The rise of the mobile citizen developer & Oracle Mobile Application Accelerator

The rise of the mobile citizen developer & Oracle Mobile Application Accelerator

3 years ago at Oracle we set forward a clear vision for what we wanted to provide enterprise customers in the mobile world. Tools for mobile developers certainly. Tools for cloud service developers aligned with our cloud vision too. But also tools for a new category of users called "citizen developers".

It is this last category of users that Oracle's recently released Oracle Mobile Application Accelerator, or MAX for short, is designed to assist. Like many product launches MAX will have its fair share of marketing collateral to explain what it does. But my preference is to talk to the real people behind our products to get the word from the proverbial horses mouth about why they built the tool, what challenges did they face, what makes them proud.

In this ongoing mobile Q&A series I've invited Denis Tyrell, the lead product manager for MAX, and Liza Broadbent, head UX designer for MAX, to answer questions about all things MAX.

Hi Denis & Liza. So lets put the pressure on at the beginning of this interview. I'm now the CEO of ACME Ltd and we've all just walked into the same virtual elevator, and I'm frustrated as I can't get a connection to see our corporate web dashboard in my mobile browser. You've 15 seconds each to pitch MAX to me. What is it? Why do I want it? Why does ACME Ltd care?

Denis: Hi Chris, thanks for having us. This sounds like a common problem. You want some information available while you’re on the move but you probably don’t have the budget or the clout to have IT create an app for you. What if you could create that mobile application yourself and easily compose and deliver it to your device while you’re sitting at your desk eating lunch today? I bet you’d go for that? MAX is designed for users just like you the CEO of ACME, who we sometimes refer to as citizen developers or simply business users. It is focused for users that know what they want to build and have some technical skill but who aren’t developers. The great thing is that you get what you want, you don’t wait for IT to build it for you and it doesn’t cost you a ton of R&D. You might even challenge a few of your developer buddies to see who can build it faster!

Liza: Well, with 15 seconds in our virtual elevator, I would let MAX speak for itself by demoing building a dashboard with a few clicks right on my tablet <smile>.

<Laugh> Thanks Denis & Liza. So lets explore the concept of the citizen developer a little further for our audience. At Oracle we're very familiar with this term, but for someone who hasn't heard it before can you describe who they are and why we're building software for them?

Denis: I’m actually not a fan of the term "citizen developer" only because it has the word developer in it. We don’t even refer to "developing" an app, but rather "composing" it. I focus more on the term business user because our target audience doesn’t qualify for the geek stereotype <smile>. This is a technical user who probably knows Excel and maybe even some HTML but doesn’t necessarily know a coding language. They certainly know the application functionality they want to build and might be a subject matter expert in their area.

Liza: While the label "Citizen Developer" is of fairly recent vintage, these folks have been around -- and underserved -- for a long time. They were the local Excel or personal database wizards who filled the void as best they could between the tools they got from IT, and their business needs. Now in contrast to Denis, I really like this term because it has "developer" in it <laughs>. I love the idea that we are making real software development possible for people who don’t write code: with a few clicks of the mouse or taps on a tablet, they can build real, substantial mobile applications in no time.

<Laugh> Nice to see cohesion in our answers! ;-) So this is your everyday worker with contemporary computing skills taking on the task of building mobile apps. Fun for them, but what's the benefit to the business in providing these sort of tools to their non IT folk?

Denis: Let’s face it, R&D / IT folks are stretched pretty thin in most companies. Tons of people are probably coming up to them in the hallways starting sentences with: "Wouldn’t it be cool if we had a mobile app for ...". They just don’t have the time or sometimes even the charter or skills to build out these mobile apps. So in response MAX lets the line-of-business build applications to solve their specific needs themselves. This doesn’t replace the IT folks by any means, but lets them concentrate on other projects that DO require developers and much more infrastructure and process.

Liza: Even here at Oracle, where we have access to more tools and technology than you can imagine, teams have business needs for local applications that no one from IT is going to build for them. In our own UX group, for example, we have a home-grown application for managing icon requests and assets so that product teams all across Oracle don’t design and implement the same icon over and over again. Oracle’s corporate IT department is never going to build and maintain something like this, so this is where tools like MAX and Application Builder Cloud Service come to the rescue.

Liza, as I know you've been involved in building user experience designs for a huge array of Oracle products like Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS) and programmer IDEs like JDeveloper, I'm guessing there is a big difference in building tools for a technical audience vs a so called citizen developer. Do you have any experiences to share on how building a tool for the day-to-day enterprise staff member is different from some of our more complex IT focused products?

Liza: Actually, Chris, the process of UX design is exactly the same. What’s different is the target personas that we’re designing for – developers vs. citizen developers. From a UX design perspective, personas are named characters who represent groups of users with similar behaviors and goals. These persona goals drive scenarios for product use, which in turn determine the tasks we need to support. Within a single product, we’re typically designing for multiple personas. In Mobile Cloud, for example, we have Bob the Business User, our MAX citizen developer; Mia the Mobile Developer, who sketches APIs and mock data for use in the mobile applications she’s building; and Samir the Service Developer, who implements mobile APIs with connections to back-end services. So while Mia and Bob both want to build mobile applications, they want to achieve that goal in very different ways.

Denis, you're also the product manager for Oracle's Mobile Application Framework (MAF). Can you differentiate MAF from MAX? When would I use MAF, when would I use MAX? Oh and let's not forget Oracle's recent JavaScript Extension Toolkit (JET) too.

Denis: Both MAF and JET are for developers. They give you complete freedom and more "hi-fidelity" to what you can create and with those frameworks you can create just about anything. They also require that you know the development language used in those frameworks and have a development setup on your machine with mobile SDKs and IDEs etc. On the other hand with MAX, it's delivered entirely through a browser and requires you have no IDE or mobile platform SDKs. With MAX you are more structured in what you can create. There are patterns available that you can use but only a certain amount of things you can do and it’s not for every use case.

And what about Oracle Application Builder Cloud Service (ABCS) we mentioned earlier, how does that fit into the picture?

Denis: ABCS and MAX are similar in HOW they create an application but what they create is different. ABCS is for creating web applications while MAX is for device-resident mobile apps.

Liza: And my team designed the UX for both with the same target persona in mind. MAX users should hit the ground running if they want to create a web application with ABCS, and vice versa.

What about the type of mobile application citizen developers build? Presumably we're not building the next Candy Crush with Oracle's enterprise focused tools, so what sort of mobile app is MAX suited too?

Denis: The applications that MAX targets are generally line-of-business apps, B2E applications for information workers and "glance" apps to get dashboard-like information. MAX can also be used for data gathering applications as well. As we add more and more functionality to MAX I think we’ll see the possibilities expand beyond what we’ve even dreamed of.

And how does Oracle Mobile Cloud Service fit into this picture?

Denis: MAX is really just a feature of Mobile Cloud Service and not a product on its own. All the business object services inside of MAX are really just exposing MCS APIs to the business user in a way that makes them easy to uptake and use in a mobile app themselves.

Liza: Mobile Cloud provides the platform for the intersection between Bob, our business user, and Samir, our service developer who provides the APIs for Bob to use in his applications.

To finish off, MAX v1 is gold. I know at Oracle we're always cagey talking about future features thanks to our esteemed legal colleagues, yet our audience doesn't suffer the same concerns, they just want to know what's cool & coming. Can you give us any insight into where you want to take the tool in future versions? I've a great idea for an VR extension.... ;-)

Denis: We have lots to add in the near future to make MAX a really comprehensive mobile application composition platform. We’ll be adding all the device integration that users need like beacons, GPS and all that. Beyond those near-term items, we’re looking at some really cool voice and wearable integration and even some cool tools for UX designers to get from design to application in even less time! I won’t let too many cats out of the bag. Show me another platform that lets a business create a mobile app that gives them the data they need, has the device integration to really make it uniquely mobile and send updates to their watch on important events … and do all this in the time it takes just to download a typical mobile platform SDK. Meanwhile send me the details of this VR idea and we’ll give you some design credits. <laugh>

Liza: Well, Denis has a roadmap as long as your arm so we’ll be busy for while <smile>. I’m particularly excited to give citizen developers the means of designing and deploying apps for wearables, and bots are super interesting…! But what I’m most looking forward to is seeing users solving real world business problems with MAX, and the inevitable surprises that we encounter along the way. To a large extent, what MAX becomes in the future will be shaped by what we learn from our users -- even if we’re applying what we learn to something they haven’t imagined yet!

Great, thanks very much for your time Denis & Liza, I know its an exciting time for you both to finally have MAX out in the wild.

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John Flack

Staff Engineer Software at Peraton

7y

Sorry, Chris - in more than 30 years in IT, I've seen tools for the "citizen-developer" come and go - MS Access, Oracle Application Express, Oracle Discoverer among them. Every time, it winds up in the lap of the professional developers - citizen-developers have "real" jobs to do, and they get to a point where their needs exceed their skills or time to figure it out.

nitesh kumar

Oracle Cloud Architect | TOGAF

7y

Great article .. thanks .

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Luc Bors

Founder & Owner @ BOHORT

7y

Nice.

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Peter Jeavons

SaaS Leader, CxO, SVP, GM, Board Advisor/NED

7y

Great to add OPA Mobile for Apps. Download the OPA Mobile App demonstrator thru the Apple or Android Apps stores.

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