Mobile as Future Workplace Experience

Technology has come a long way and has become an inevitable part in our lives. The most obvious one are our smartphones. Smartphones are the most used piece of technology by number of users as well as by the amount of hours spent daily. Within the last 6 years the number of users has almost doubled to 6.6 billion users worldwide and on average we spent 5 hours a day on a smartphone (worktime not included). In order to complete the statistics picture, the younger the people, the more they use the smartphone as first device to access to internet. If we take a closer look to these numbers, we can see, that they are already telling a story where we are globally heading on to. There are many different reasons for our heavy usage of smartphones, but they all intersect at a specific point. The usage is directly connected with stimulating our perceived needs.

Your supportive everyday tool

With the increased amount of usage we all are getting used to our smartphones more and more. Smartphones have already become our daily driver for anything. It all started with phone calls and quickly messaging apps became very popular. Nowadays there is an app for anything, for leisure, education or productivity we all use in our private life. In work environment most employees, especially the ones with a customer touchpoint, use a smartphone, but the main focus is communication via phone calls or emails. In our work environment we do not use the full potential of a smartphone. But the shift will inevitably come, because we saw that already in our private life and more importantly the future employees who grew up with almost exclusively with a smartphone as a single device will persist on a smartphone as the main device to get the job done. This might seem radical, because we cannot imagine a work life without a computer, but we also could not imagine that more people will consume media via smartphones than via TV and especially not during the time when smartphones were not even invented, but this shift already happened in countries with higher smartphone penetration.

But what are the reasons for this shift? There are multiple reasons for that and the combination of these reasons make the smartphone unique and so important for us.

As we mentioned earlier the smartphone is a personal gateway to access anything we like. We can do anything we want, just from the smartphone. The second reason which goes immediately hand in hand is mobility. Smartphones are far ahead to other devices in regards of mobility. Couple years ago whenever we wanted to check the emails, either we needed to be in the office or if we had a laptop we needed to turn on the laptop and wait until the operating system was booted. Nowadays we just open the mail-app within seconds on our smartphone. Location is no boundary anymore. Of course checking the mails so fast is also a fact of computing power which has risen so quickly. There is a fun fact, that current smartphones are many millions time more powerful than the computers used at the moon landing. But all these aspects would not have a meaning without the convenience of the used software. For example the iPhone was not the first smartphone developed, but it was by far the most convenient one to use. In fact convenience is one of the main drivers for pushing technology, software, etc. through a given environment. Cashless payments via credit card has gotten accepted broader because it is easier than managing the cash in your wallet. One of the huge factors for the rise of PayPal was transferring money without a cryptic account number, but just with an email address.

The evolution of work experience

All in all accessibility, mobility and computing power paired with convenience are boosting the heavy usage of smartphones. In the work environment we can see that the first steps are also already taken, but smartphones are still mainly used for communication and not for other things. If we take a closer look at work in general we can see that we need a special kind of transition. Phone calls and emails are already covered on the smartphones within the work environment, but there is one trait which defines work as it is. Any work has the goal to produce some kind of result. This result is a product of many completed tasks, which is done by the employee. Any task has a certain deadline and for some tasks tools are necessary in order to finish them. Therefore future enterprise applications need to focus on task driven applications in order to complete the transition to "full-time"-smartphone usage.

Task-driven apps have a huge variety. From simple to-do-lists to complex collaboration tools and workflow management. In a world in which the complexity is rising also by the amount of information produced, we need to simplify anything in order to be able to manage and complete the tasks we need to. The development on smartphones regarding UI/UX made a huge leap. This is why we need to transform our lessons learned from consumer oriented apps into our enterprise apps.

The biggest advantage of a mobile first approach is the better user experience motivated by the lack of space on a smartphone. Any button, menu, picture went through the same question: "Is it really necessary?" This helps evidently to simplify the huge complexity of tasks, because we focus on the things that have only an impact on the result we try to achieve. The best example for that is the navigation bar. Many companies provide a company-intranet and due to the company-size the navigation bar is very complex and bloated. This is because these companies did not fully understand the purpose of the navigation bar. Most of the solutions were build by the idea to show anything what is available. But the search bar is specifically built for that reason. the navigation bar should be the menu for just accessing the most important sites very quickly and not to reach everything possible. This approach becomes even more important when we think about enterprise apps, that are specifically built to complete a certain task.

Another two interconnected advantages are the reduced bounce rate and a higher engagement rate when comparing desktop users to smartphone users. These advantages are showing how important responsive design can become for a companies success. How can we adopt these results into benefits within enterprises? There are two very obvious situation where a responsive design comes very handy. When we are communicating and when we are collaborating. In these two situations we want to have the other person a very reduced bounce and a high engagement rate to our message or our task. With smartphone focused apps we can achieve that and the result will be a faster completion of the task and a higher quality of work. Two things which are basically diametrically opposed to each other.

Aeroji in your pocket

What does that all mean for future developments, especially for SaaS-solutions like Aeroji which want to provide a daily tool for multiple companies in the aviation? Aeroji mainly focuses on the procurement process of engine transitions and wants to accelerate the whole process. This procurement process is lead by asset managers who search for engines, evaluate them, go into internal and external collaborations, negotiate with partners and close deals. Getting in contact with business partner and finding the right engines are the most crucial part in the whole process. Therefore an asset manager does very often communication via a smartphone. So the first steps into the transition to the digital world accessed via a smartphone is already done. but anything else is really difficult for asset managers to do on a smartphone. This is why Aeroji has focused on to a responsive design in the last couple month with lots of iterations and testing in order to provide the best possible experience on any smartphone. Of course anything already available on the desktop is now also available on the smartphone, because we believe that this is the logical consequence where the world is transitioning towards.

But our development will not end here. As we mentioned in the generational shift and also where enterprises need to learn what are the upcoming steps, we as Aeroji will develop any feature from now on mobile first, because with this approach we are ensuring, that also our desktop version will benefit from. But anything we develop we develop mainly for the asset managers and the complexity of their daily work.

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Your Aeroji Team