Launching a Native App: Lessons Learned in Academic Libraries

Abstract

If your library has a website and your users have mobile devices, congratulations: you have a mobile user experience. But is that experience a good one for your users? Libraries seeking to offer good user experience on mobile devices have two choices: a responsive website, which scales the amount of content displayed up and down depending on screen size, and a native app, downloadable from platform marketplaces. Would a native app improve your mobile user experience? Is an app mutually exclusive to a responsive website? Why would you choose one over the other? Is there any reason to have both? Who will do this development? In academic libraries, effective user experience always starts from an institutional context and what that context makes possible. For that reason, the editors of Weave will not presume to tell you whether your mobile presence should take the form of a native app, a responsively designed website, or both. This is despite the fact that we generally believe that a well-designed responsive website will serve the mobile patrons. But that’s in a vacuum. Your library, ours, they don’t exist in a vacuum. We hope you’ll read the following five brief case studies, put together by April Siqueiros and Samantha Raddatz of Pratt SILS, of academic libraries that chose to develop a native app with your own institutional context in mind. How will you best serve your mobile users?

Keywords

• user experience
• mobile user experience