In my blog last week about the “Royal Family” of enterprise mobile app imperatives, I pointed out that in my opinion, “context is king.” Let me give you a simple example of where a little context could go a long way.

Recently, I was heading to an appointment and volunteered to look up the directions to make sure the driver was heading the right way. With my trusty iPhone 5, I opened the Maps application and input the address we were heading to, which soon revealed itself on the map. I then had to click on the destination, click on the “directions to here” choice, then choose from a list to select directions from my current location to the destination. What’s missing in this scenario is any concept of the context. I’m moving at high velocity toward the location I just entered, so why so many clicks to get the directions from my current location to be displayed on the screen? Why do I have to be so explicit about what I want when an app could pretty easily discern my intentions and just display the information I wanted?

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