The Challenges of Designing Digital Services for Multiple Mobile Platforms

The value of digital services is increasingly recognized by owners of digital platforms. These services have central role in building and sustaining the business of the digital platform. In order to sustain the design of digital services, owners of digital platforms encourage third-party developers to tap into and join the digital ecosystem. However, while there is an emerging literature on designing digital services, little empirical evidence exists about challenges faced by third-party developers while designing digital services, and in particular for multiple mobile platforms. Drawing on a multiple case study of three mobile application development firms from Sweden, Denmark and Norway, we synthesize the digital service design taxonomy to understand the challenges faced by third-party developers. Our study identifies a set of challenges in four different levels: user level, platform level, distribution level and ecosystem level. The identified challenges are then illustrated by different design dimensions. For each challenge, we identified set of factors and classified them under three objectives: business, interaction and technology. In doing this, our research extends and complements existing digital service literature and contributes new knowledge about the design of digital services.