You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t agree that there’s an ever-expanding need for organizations to branch out into the mobile sector. But with the plethora of mobile platforms that exists today, we have a tricky task of knowing which to develop for, and how to most effectively and efficiently make sure the application is successful on the other platforms as well.  

We recently hosted a three-hour workshop at the 2010 South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where we discussed mobile development across platforms and brought together three top-level thinkers in the industry: Rylan Barnes, lead developer on the ShopSavvy application and co-founder of Big In Japan, Inc.; Kevin Hoyt, group manager of platform evangelism at Adobe, Inc.; and Tom Conrad, CTO of Internet music giant, Pandora. Throughout the course of the workshop, our speakers provided insight on their experiences and key learnings for today’s mobile developers. Here are a few highlights and how-tos:

• Keep it familiar. Each platform provides room for customization, but it should be done within the parameters of its standard, familiar toolkit. Take the iPhone, for instance. All of the navigation buttons remain on the screen at all times. Then there’s the Blackberry, whose buttons are tucked into the menu. Users don’t typically jump between platforms; they’re only familiar with how to use the device they own. So, while it’s easy for developers to want to bring tools from one over to the other, for user experience purposes, it’s imperative to stick to the basic rules of each individual platform.
• Don’t silo your customers. When developing for multiple devices, too often customer segments get broken down too much. Your users are most likely not just Windows phone users, or just desktop users. They move across contexts and they take their data with them from one to the other, making it important to create a unified user experience across multiple devices. A recent Nielsen report shows a substantial increase in media multi-tasking in America, with 57% of consumers watching TV and going online simultaneously at least once a month. Adobe is at the forefront of an industry-wide initiative that aims to make the cross-device development task less daunting. The Open Screen Project (OSP) is bringing front-end Web development into the mobile conversation with the hopes of making it no longer necessary to develop new sets of code for each individual platform. While the possibilities presented by initiatives such as the OSP are still up for debate, if done right, it could undoubtedly ease the workload of developers in the future.
• Invest in user experience. In 2007, Pandora had a presence on an array of feature phones, but quickly found that success in the mobile arena isn’t as simple as just making sure you’re everywhere. Phone owners at that point weren’t thinking of the Internet aspect of their devices. Then came the iPhone, a very Web-centric device, and as a result, the opportunity developed to create not just an app, but a full-blown user experience tailored to the way customers engaged with a specific device. Within four hours, Pandora had more users on a single platform than they had ever had on all the feature phones combined. 

Mobile development will continue to be a hot topic of conversation as bright new solutions and ideas surface, morph and are repurposed to improve the user experience. We’re excited to see where mobile is headed, and, along the way, help steer conversations and develop solutions that make sense for both marketers and mobile enthusiasts.

T3 is committed to supporting the nonprofit community, and we’re excited about leading designers and developers with our proposed “Design and Development Powers for the Social Good” panel at the 2010 SXSW Interactive Festival.

During the panel, a team of design and development experts will solicit participation from the audience to create new digital projects for selected nonprofit organizations (NPOs). Panelists will provide guidance while participants learn from each other as they team up to use their skills for a good cause. 

The session will discuss the available design and development resources and best practices in order to address the digital needs of the selected NPOs. Participants will discover what they’re capable of achieving in one hour, while learning how to design and develop for the available tools and collectively ensuring that the projects are maintainable.This is our chance to show what panelists and the audience can do together for deserving organizations.

Lead by Frank Duran, T3 Senior Creative Developer, the panel will include representatives from the selected NPOs, giving participants first-hand insight and feedback.

Like what you see here? Be sure to vote in the SXSW PanelPicker and check out the other T3 proposals we submitted.

Editor’s note: T3 is already gearing up for SXSWi 2010, and we’ve submitted four speaker proposals for this year’s event. We’ll be highlighting our panel submissions during public voting, and we hope you check them out and vote.

Images, icons and buttons guide our perception of mobile devices, street signs, and computer interfaces, because as humans, we are wired to recognize shapes and colors before we read words.

During our proposed “Images and Icons: Creative Thinking Never Looked So Good” panel at the 2010 SXSW Interactive Festival, participants will learn ways to harness this natural predisposition to create more effective digital experiences.

Discover techniques that you can use immediately to strike the right balance between visual and written cues, identify the things that you should always check for when finalizing a design, and find ways to improve your signal-to-noise ratio while still creating a badass design.  Each technique will be accompanied with the actual science behind it, and real-life case studies to help you see what it works.

In this session, Erin Young, T3 Information Architect, will lead a diverse panel of digital and visual practitioners in a discussion that will uncover ways to know when the rules of design should be applied (and when they should be broken.)  Leave this session with tangible tactics that you can apply immediately.

If this interests you, please vote in the SXSW PanelPicker, and  comment below to tell us what you’d like to see if we get selected.

See the other T3 proposals we submitted.