Designing mobile applications for organizational routines

Abstract

As tablet computers and smartphones have become widespread, organizations are increasingly using mobile applications for supporting routines, i. e., repetitive patterns of activity that occur throughout an organization. However, prior studies see user interactions mostly as a silo–able to help individual users perform better–but not embedded in an organizational context of a user group or company. In order to address this gap, the paper at hand looks into the roles of mobile applications in supporting routines, and the related principles for mobile application design. We present two mobile applications that support domain experts in two diverse contexts, automotive car dealerships and hospitals. Based on their analysis, we were able to identify patterns as well as a number of design principles for mobile applications supporting organizational routines.