I’ve been trying to stay positive and paint mobile design and development in a positive light. Before I let you in on the secrets of the mobile field—getting into all the dirty details, pitfalls, and frustrations of the medium, and how to solve them, or in some cases how to sidestep them—I want you to remember how important mobile development is to the future. It is the greatest communication and information medium of our time.

You will be tested. In fact, you should expect your explorations into mobile to be some of the most challenging moments in your career. Never give up: it is worth every minute of frustration, and with a little practice, I think you will find it highly rewarding work that transcends just mobile apps or sites.

It starts with developing a mobile strategy. By the phrase “mobile strategy,” what I mean is “how much time, effort, and money it will cost you.” Have no illusions: mobile design and development don’t come cheap. If you target only one platform, you might possibly see success with relatively no risk. However, once you start attempting to scale that strategy, you will quickly find yourself exponentially increasing the amount of time and effort required to be successful. With the wrong strategy, it can be hard to justify and even harder to monetize the costs of mobile.

Of course, there are workarounds, but if you come from the world of web products or traditional software development, some of the choices you will have to make might be difficult. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to over the years who had a great idea for a mobile product, but didn’t see it through because their decisions were guided by the traditional rules of business on the Web or the desktop.

You could almost look at your mobile design and development strategy like a game of Tetris —the game where you need to fill in each row with the falling shapes in order to clear the row and continue to make space for more shapes—which happens to be one of the most popular mobile games ever sold. When the game starts, clearing the first few lines is insanely easy. This can be your first hurdle in the mobile field, such as defining your business goals. Your second task gets a bit harder, such as defining user goals, but you are still in control. As the pieces continue to fall, and begin to involve defining the context, design challenges, framework issues, and testing, you start to struggle with getting each of them lined up and placed into the right spots, but you still have a strategy in mind.

Then you start getting into those little S-shaped pieces, or the devices. You aren’t sure what to do all with of them, but they keep coming and you aren’t able to figure out how to make them all fit into your strategy. Suddenly you realize that you aren’t even trying to clear lines anymore—you are just trying to manage the chaos.

I can guess what you are probably thinking: that sounds awful. But let’s not forget that Tetris is one of the best-selling games ever made, so obviously it can’t be that bad. It is certainly frustrating at times, but it is still fun. I think the problem many people have when trying to create a successful mobile strategy is they look at the endeavor like a project, with a predefined beginning and end and a linear path between.

Instead, look at mobile development more like a puzzle, similar to Tetris. Sure, it can probably be solved, but investing ages to solve a puzzle does not unlock the great secrets of life. The goal of a puzzle, the value we derive from it, comes from the attempt to solve it—not always from the solution itself. A good mobile strategy is not always just about simply doing something from end to end, as the complexity of supporting the vast number of mobile devices is out of reach for the great majority of us.

I recommend that you view your mobile strategy as a movement that can be transformational to your project, company, or organization. It is about discovering how to infuse a new medium into your business and build an innovative platform that will take you not just into the next year, but into the next decade. For example:

• For a sales-based organization, you could use the mobile web to get information to your salespeople in the field, allowing them to bring up live pricing and estimates while they are at lunch with a client.
• For health care, you could use mobile devices to provide records; access to formularies, policies, and procedures; even patient charts—and all at the patient’s bedside.
• For real estate, you can provide potential buyers with live listings of similar properties nearby, information about the house, school information, the average home values in the neighborhood, and mortgage calculators—all while touring a property.
• For local governments, you can use mobile technology for mass transit, to increase awareness or community participation, to elicit feedback on public works projects, and to weigh in on important issues facing the community.
• For retailers, you can provide instant points of purchase without customers having to go to the register, provide ongoing customer support, link online customer reviews and price matching information—all while the customer is holding a product in her hand.
• For arts and entertainment, you can provide information (or even games) about upcoming events and other background information that is all tied into an address book, allowing the customer to plan a fun night out with friends.

The list could go on and on. You might notice that the common thread in each of the opportunities listed here is putting the user in the center of the experience, which is what mobile technology does. Empowering your users empowers the future of your business. And at the center of that transaction is this little always-on, always-connected device that we call the mobile phone.