Mere apps

August 1, 2013 -- I recently did a demo of my NurseMind nursing checklist app for some technically-savvy people. They were not impressed.

I think the disconnect was based on the assumption -- indeed most people appear to assume this: apps should always be simple and obvious.

Certainly, there is no excuse for a poor user interface, but it is also true that serious professional tools are necessarily complex. For example, NurseMind has a "Remind Me" feature that adds a task to a checklist. It takes three screens to do this because it needs to know: 1. what task to remind about, 2. which patient it's for, and 3. what time it's due. Simple in concept, complex in implementation. The result? With all those screens, the app looks hairy, over-engineered. Yet there is no way to dumb it down without reducing its usefulness.

A corollary of the simplicity assumption: smartphones are not suitable platforms for serious professional tools. That is the obstacle I'm encountering. People expect something trivial and are put off when it isn't. Could this be an effect of McLuhan's dictum, "the medium is the message"? You wouldn't publish the Constitution on fishwrap. And perhaps you wouldn't build serious professional tools on smartphones.

My prediction? This conventional wisdom will evolve. It will become clear that smartphones are real computers and run full-powered professional application software.

Today, we are still in the early stages of this technology. The low-hanging fruit (appealing yet simple applications) is being plucked. But people like me are working on bigger problems. The development cycle is longer and acceptance is delayed, but the trend is real. Watch as it unfolds.

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