the Conception of Mobile Business Applications

Mobile business applications (mobile business apps) bear huge potentials for increased work productivity, work comfort, and even sales if they are of high quality. Usability and user experience, in particular, are among the key quality attributes. The high quality requirements of mobile business apps require them to be thoroughly engineered. Unfortunately, today’s software engineering approaches are often too heavy-weight to allow developing high-quality mobile business apps in the context of mobile projects, which often face small budgets, extremely limited effort, and short time-to-market requirements. This paper presents mConcAppt, a user-centered and lightweight conception method for mobile business apps. It provides guidance for requirements engineering and interaction design for mobile business apps and provides interfaces to other activities, such as visual design, architectural design, implementation, and testing. The adoption of mConcAppt in various industrial contexts indicates that it enables organizations to elaborate a concept for a high-quality mobile business app in 2-4 weeks.

Does the ipad add value to business environments

Mobile tablets like the iPad recently had a huge success in the consumer market. This generates the demand to use them productively in business environments. The underlying case study evaluates the introduction of iPads at an applied research company. The study gives evidence that the iPad adds value to this particular business environment especially in terms of productivity and joy of use. A detailed composition of benefits and drawbacks shows major factors that have to be considered when thinking about introducing and integrating iPads to a business environment.

Why Data Needs more Attention in Architecture Design - Experiences from Prototyping a Large-Scale Mobile App Ecosystem

Data is of great importance in computer science and in particular in information systems and how data is treated has major impact on a systems quality attributes. Nevertheless, software architecture research, literature, and practice often neglect data and focus instead on other architectural topics like components and connectors or the management of architecture decisions in general. This paper contributes experiences from the prototyping of a large-scale mobile app ecosystem for the agricultural domain. Architectural drivers like multi-tenancy, different technical platforms and offline capability led to deep reasoning about data. In this paper, we describe the architectural decisions made around data in the app ecosystem and we present our lessons learned on technical aspects regarding data, but also on data modeling and general methodical aspects how to treat data in architecting. We want to share these experiences with the research community to stimulate more research on data in software architecture and we want to give practitioners usable hints for their daily work around data in constructing large information systems and ecosystems.

i2ME: a framework for building interactive mockups

Providing interactive mockups of mobile applications in designing phases introduces new challenges for interaction designers compared to the traditional way of static mockups. In particular, the complexity of this process increases when it comes to enabling the user to actually explore the intended user experience of the mobile environment by enhancing traditional handmade sketches or tool-generated wireframes with concrete mobile interaction elements. We introduce a framework, called i2ME (interactive Mockup-Building for Mobile Environment), for building interactive mockups with concrete mobile interaction elements. The framework enhances the static mockups (handmade or tool-generated) with screen transitions and multi-touch gestures, and enables the deployment of the resulting HTML5+JavaScript based interactive mockups to multiple platforms and device classes.

Quality by Construction Through mConcAppt: Towards Using UI-construction as Driver for High Quality Mobile App Engineering

Mobile Business Apps bear a huge potential to increase employee productivity, working comfort, and even sales if they are of high quality. Thereby, usability and user experience are seen as the key quality attributes. This paper shortly describes a constructive user centered method (mConcAppt) for UI and interaction design that is closely interwoven with all other activities in the software engineering lifecycle. Ensuring a high quality product by construction, the method clearly defines those interfaces to other activities. Thus, mConcAppt serves as a driver for information exchange and communication within mobile app engineering teams. Experiences from various applications in practice are shown that describe those communication needs and interfaces in detail.

Standardizing model-based in-vehicle infotainment development in the German automotive industry

Based on the analysis of existing HMI development processes in the automotive domain, a reference process for software engineering has been developed. This process was used to develop a domain data model and a model-based specification language in order to establish a common exchange format based on consistent domain knowledge. This approach provides a common ground for collaboration to OEMs, suppliers, and software tool developers. It also facilitates traceability from requirements and conceptual elements to concrete, specified elements using the model-based specification language.

Workshop on prototyping to support the interaction designing in mobile application development (PID-MAD 2013)

Recent changes in the mobile environment; such as the addition of multi-touch gestures, usage of sensors, or single-focused mobile apps; brought several challenges for interaction designers in communicating their ideas and thoughts enduring early design activities. Traditional prototyping techniques may not provide sufficient support due to the lack of current mobile interaction paradigms in them. Therefore, a shift is required in prototyping techniques and approaches in order to support properly the interaction design process of mobile application development for the current mobile environment. Targeting these concerns, the workshop envisions that the research must address the need for a change in existing prototyping techniques as well as focusing on novel prototyping approaches and frameworks that would support not only the interaction design process but the whole development process of mobile application development.

Digitale Innovationen von Bürgern für Bürger - Design Thinking oder Citizen Science?

Der vorliegende Beitrag beschreibt einen partizipativen Ansatz zur Entwicklung von digitalen Diensten für ländliche Regionen. Im Projekt „Digitale Dörfer“ realisiert das Projektteam gemeinsam mit den Einwohnern von drei Verbandsgemeinden in Rheinland-Pfalz verschiedene Mitmachszenarien zur Stärkung des Wir-Gefühls innerhalb der Gemeinschaft und zur Verbesserung der Nahversorgung durch örtlich ansässige Händler. In zwei Testphasen wurde ein regionaler Online-Marktplatz mit Apps zur Lieferung bestellter Waren durch Freiwillige erprobt. Hier hat sich beispielsweise gezeigt, dass Freiwillige bereit sind bis zu fünf Minuten Umweg für die Zustellung einer Lieferung in Kauf zu nehmen. In den Testphasen konnten darüber hinaus alle Lieferungen ohne Beanstandung dem Empfänger übergeben werden, was auf eine große Sorgfaltspflicht der Freiwilligen schließen lässt. Die Erprobung des so genannten Mitmachszenarios wies auf der einen Seite Erfolge auf, offenbarte zugleich aber auch die Notwendigkeit, weitergehende Konzepte in das entstehende Ökosystem einzubinden um die Attraktivität des Systems zu steigern. Auf die Frage, ob es sich bei dem gewählten Ansatz um Design Thinking, Citizen Science oder doch beides zugleich handelt wird am Ende des Beitrags eingegangen.

Workshop on Designing Interaction and Visualization for Mobile Applications (DIViM 2015)

The DIViM 2015 workshop focuses on different issues and limitations regarding designing intuitive interaction and visualization for mobile applications and devices, as well as how to overcome these limits through novel approaches and techniques.

Adding Multi-Touch Gesture Interaction in Mobile Web Applications

This paper describes the MTGest framework, an open library for adding multi-touch gesture interaction to HTML-based mobile web applications. MTGest was used in a comparative study to evaluate the multi-touch gesture interaction in a mobile web application in comparison to a native iOS mobile application. The results indicates that in most cases the web based gestures efficiency is either approximately the same or higher than the iOS-based app. The study was carried out as an initial experiment using isolated gestures, targeting the iOS platform only. For generalizing the results there is a need to perform detailed user evaluation studies with different platforms and for more complex interaction scenarios.