Your enterprise must take certain steps to build successful mobile solutions. We developed a playbook to guide enterprises through development.
Mobile is the fastest-growing, most pervasive technology in history. Mobile is also disruptive, forcing companies to re-imagine how to leverage this technology to serve customers, employees and business partners.
Your company has more than likely built and deployed mobile solutions, but did they measure up to expectations?
The average lifespan of an enterprise mobile application is surprisingly short, with half of all enterprise mobile apps failing within only two years.
It is imperative that your enterprise takes the right steps to ensure success with your mobile solutions.
A Mobile Strategy That Works
We have developed a playbook to help guide enterprises through the development lifecycle and reinforce the ideas and processes that put a solution on a path to success.
Our experience has demonstrated that successful mobile solutions typically avoid the common pitfalls and share these four factors:
1. Focus on addressing a critical business need
Mobile applications should not be a kitchen sink, do-everything solution. Mobile solutions are most successful when they have limited scope, present the right data at the right time, and allow the user to quickly and easily complete the task at hand. Identifying key stakeholders and intended audience will help determine this need.
We approach this challenge by leveraging our industry experience to work with business stakeholders in developing a mobile roadmap as part of an overall Digital Strategy.
Understanding customers’ needs and competitors’ positions in the digital landscape, identifying and quantifying business objectives, and assessing technical considerations are critical components in developing a successful strategy. Based on this roadmap, we work with you to identify and properly scope individual solutions to maximize the impact for your company.
2. Incorporate a top-notch user experience (UX)
Based on Forrester Research, 64% of employees abandon enterprise apps because of poor UX. Users get frustrated when they are forced to master a complex navigational structure, duplicate actions and tediously enter copious amounts of data. A well-designed application should give the user the ability to complete their task with as few distractions as possible.
We have found that User Experience and Design works best when it is an equal partner in your iterative process. Applications should adhere to your overall Branding and Marketing Guidelines while incorporating individual functional design decisions, leading to the best possible experience for users.
Designing the UX with the end users’ needs in mind will result in a more efficient and useful application.
3. Include analytics and other feedback loops to identify application performance issues, usage statistics and common pain points
Understanding how your users are actually using your application is essential to success. Analytics provides you with data points on which features are being used, how engaging your content actually is and both proactive and reactive intelligence needed to retain users.
We utilize our Data & Analytics practice to determine and implement best practices for tracking KPI and the data points needed to make informed decisions for your mobile solutions. Using a combination of third-party analytics providers and home-grown customizations, we are able to track and manage the data needed to create and evolve a product roadmap.
4. Maintain a quick bug fix and new feature development cycle
Users will quickly abandon an application if a bug prevents them from completing their task or even worse, causes them to lose critical work. A mobile solution should be treated as a living thing, constantly being refined and improved with bug fixes, strategic features and fresh, engaging content.
Our digital team understands that product development and deployment are only two of the components of a successful product launch. The plan must include a framework for ongoing support and maintenance of the solution, as well as marketing and change management for a successful rollout.
We collaborate with our Marketing Operations and Organizational Change Management practices to work with you to develop a launch strategy that encompasses all of these areas.
Final Thoughts
According to Gartner’s 2017 mobile application survey a quarter of enterprises globally that have not yet taken advantage of mobile applications. Are you one of them? Take advantage of mobile to increase engagement and brand loyalty through personalized notifications, data collection and outstanding user experience.
A typical U.S. smartphone owner uses approximately 27 apps, a number that has stayed fairly constant for the past four years. Make sure your mobile app is part of that 27 by making it more useful and effective than other options out there. Read more about how to do this in our blog series on app fatigue.