The Corporate Hobo Day 10: Take Note! The Pen is Back

Is it possible to be a power-user, yet work 100% on highly mobile, agile, ultra-portable devices? Join me as I push the edge of agile end user computing, with a three-week trial of being... the "Corporate Hobo".

Samsung sent me over a Galaxy Note 8 device, and I revel once again in the joy of pen computing, but this time on the small screen.

Day 10: The Pen is Back

Late yesterday I received a surprise by courier. Samsung sent me a Galaxy Note 8 to try out. Great timing, since my previous week, was in turmoil due to not being able to write out my daily plans.

Over the evening I set up the new phone. The very first thing was configuring Knox security and linking my business Google account. The second was to install OneNote and bring in my hand-written journal. 

Up until today, my journal has been a pen-based, full-screen affair on a SurfaceBook. My question for today was, can a large-screen pen-based application be effective on a small(ish) screen device?

Let's be very clear about what this means.

It is moving from a device where a user can write freely as if on an A4 sheet of paper, to a device where you have the same amount of information but are writing on something the size of a filing card. The application remains the same. The device changes. 

How does this impact user-experience?

The initial temptation was to shrink down the journal pages to view them in their entirety on the Note 8. Bad idea. 

While a full page is legible, it is not workable. Thus, the journal format could be consumed, but not edited effectively. While a page can shrink, the human hand does not.  

The purpose of a journal is not so much to view activities throughout the day - Google Calendar provides that service - but rather to plan with the act of writing. 

The second option was to zoom in and work on specific parts of the journal page. This worked for some journaling activities, but not for others. 

For the weekly planning activity, zooming around partial views of a page did not provide a workable experience. The benefit of a full-page view of your plans while planning is that connections between activities can be determined. 

However, daily planning works just fine. With a zoomed in mode, activities are arranged in a more 'granular manner.'

Based on today's experiences with the journal, I slightly redesigned the weekly and daily journal pages within OneNote so they would be more appropriate for an index-card sized work area. 

Instead of mimicking a large-format Filofax, my journal looks like one of those cute mini-journals. Same intention and information, but a different context.

Takie Note

Of course, taking notes with the Note 8 - as with any of the Note series - is blissful. After all, it's in the name. In the past, I've used the SurfaceBook in meetings for taking handwritten notes. This then required export to PDF and then uploading into Google Docs and integration with our CRM. 

However, Google Keep on the Note 8 provides a more streamlined approach, allowing saving of content directly into Google Docs.

However, I've found that the default Samsung note-taking app, inventively called Samsung Note, provided the best overall experience, with sharing to Google Docs being just one extra screen-click compared to Keep. 

What did the Corporate Hobo Learn Today?

User Experience is all about context: where the user is, what they are doing, and how they want to do it. It is a mistake to see workers as singular persona's that all use a specific application in the same way to get the same job done in the same way. Rather, users will adapt solutions and services to best fit their needs *at any given time.* 

Solution: When you change the device, you change the user experience of a solution. Therefore, corporate device selection needs to be considered hand-in-hand with solution selection and design considerations. 

Do not fall into the mistake of assuming 'responsive' web design will solve UX issues when developing applications for large and small screens devices. Instead, consider what is needed by a worker in the context of where the work is being performed, and why. 

Context is everything. While a full A4 page can be easily viewed... the context of the device and location means this activity - a full month view - becomes a read-only activity.

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Dr. Joseph Sweeney is independent IBRS advisor for workforce transformation, mobility and end user computing. His research may be found at the IBRS website.

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