Consider these three wrong how you can develop enterprise apps — and avoid them.
Most enterprise mobile apps have far to head before they are often considered great mobile apps. Unfortunately, apps often fail for a similar reason over and over again, with organizations neglecting to look the issues before it’s too late. Soon, user adoption plummets, shadow apps (those not approved by IT) become commonplace and your enterprise begins to suffer.
With this in mind, listed below are three guaranteed tips on how to screw up your online business mobile app – and the way to circumvent doing so.
1. Give users exactly what they ask for
Start by finding your best business analyst and spend some weeks compiling a listing of necessities in your app. Upon getting an excellent handle on what you wish to have, put out a request for proposal (RFP) and look for a vendor that does not understand your small business to implement the app.
[In a mobile business, you must always be testing for failure. Read Are you able to Deliver Antifragile Mobile Apps?]
You feel confident that the app goes to be a big success: you interviewed stakeholders, modeled it after your existing processes and wrote all of it down. How could this ever fail?
I’ve got one word for you: iterate. What number of times have you ever ordered exactly what you wanted at a cafe only to be disappointed after you got what you asked for? This same feeling of regret happens on a regular basis with mobile customers.
Instead of spending weeks or months gathering requirements, quickly identify the minimal viable product (MVP) and get an app in the market — fast! Once the app is released, ask your users for feedback. Incorporate that feedback. Release the app repeatedly. Not just will your app not suck, your users will feel that they had a stake in it.
2. Model your app after an existing business process
What if I told you to write the stairs you’ll take find the telephone number, address, and operating hours of the Atlas Cafe within the Mission District of San Francisco — but without supplying you with access to the net? You’d examine me like i used to be crazy, right? So why create enterprise mobile apps modeled after existing processes?
Your users probably don’t love your existing processes an excessive amount of once they have a whole keyboard and a snug chair to go into information. Forcing them to do it on a slightly keyboard designed for pixies might be downright painful.
Here’s an example: Delivery drivers often have a troublesome time finding the proper apartment at the first visit. With the prevailing process, drivers entered an outline of the placement within the system. With mobile devices, however, the motive force can take a photograph of the position and GPS tag it. The mobile process is totally different and more efficient and drivers can complete it far more quickly.
Try this tactic to prevent the typical pitfall of modeling mobile after existing processes: divide a whiteboard into three vertical columns. Label them: Business Process, Mobile-First, and New Opportunities. Within the first column draw your existing process in a flow diagram. Within the second column, draw lines from the flow diagram for steps which may be re-imagined with mobile and list them within the Mobile-First column.
Finally, within the third column, in keeping with your brainstormed ideas for a Mobile-First flow, write down any new opportunities for apps or business processes that this new process offers. Using our delivery driver example from above, the truth that the driving force has tagged the apartment signifies that future deliveries should be flagged for “thin packaging only” to permit the motive force to slip the delivery under the gate and avoid the buyer missing future deliveries, even supposing they aren’t home.
3. Ensure the app doesn’t really hook up with your business
If you really need to make a mistake your mobile app, make an app that creates or updates data into one system but forces the user to later edit the information or add additional info for the information to be a part of a broader process.
You do not need your mobile app to be cut loose what you are promoting processes and unable to update core systems. You wish data from mobile apps to be a continuing portion of the enterprise experience — what i love to name enterprise UX.
I constantly see organizations roll out amazing new mobile apps for viewing corporate data which are completely with out enterprise UX. These apps let the user view information at the go, but require them to leap to a different system to update the information. What actually happens is that your small business process is now harder than it was before you gave your users that new fancy mobile app.
One solution to avoid poor enterprise UX is to exploit cloud-based platforms and providers and securely connect existing systems to the cloud as a mobile integration hub. Then, build your apps using this new platform as a single point for mobile app connectivity.
Cloud-based platforms speak mobile — with RESTful APIs, efficient data transfers, and local mobile SDKs — to give the opportunity to create great enterprise UX without ever spending on costly development cycles updating legacy systems.
Too often I see enterprises doom their mobile apps. The predominant reason is that they approach mobile apps the identical way they’ve got always treated projects: creating volumes of requirement specifications, not reimagining processes to apply new technologies, and never listening to the enterprise UX experience.
Together, these strategies will torpedo any mobile app plan and — congratulations! — your app is nearly certain to stink.
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Quinton Wall is the Director of Platform Technology at Salesforce.com where he makes a speciality of helping customers harness the possibility of the cloud and platform-as-a-service. Wall was ranked probably the most influential force.com blogger in 2010 and is a prolific author of dozens of … View Full Bio
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