The final law of good mobile software design is perhaps the most obvious and least practiced: mobilizing 10 percent of an existing application should take no more than 10 percent of the time it took to configure the parent app. Mobile applications must add by subtraction, and part of adding is making sure what is extracted can be used without significant rework. For example, large menus should not need to be recreated for handhelds — regardless of their size. Similarly, interconnected features, such as submitter names (which display employee details) or problem types (which show category and item fields), should operate on handhelds as they do on PCs. That doesn’t necessarily mean all menu items should be downloaded or that all desktop workflow must fire offline. What it means is the mobile design tool should make it easy to preserve desktop functionality while optimizing it for mobile constraints.
Deconstructing and rebuilding applications take time, which was already invested in the design of the original application. It certainly isn’t logical that paring down an application would require it to first be expanded or enhanced. To avoid unnecessary rework, only deploy mobile solutions that are tightly integrated with underlying applications and have robust development environments, role-based configuration features, and broad device support.
By BMC Software