Reconsidering Mobile-First Design for Business Apps

I had an interesting conversation with some banking execs who had a lot to say about mobile-first design and multi-page "form wizards"...none of it good.  What they told me was that when you are dealing with forms with lots of data (as loan applications tend to be), the last thing you want is to submit page after page of short, one-page forms.  They were very adamant that these multi-page (they called them "tabbed") applications were killing their productivity.

They want one REALLY BIG form with all the data on it that they can fill out once and submit.  They don't care if they have to scroll a lot or if there are a lot of fields on the page.  They went so far as to say it would shave hours off of their daily work and earn the bank loads of money.

Interestingly, I'd always resisted mobile-friendly pages for business apps because my personal preference is to organize the data well so that you don't need a bunch of "submit" buttons.  I feel like these power-users have vindicated my preference and I am going to be more aware of a form's use cases when designing business apps.

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