What to expect from Yellowfin’s new mobile app

What to expect from Yellowfin’s new mobile app

We've got a brand new mobile application coming now out and lots of people have been asking me what’s in it. To be honest, it's much easier to tell you what's not in it - and that’s dashboards and reports. I can hear you saying, ‘How can an analytics vendor have a mobile app with no dashboards or reports?’ But the truth is no one really uses a mobile app to view dashboards or reports. It's the wrong format for looking at a clunky dashboard or detailed report. People prefer to view these on their desktop because it's simpler and faster to do what they need to do. The point of a mobile device isn't to replicate a desktop, so we've had to completely rethink our app based on what people want to do on their phones. What really got me thinking about this was some research that Donald Farmer gave me. It broke down how people consume data in four key ways – glimpsing, snacking, chunking and immersion.  

4 modes of data consumption

Glimpsing is where you pick up your phone and glance at it but don’t do anything further. For example, checking the time on your phone or looking at a notification telling you that you've got a new message. It’s about micro-moments. Then there’s snacking, which is where you pick up your device and just scroll through something quickly, like reading a message. This gives you an idea of what something is about in a few seconds, but you don’t click on the link or read it in detail. You may decide to save a link though or read it later. Chunking is where you actually carve out time to take in information, like clicking on the link, reading a long-form article or looking at a dashboard. The last one is immersion, which involves actually responding to what you’ve seen. You become fully immersed in the task like writing a long-form story or doing some analysis.

Mobile vs. Desktop modes

While some people might have large screens on their phone, they still can’t use it to do all of these things. Chunking and immersion tend to happen when you’re at a desktop and have the time to get into it. So, Yellowfin decided to focus exclusively on glimpsing and snacking in our new mobile app, because that’s what most people use their phones for. We want to help people understand what’s happening quickly, and both Signals and Stories do that well. 

The Yellowfin Mobile BI App experience

We’ve designed our mobile app so you can wake up in the morning, take a quick look and see what's happening on your mobile device. The app will send you alerts to Signals that are occurring in your organization and you can glimpse at what's changing. If you want to snack, you can read relevant Stories while you’re sitting on the train or preparing yourself for the day. Then when you get to the office, you can take the time to really immerse yourself in the detail on a device that makes sense, which is a desktop. I think our new app will appeal to a broad range of people within organizations. It will let people respond to data in real time and start thinking more strategically about their business. Without dashboards and reports getting in the way, our app will make it really easy to find out what's changing as it happens.

Try the new Yellowfin Mobile BI App

Try the new Yellowfin Mobile BI app on your own data, if you're already a customer, or on sample data if you are new to Yellowfin.