Cover Story: Four Publishers Reveal Their App Strategies
With each project featuring a mobile component, Springer considers issues such as how branding is inserted into apps, how best to target apps to specific user needs and strategies for promotion.
Cleary stresses the importance of knowing your audience and how they work. In the case of the Springer Protocols app, which provides "recipes" for certain experiments so researchers don't have to reinvent the wheel every time they go into the lab, the publisher decided to do a user survey to discover how scientists use the protocols in a mobile environment. What they discovered was that most researchers use devices already in the lab rather than bringing their own, without necessarily knowing whether these devices use the iOS or Android operating systems. "To help them, we decided to develop a [Web] app using HTML5," she says, "so users can experience Springer Protocols in a mobile environment on any mobile device with a browser."