I presented earlier today at MoDevUX 2013. This is premier Mobile User Experience conference hosted by GoMoDev here in Northern Virginia. I attended the conference last year and this year am attending and presenting. Today I ran a ‘Mini-Workshop’ titled: Enterprise Mobile App UX: Designing from UI to Backend. 

The abstract to the talk is as follows:

Enterprise Applications are typically no more than a User Interface to a set of complex back-end systems. They allow Systems of Record to become Systems of Interaction by putting the records and the ability to interact with them in the palm of your hand. A good User Experience with such a Mobile App requires designing the entire end-to-end architecture with the User Interaction in mind. What is your enterprise mobile apps’ back-end? Is it a single ‘black-box’ serving up data via REST calls? Or is it a set of back-ends, communicating with your app’s UI via multiple APIs. Does your back-end include services that require you to change your app’s UI every time it gets updated? Does the nature of your back-end impact how you build your app, impact the UI design decisions you need to take? How do you test all your back-end(s) for functionality and performance? How do you integrate all these pieces together? How do you provide a good User Experience? As you build complex mobile apps, the architecture of your complete end-to-end system – Backend to UI – becomes critical to your application’s success. This presentation will help attendees identify key architectural decisions that they need to take early in their mobile app development lifecycle to help address these challenges, reduce risk and cost and enhance the User Experience. It will do so by presenting examples of successful architectures of mobile apps and explore key decisions they took and why.

The key theses of the talk is:

• If you making Enterprise Apps, you Mobile Apps are the front-end to a complex back-end system
• Architectural Decisions determine your UX

In all, there are Three UX Decisions you need to take:

1. Your UI technology should match your content
2. Your Backend Architecture and how it connects to your App
3. Your UX  and flow should match your Backend UX and flow

The Slides are Attached: