BYOD in the Industrial Environment

The industrial environment, whether a power plant in a scorching Arabian desert or a rainy depot in Aberdeen, presents a far harsher environment than an air-conditioned office in Hong Kong.

Here are five insights that have guided Spartan while developing Phalanx, to not just survive in an industrial setting, but to thrive there.

1. Flexible as paper

Any industrial app must compete with the most successful business technology invented – paper. Paper has prevailed, because it is easy to use and simple to change.

An app must be equally intuitive and flexible. The most common user scenarios should glide through with ease and you should aim for zero training. Free text data entry should be avoided and, if you have to use it, it should be limited to exceptional scenarios where users need to capture unstructured data outside the normal process flow.

Involve users throughout the early design phase and use paper prototyping techniques to capture the optimum user flow before writing a single line of code.

2. What, no signal?

In an industrial setting there will be large periods of time when the user’s device is either disconnected or has a very poor connection. Your app should be aware of actions that must be connected, that can fall back to an offline cache and that never need connection.

The actions must then be combined to ensure that users jobs are never blocked by poor or broken signals. Facebook stops working when off the network, field service teams don’t.

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3. Fat Fingers & Small Screens

Industrial environments are noisy and often dangerous. It is important that industrial users are not overly distracted by your app. If you are developing for outside use, then ignore the subtler colour schemes used in consumer apps, as glare from the sun will render them unusable.

You should focus on blunt gestures and big buttons as the industrial user will often be wearing safety gloves.

The app should lead the user through the process, with each step offering only a few actions and each action mapped to a single clear gesture or users will start inventing their own gestures.

4. Elegance and Enterprise

Adapting enterprise software to a BYOD environment demands higher standards of aesthetics and stability.

Extend the user interface and user experience metaphors of the best consumer apps; avoid gimmicks (particularly in animation) and ask the question: “What would encourage an employee to come back time and again, embracing the app as a key part of their daily work?”

5. Getting it out there

iOS, Android and the other mobile platforms provide different solutions for Mobile Device Management and app deployment. If all platforms are to be supported, consider third party multi-platform solutions such as MobiControl and MobileIron.

An enterprise app that wants to target all platforms, but without the overhead of developing separate software for each should, like Phalanx, consider a strategy of Mobile HTML5.

Develop your app as a standalone HTML5 web app linked from the device’s home screen or wrapped up as a native app using a system like PhoneGap. This gives maximum reach with minimum rework.

Either way, it is about getting your well designed industrial app into your workers’ hands. Then they will enjoy the same power and fun they have with their personal apps and can transform your company’s operations.

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