Mobile information PRODUCTS
Will Russell, innovation and technology manager, Royal Society of Chemistry
T
here are many reasons for providing resources on mobile devices. Obviously more people are using mobile devices now, and to the customer apps offer a great opportunity to take the science with them. Rather than thinking about providing resources to mobile, we see it more as a recognition that there are a variety of different devices (different screen sizes, different platforms and operating systems, different interfaces such as touch) that people now use to interact with our content.
Our approach is a mixture of mobile- optimised website and apps. We are looking to improve the mobile optimisations across our entire web presence as well as creating applications where there is benefit in doing so. The RSC Mobile app allows you can search our entire online journal and e-book collections and, if you have access, download the content for reading on your mobile device. You can also select the journals you are most interested in to have a direct feed of the latest articles. This product for researchers gives a slightly different experience from that of the mobile website in that you can download abstracts into the app, with the opportunity to download the full text later. If it were a case of recreating the mobile website and calling it an app that wouldn’t really make sense. The app was developed in a hybrid way where some of the content (content such as search where you need a connection) is delivered via the web in a wrapper. This enabled us to redevelop the app for Android quickly, without having to rewrite from scratch. Our NPU Alerts app was different in that it presented to the reader the visual structures for the natural products as opposed to just their name. NPU is interesting as it considers the different scenario on the mobile device, with the user able to just scroll through graphics of the latest structures.
Our first app aimed at a much younger audience has also just been released on iPad and Android. This is Elements of Nutrition and you can use the mobile device’s altimeter to move a shopping card back and forth to collect goods. Traffic from mobile devices to our content has definitely grown since last year, although we still have work to do in order to optimise our
www.researchinformation.info @researchinfo
content fully for mobile. The usage of the mobile website is still greater than that of the mobile app and this is probably due to the need to install something with the app. Both will be further developed.
Growth in mobile use is helped by the reduced cost of mobile devices and the cost of access, as well as the many thousands of useful
applications in the space. We have to think of all digital products now as being ‘multi-device’ – they have to work on PC screens with very varied sizes, tablets, smartphones and whatever comes next with the new interfaces. It’s more than just a screen-size opportunity,
it’s the new interfaces such as ‘geo’ and ‘touch’. It’s also more than just design. How do the needs of a scientist change in different scenarios? How can we provide the best experience for the scientist? We’re keen to work with our community to try things quickly to see what they find
‘I’m sure that connecting people around research information will become standard’
most useful and build on that. We may look at building an app that utilises speech next. Some of the challenges facing mobile tools within research are authentication in the mobile world, and the ability for the researcher to utilise several devices, enjoying an experience that passes between them seamlessly. As technologies such as HTML5 advance, the boundaries between apps and sites will close. More mobile devices will be used by researchers to put back information into the system, publishing data as it happens as opposed to primarily researching information. Mobile has changed the digital world; now there isn’t really an online and offline, the chemist anywhere can be connected to data, the community, their colleagues, and funders via a pocket-sized device.
The digital world is becoming augmented
with the real world. The thing about ‘mobiles’ is that they are social, built to connect people and I’m sure that connecting people around research information will become standard.
AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2013 Research Information 25
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