But what makes for a good mobile app? What are the ingredients that bring something new – even exciting – to people’s lives?

Good design and attractive graphics are certainly part of the answer. But the underlying principle must be that the app satisfies a clear need – it serves a purpose; and it’s a purpose that exploits the nature of the mobile platform in question.

This was brought home at a British Computer Society event I attended in Bristol this week. The speakers, from app specialists Mubaloo and Bardowl, emphasised the importance of starting with the users in mind: Who are they? What do they want to achieve?

The answers aren’t always that straight forward.

For instance, in getting into apps, the biggest early wins may be tools for internal (business) users, rather than something for your customers. And where customers are concerned, some customer segments – and the activities they perform – may well be more important than others. In other words, an app doesn’t have to be universal, certainly not as part of initial forays into smart phone use.

Getting the ‘who’ and ‘what’ questions sorted – who are the users and what do they want to do? – is of course the first obvious step in any information system development. As Checkland and Holwell point out, only once we’ve understood the purposeful action people want to engage in can we design systems to support them.

But once that action is understood decisions then need to be made about which functionality and content are more or less important. And here lies a key danger with smart phones: try and recreate on a mobile what you might have on desktop software and you’ll end up cluttering the user interface and failing to reap the unique benefits a mobile can provide.

Those of us that do use apps tend to like – and often prefer – them because of their simplicity and ease of use. Well designed ones reflect your priorities and make it quick and intuitive for you to do what you want to do. At best, they also recognise the fact that you might be on the move and pull in geographic data as part of the app’s functionality.

It is with this in mind that we at 3^rd Sector Digital are currently talking to our customers in the church sector about building an app version of our Diosys system. Diosys – which provides a map-based means of exploring diocesan data on the Web – recognises that data with a geographic dimension is not best accessed via a conventional directory. Once we have this on a mobile too, users will also be able to engage with data based on where they are at that point in time.

So yes, good design is all part of taking apps forward. But this needs to be premised on a clear prioritisation of user needs and be open to the innovations only mobile technology can support.