Web and Mobile Delivery

EDBOK Guide

What is Web and Mobile Delivery?

Web and mobile delivery includes the actual presentation of documents on smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops and other web-connected devices, as well as all of the document design and preparation required to support these devices. Web and mobile device display environments shape a common set of presentation options and requirements. There are also unique considerations based on device form factors and device types.

Web and mobile delivery requires consideration of the following topics:

• information delivery options,
• desired user experience,
• information management, and
• system integration.

Information Delivery

Documents can be delivered to web-connected and mobile devices in a format similar to the printed equivalent. The document may be enabled with additional capabilities based on the delivery method and receiving devices. It may even be delivered in an alternative format more appropriate to the device characteristics. When documents are delivered to mobile devices, content providers may also provide new information presentation options since the content can be organized and presented specifically for the screen sizes and capabilities of the receiving devices.

The three common delivery approaches include electronic documents, interactive documents, and mobile experiences.

Electronic Document Delivery

Some communications must be delivered as a document to meet regulatory and legal requirements. When it is permitted to deliver those documents electronically the most commonly accepted formats are PDF and image, although there are proprietary formats and associated viewers. Customers retrieve electronic documents in different ways depending on receiving devices. Web-based electronic presentment solutions generally deliver access to the document through portals, online systems, or email solutions. The documents may be handled as attachments to be opened online or downloaded from email-based links or through links found when logging on to a web portal.

Modern browsers, including Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari and Firefox, include a PDF viewer as part of the browser. Browser-embedded PDF viewers can be disabled to allow alternatives to be used, such as the Adobe Reader, or the wide variety of freeware viewers such as Ghostview or xpdf, to render PDF documents.

Confirmation of receipt may be a business requirement for electronic documents. Since the document itself cannot communicate back to the host system without extraordinary programming it is important to identify receipt-tracking requirements and ensure that the portal, delivery system and tracking system can meet the requirements. Some portal and online systems may offer the option to record events such as document retrieval or even document open.

Interactive Document Delivery

Some documents lend themselves to an interactive experience for the customer. A variety of document types from transaction to correspondence to forms may be addressed as interactive documents. Interactive documents may be delivered as traditional electronic documents through portals, email, or part of an overarching application.

For transaction documents, interactions may allow a customer to alter information presentation using options such as expanding or collapsing transaction detail, sorting transaction tables, and displaying data in charts that can dynamically change based on user selection. Interactive documents may include hypertext links to provide navigation to sections within a document or to transfer to view external web content for associated information such as educational or marketing content.

Mobile Experience Delivery

The rapid adoption of mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, introduces new business implications for document delivery. The form factor, or dimensional characteristics, of mobile devices and the expected user experience drive many mobile delivery design requirements.

Delivery to mobile devices is often a result of an end user clicking on a link, sometimes embedded within a mobile application, to request the document. Retrieval may be prefaced by a push notification from an application to a given users’ mobile device.

Mobile applications generally take one of three forms: HTML, native application, or a hybrid approach. HTML (hypertext markup language) experiences are initiated and rendered through the mobile browser. With the adoption of HTML5, a standard that modern browsers have adopted, HTML-based experiences tend to work similarly across the variety of browsers. Since the HTML5 specification continues to evolve, special care should be taken to ensure that the expected experience is provided. Similar to websites, HTML-based applications may include live links to content residing on web servers and the ability to download files for offline viewing.

Mobile native apps are written for a specific mobile operating system, such as iOS or Android. Historically, the benefit of the specific operating system app approach was to provide app access to device features such as geolocation or a camera. However, the evolution of HTML5 has provided access to many device features eliminating many technical requirements to create native apps. A consideration for creating native apps is that the various operating systems require different programming languages to be used. For example, iOS devices support native apps are written in ObjectiveC, while Android supports Java. Cross-platform mobile application development toolkits and products are becoming available to address this development requirement, meaning the toolkit translates the app code into the device-specific language. Native apps are downloaded from an app store.

Hybrid apps combine both HTML and native app capabilities by providing a native app wrapper around the HTML application. This approach allows apps to be distributed via app stores and provides some device feature access. Technology solutions such as Adobe PhoneGap or the open source equivalent, Apache Cordova, are used to create the wrapper needed to enable an HTML app to be downloaded.

User Experience

Business drivers for document delivery to the web and mobile may be distilled down to digitizing core business processes such as billing, account notices, or marketing content for the target demographic of the electronic experience. Web and mobile platforms, on the one hand, allow for information presentation and interaction, but on the other hand introduce a new set of requirements based on the physical aspects and capabilities of user devices.

Information Presentation

Mobile delivery provides options for information presentation to customers. PDF, image formats, or HTML versions of documents designed to look like their printed equivalent require customers to scroll vertically and horizontally, depending on the viewing device dimensions and/or zoom factor. Given screen dimensions, viewing electronic documents on a PC may be an acceptable experience since pages are viewed by simply scrolling up or down. However, a document displayed on a smartphone or small tablet may require extensive scrolling or user interaction to “pinch and zoom” the screen to effectively view the information.

There are several options to consider regarding document information presentment on a mobile device. Requiring users to scroll between pages or click on links to navigate to different sections is one option. A menu bar or hypertext links within a document can be used to reference different document sections or pages or even external content.

Presentation of transaction detail also comes with choices when delivered to mobile devices. Transactional tables can be offered as sortable by clicking on a column header. Detail rows of a table may be expandable or collapsible to show or hide information.

Likewise, interactive charts, such as pie, bar, or line charts, may be created to enable a user to click on a chart element to see the details. Corresponding table contents can be linked to the chart selections if desired.

Marketing information can become more dynamic when documents are delivered to mobile devices. Images may be embedded into the application or referenced as a resource through a URL. Animation through GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) files that are part of a document may be used to draw attention to a particular item. Additionally, hypertext links can be provided to reference marketing content including audio or video files.

Form Factor Considerations

A mobile device’s display dimensions influence an appropriate mobile experience. For example, transaction information presented in table format that includes multiple columns may be appropriate for a PC or tablet; however, impractical for a smartphone display. Both tablet and smartphones allow a user-driven portrait versus landscape view by simply rotating the device. The horizontal space available in each mode will likely bring additional design considerations to mind.

In the case of a smartphone, transaction information may need to be presented as a scrollable list represented by one or two of the most logical table columns. For instance, the screen may allow for a transaction date and amount to be displayed with an option to view additional transactional information. One design consideration then may allow a user to select an entry from the list to navigate to a new screen that provides the additional transaction detail. Given the form factor, tablet or smartphone delivery may also require design considerations for organizing information access via menu items, tabs, links, or swiping up or across to access additional layers of information.

Mobile experiences that automatically account for the device and form factor and present information most appropriately for the particular device are considered responsive. Responsive design aims to provide an optimal viewing experience by limiting scrolling, panning, or resizing. One method to support responsive design is to establish layout and content in relative units like percentages (of the screen size). Detecting the device, or media, through queries allows the application of different design styles established by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) use a style sheet language to describe web content presentation. Many software tools exist to generate or customize CSS for web and mobile presentment.

Mobile devices provide other features such as placing phone calls, using geolocation to determine or record location, and using cameras to create and store pictures. Some business and consumer mobile experiences may require this type of feature access to be naturally integrated. In the past, these features required a native application or a hybrid application; however, HTML has advanced to the point that pure browser-based apps written with JavaScript can also support many such device features.

Rich, interactive experiences are provided today through HTML5 with JavaScript or other technologies such as Adobe Flash or Apache Flex. With an ever-changing landscape of support, a developer should examine support for the technology used for the experience as it relates to the targeted device types. For example, currently Flash is not supported on iOS devices.

Information Management

Web and mobile experiences bring a unique dimension to application design considerations with regard to content management. Physical documents ultimately incorporate content into the document itself at composition time. Web-based documents allow for content to be retrieved and incorporated at the time of display. Since the rendering of information, often with sensitive and personal data, is performed by a distributed device, care is required with respect to where information is stored and how applications support secure experiences.

Data and Content Integration

Similar to printed transaction documents, mobile applications that deliver personalized information must account for retrieval, integration, and management of data and content. Mobile delivery does not require data or content to be stored in different locations or formats than traditional document creation solutions require. However, content such as ads, static images, or streaming information may be placed in a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to provide optimal performance. CDNs are specialized data centers strategically placed on the Internet to provide high availability and performance for certain content delivery, relieving an organization’s own infrastructure demands.

Content may also be stored in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems for control, compliance, and brand purposes. Access to such content may require use of web services, specialized Application Programming Interfaces (API), or HTML Get or Post commands.

As with content, company and personal data may be retrieved using web services, specific APIs, or HTML Get or Post commands. Additionally, data may be housed in databases or file systems on a server. Consider the application design with respect to client versus server-side connection to databases. For example, a design including a client-side connection to a database may create issues depending on number of concurrent connections and duration connections are held open. A design practice to overcome such an issue is to manage database connections solely on the server.

Mobile Data Storage

Personalized experiences, whether as a representation of statement information or targeted marketing, will likely require data to be stored on the client device. In addition to the data retrieved from a server, data may also include user-entered information such as preferences for updates or communications.

Regardless of what information or how data is retrieved, consider how and where data is stored locally on the mobile device. Modern mobile devices and operating systems provide for local storage on the device. Some mobile operating systems include local, lightweight databases to provide application services as well. If local storage is used for an application, personal identifiable information should be encrypted. Design of mobile applications that run in offline mode, or when not connected to the Internet, should consider if and how sensitive data is stored.

Mobile and web applications may capture and store data as unintended artifacts of a session. For example, cookies, web history, browser cache, debug or log files, and mobile databases should be considered with respect to unintentional data storage. Establishing operating system settings or no-store directives in packet headers may prevent HTTP and HTTPS traffic caching. Also, encryption methods applied to locally-stored data are commonly recommended to ensure private data is not exposed to other applications.

HTTP Get and Post commands are methods to retrieve and send data from a client to a server. A Get request may include parameters within a query string. This technique should be carefully considered for risks of exposing sensitive information such as account numbers, customer names, or passwords as part of a parameter. HTTP Post essentially instructs a server to accept the data enclosed in the request’s body. The data may be encrypted and thus helps to mitigate the security risks potentially found with an HTTP Get command.

Security and Authentication

In the case of mobile and web delivery, authentication is clearly required to ensure that the right user is accessing information. User identification, which is a prerequisite to authentication, is necessary to retrieve any specific data to be presented to the given user. User authentication is the responsibility of the mobile and web delivery applications.

Therefore, in addition to considerations for data treatment, mobile and web delivery solutions often require integration with corporate security and user identification systems through Single Sign-On (SSO) methods or authentication services such

as the open standard for authorization (OAuth) or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). SSO essentially allows an application to be launched and the user authenticated by the application because he/she is gaining access through another application that has already authenticated them. SSO relies on shared authentication servers to identify users across the set of applications.

OAuth specifies a process that allows for access without sharing of credentials. It was designed for use with HTTP and relies on the exchange of tokens that provide access to protected resources hosted by a server.

System Integration

Customer communications, whether paper or digital, depend on integration with many other systems and processes. One fundamental design question that directly influences system integration requirements involves whether or not the documents or information need to be generated as part of a systematic process or as part of a user’s experience where information is dynamically brought together based on the target device.

Document Composition

Mobile and web delivery solutions may be initiated as part of a document composition process. The system integration required for traditional paper and electronic documents relative to upstream data and content access can typically be leveraged for both approaches. The actual delivery could be through a repository that serves up an electronic document per user request or as an attachment or link in an email.

Inserts may be simulated in electronic documents as additional PDF documents or via links embedded within the primary communication. Since electronic documents do not benefit from postal savings or require coded values to drive post-processing equipment, barcoding is typically not required. However, some traditional post-processing steps such as report generation may still be required to reflect what customer documents were created, for example.

The document composition approach may be used to produce electronic documents for web and mobile delivery in batch or in an on-demand manner. Batch implementations often store documents in PDF or HTML format in a repository for later retrieval or send documents to users via email. Typically, on-demand generation will result in a PDF or HTML document that will be pulled by the user. In this case, the experience may be initiated from a website or portal.

Portal

Whether generated in batch or as a function of an on-demand request, mobile and web- delivered information may be retrieved through a website or portal. Online delivery sites may allow the user to set preferences for methods and events for reminders and/ or alerts. For instance, a credit card customer may ask for a notice that a bill payment is coming due or that a foreign transaction was placed on their card. Notifications and reminders, while often sent from a site such as a portal, may be delivered as a text message or an email. Both methods allow for a link to be used for navigation to bill details in this example.

Portals or personalized, authenticated websites provide a landing, or home, page to enable the user to click on images or links to retrieve individual documents. On-demand implementations would mean that the document(s) are generated as they are requested. As in traditional document composition implementations, the personal data will be retrieved, the document composed, and then presented in a frame of the portal.

Implementations that use a portal approach may be extended to facilitate tracking of document retrieval and viewing.

Summary

There are several approaches that can be taken to present documents on the web and mobile devices. Consideration for regulatory requirements as well as business requirements for presentation layout, supported mobile devices, desired user interaction capabilities and system integration will influence applicable approaches for mobile and web delivery.

Retention of information in a document construct similar to a printed document tends to require larger screens found on PCs, laptops, and larger tablet devices. Electronic and interactive documents often allow users to navigate and choose how some information is displayed. Smaller screens found on some tablets and smartphones may best benefit from an HTML application or phone app that considers the form factor.

Information management and security can lead to significant technical requirements when delivering information to mobile devices. Technical design decisions related to data storage and handling of sensitive data can be particularly complex for mobile applications.

Regardless of the implementation approach taken, one should realize that many new software solutions are available and continually being brought to market to more easily create electronic and interactive documents as well as mobile information presentation apps.