With the emergence of true mobile computing, one of the things Yankee Group wants to work out for our clients is the impact on the user experience. When you don’t have a bright 15-inch screen and a mouse or a touchpad for instance, how much information can you request? When you’re not at your desk but in a harried queue shoving your carry-ons forward with your feet, how well can you concentrate on what a mobile screen has to tell you?

As usual with big directional changes in technology, vocabulary has to help us think differently. I’ve been talking about the likelihood that we’ll start to see atomized applications — apps reduced from today’s do-it-all-with-footnotes monsters to very simple, discrete tools doing just a few things. YG analyst Carl Howe says the term he’s hearing is ‘Chiclet’ apps, as with the iPhone interface being rapidly adopted elsewhere. But beyond reducing app bloat to a simple set of functions, there’s also a need to think more simply about presenting information. In a document- and report-centric world, we’ll be re-thinking content delivery in a big way.

David Birnbach, CEO of Vaultus Mobile, was talking with us about this the other day, as Yankee Group works to figure out solutions to mobilizing our substantial Anywhere databases. Vaultus develops mobile clients for large enterprises that want to give employees or customers mobile access to corporate databases. “People seem to want to go from the aggregate level, e.g. all store sales, to the unit level, like women’s shoes sales in one store, in just two or three clicks. You have to strip back to a clean slate in planning what to present. It needs to start out very rolled-up-ish.”

My spell-checker doesn’t like that word, but I do!