When was the last time you silently cursed a badly designed feature while using your email client, newly installed software at your firm, IVR menu of a call centre, your online banking system, your car or even your office coffee machine? Chances are it was last week —it’s another matter that you sucked it up and moved on with your life.
You could perhaps attribute your frustration to the ubiquitous mobile app (the poster child of the digital economy) for enhancing your sense of fine user experience. And you may not be alone in doing that as mobile apps quietly go about shaping many of the expectations we have from the products and services we consume on a daily basis.
In the last few years we’ve seen number of mobile apps skyrocketing to over 5 million with over 90 billion downloads, yet users spend most of their time only on a handful of apps. This has not only intensified the competition for user mindshare, but also generated a vast body of knowledge and best practices for building quality apps that users love and want to come back to, again and again.
It is not hard to grasp why user experience (UX) can be a tough nut to crack for mobile apps. We expect them to be simple, elegant and yet highly efficient in getting the job done. Any app that is taxing on our thumbs (or fingers) and requires more cognitive effort than changing the channels on our TV can tick us off.
That said, not everyone is losing their sleep over the UX. Certainly not the Exploration and Production (E&P) sector, apparently.
Just like any other digital technology, mobility is also creating certain excitement in the E&P sector with slow and steady uptick in app adoption. Quite expectedly, E&P CIOs along with their business counterparts have started putting together their firms’mobility strategy.
However, the main focus of the strategy has been around technical aspects such as data security, choice of enterprise mobility platforms and app development approach. As far as UX is concerned, it has yet to get much attention beyond the customary nods from the think tanks. It would be understandable if mobile apps were coming off-the-shelf, giving E&P firms little say in the UX design, but the majority of apps in the E&P sector today are custom-built (in-house or by service providers) and will continue to be for some time.
The general thinking is that the market offers enough expertise that E&P firms can summon to deal with the UX. True, but I also believe that external expertise will have limited value if the firms don’t have the internal capabilities and culture to absorb and complement the practices that mobility solution providers bring to the table.
Let me highlight a few such practices that merit attention from the E&P firms.
User experience is more than an attractive screen with fancy charts and colours as some tend to believe. UX is a greater whole delivered by various parts such as screen layout, controls, authentication, navigation and data access. Imagine a car, where a great driving experience is delivered by many parts of it such as: engine, powertrain, chassis, interiors and various utilities coming together – not just by the way the car looks.
E&P firms have traditionally relied on their super users or Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to design their desktop-based applications such as Dashboards. While taking nothing away from the SMEs, it’s a lot easier to design an interface for the large dual screens with fast internet speed —that many E&P engineers enjoy —compared to the smaller screens of mobile devices on unpredictable internet connectivity.
An efficient app design demands deep understanding of the users’information usage patterns, working styles, environment and smart trade-offs in the features. A field engineer raising (often with the gloves on) request for corrective maintenance on a tablet requires a different user experience than a manager approving that request on a smart phone. There is simply no cookie-cutter approach to the app design.
Forward-thinking E&P firms, being aware of this challenge, are embracing modern design concepts such as Design Thinking that help build deeper insight into the business problems being solved by the app and generate ideas to create the optimal design by drawing upon end users’diverse points of view.
At the same time success of such methods requires acceptance and wider participation of end users, many of whom may be getting exposed to them for the first time and may not feel “at home”with terms such as Personas or Journey Maps. This is where leadership needs to play an active role in creating awareness and breaking internal collaboration barriers.
Experts advise that getting the right user experience is an evolving process that entails multiple iterations focussed on making design enhancements by learning from end users’feedback on incremental software releases. This philosophy of “do fast and learn fast”has led to the wider adoption of the Agile methodologies with DevOps becoming a de-facto standard for mobile app development in many hi-tech sectors.
Moreover, emerging cloud-based architectural paradigms utilizing micro-servicesand low/no-code toolspromise faster release cycles, shrinking them down to a few weeks or even days. They also allow the development teams to experiment with a variety of technology components to achieve design innovations.
Embedding these practices, however, will require E&P firms to rethink their IT project management and software development practices that are probably suited for “certain”types of IT projects but could encumber the mobile apps that tend to have smaller scope and lesser complexity.
For example, many E&P firms still struggle with Agile in their IT projects due to functional silos, particularly those involving business and IT, combined with the documentation and approval-heavy project management stage-gates. On the technology front, E&P firms, barring some notable exceptions, still show reluctance to use cloud based infrastructure for software development, which creates dependency on physical infrastructure availability and limits the project teams’architectural options for meeting the design requirements.
Mobile product management is one of the widely recommended practices for ensuring that UX keeps pace with changing operational realities and technology landscape. It combines the processes, governance and product championship focussed on continuous improvement of the apps through harnessing market innovation and constant engagement with end users, gathering their inputs and funnelling those into the planned release cycles.
So far E&P firms haven’t had to worry about the product management. Their flagship desktop applications come from the vendors while custom-built applications, once developed, receive reactive maintenance from IT until they get phased out.
In order to protect their investments on mobile apps, E&P firms may have to consider putting in place the structure, discipline and skills to manage the apps like products. Leaving the responsibility for upkeep of these apps on IT and service providers’may not bring the necessary innovation to keep the apps relevant to the users.
While some of these practices may not be news to the E&P firms, not many —especially those in the early days of their mobility journey —will show appetite to go through all the pains to adopt them just for the sake of UX. Some, I suspect, wouldn’t even mind a few hits and misses with their apps as they navigate the mobility learning curve. After all, a bad UX has never put any E&P firm out of the business and failures of a few apps here and there may not burn a big hole in the managers’pockets. End users, on their part, might just put up with the average apps like they have with the clunky dashboards, sundry applications built with Microsoft Access or Visual basics and interpretation tools that still require running command lines or scripts.
However, the optimist in me believes that things may look better once mobility takes hold in the sector, E&P firms become more digital and a new generation of the users (a.k.a. millennials) —spoiled by the Instagrams, Snapchats, Dropboxes and Google apps of the world —have significant voice in their firms’digital affairs.
What we would see then are not only great apps in the E&P sector, but user experience taking center stage in development of almost everything that goes into a computer screen with a human on the other side of it. That would not be just hugely empowering to the end users, but could transform work practices in ways unimagined so far.
In the last few years we’ve seen number of mobile apps skyrocketing to over 5 million with over 90 billion downloads, yet users spend most of their time only on a handful of apps. This has not only intensified the competition for user mindshare, but also generated a vast body of knowledge and best practices for building quality apps that users love and want to come back to, again and again.
It is not hard to grasp why user experience (UX) can be a tough nut to crack for mobile apps. We expect them to be simple, elegant and yet highly efficient in getting the job done. Any app that is taxing on our thumbs (or fingers) and requires more cognitive effort than changing the channels on our TV can tick us off.
That said, not everyone is losing their sleep over the UX. Certainly not the Exploration and Production (E&P) sector, apparently.
UX in the E&P Sector
Just like any other digital technology, mobility is also creating certain excitement in the E&P sector with slow and steady uptick in app adoption. Quite expectedly, E&P CIOs along with their business counterparts have started putting together their firms’mobility strategy.However, the main focus of the strategy has been around technical aspects such as data security, choice of enterprise mobility platforms and app development approach. As far as UX is concerned, it has yet to get much attention beyond the customary nods from the think tanks. It would be understandable if mobile apps were coming off-the-shelf, giving E&P firms little say in the UX design, but the majority of apps in the E&P sector today are custom-built (in-house or by service providers) and will continue to be for some time.
The general thinking is that the market offers enough expertise that E&P firms can summon to deal with the UX. True, but I also believe that external expertise will have limited value if the firms don’t have the internal capabilities and culture to absorb and complement the practices that mobility solution providers bring to the table.
Let me highlight a few such practices that merit attention from the E&P firms.
Design Thinking
User experience is more than an attractive screen with fancy charts and colours as some tend to believe. UX is a greater whole delivered by various parts such as screen layout, controls, authentication, navigation and data access. Imagine a car, where a great driving experience is delivered by many parts of it such as: engine, powertrain, chassis, interiors and various utilities coming together – not just by the way the car looks.
E&P firms have traditionally relied on their super users or Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to design their desktop-based applications such as Dashboards. While taking nothing away from the SMEs, it’s a lot easier to design an interface for the large dual screens with fast internet speed —that many E&P engineers enjoy —compared to the smaller screens of mobile devices on unpredictable internet connectivity.
An efficient app design demands deep understanding of the users’information usage patterns, working styles, environment and smart trade-offs in the features. A field engineer raising (often with the gloves on) request for corrective maintenance on a tablet requires a different user experience than a manager approving that request on a smart phone. There is simply no cookie-cutter approach to the app design.
Forward-thinking E&P firms, being aware of this challenge, are embracing modern design concepts such as Design Thinking that help build deeper insight into the business problems being solved by the app and generate ideas to create the optimal design by drawing upon end users’diverse points of view.
At the same time success of such methods requires acceptance and wider participation of end users, many of whom may be getting exposed to them for the first time and may not feel “at home”with terms such as Personas or Journey Maps. This is where leadership needs to play an active role in creating awareness and breaking internal collaboration barriers.
Iterative Development
Experts advise that getting the right user experience is an evolving process that entails multiple iterations focussed on making design enhancements by learning from end users’feedback on incremental software releases. This philosophy of “do fast and learn fast”has led to the wider adoption of the Agile methodologies with DevOps becoming a de-facto standard for mobile app development in many hi-tech sectors.
Moreover, emerging cloud-based architectural paradigms utilizing micro-servicesand low/no-code toolspromise faster release cycles, shrinking them down to a few weeks or even days. They also allow the development teams to experiment with a variety of technology components to achieve design innovations.
Embedding these practices, however, will require E&P firms to rethink their IT project management and software development practices that are probably suited for “certain”types of IT projects but could encumber the mobile apps that tend to have smaller scope and lesser complexity.
For example, many E&P firms still struggle with Agile in their IT projects due to functional silos, particularly those involving business and IT, combined with the documentation and approval-heavy project management stage-gates. On the technology front, E&P firms, barring some notable exceptions, still show reluctance to use cloud based infrastructure for software development, which creates dependency on physical infrastructure availability and limits the project teams’architectural options for meeting the design requirements.
Mobile Product Management
Mobile product management is one of the widely recommended practices for ensuring that UX keeps pace with changing operational realities and technology landscape. It combines the processes, governance and product championship focussed on continuous improvement of the apps through harnessing market innovation and constant engagement with end users, gathering their inputs and funnelling those into the planned release cycles.
So far E&P firms haven’t had to worry about the product management. Their flagship desktop applications come from the vendors while custom-built applications, once developed, receive reactive maintenance from IT until they get phased out.
In order to protect their investments on mobile apps, E&P firms may have to consider putting in place the structure, discipline and skills to manage the apps like products. Leaving the responsibility for upkeep of these apps on IT and service providers’may not bring the necessary innovation to keep the apps relevant to the users.
WrAPPing it up
While some of these practices may not be news to the E&P firms, not many —especially those in the early days of their mobility journey —will show appetite to go through all the pains to adopt them just for the sake of UX. Some, I suspect, wouldn’t even mind a few hits and misses with their apps as they navigate the mobility learning curve. After all, a bad UX has never put any E&P firm out of the business and failures of a few apps here and there may not burn a big hole in the managers’pockets. End users, on their part, might just put up with the average apps like they have with the clunky dashboards, sundry applications built with Microsoft Access or Visual basics and interpretation tools that still require running command lines or scripts.
However, the optimist in me believes that things may look better once mobility takes hold in the sector, E&P firms become more digital and a new generation of the users (a.k.a. millennials) —spoiled by the Instagrams, Snapchats, Dropboxes and Google apps of the world —have significant voice in their firms’digital affairs.
What we would see then are not only great apps in the E&P sector, but user experience taking center stage in development of almost everything that goes into a computer screen with a human on the other side of it. That would not be just hugely empowering to the end users, but could transform work practices in ways unimagined so far.
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