“78% of business applications are abandoned after their first use”
According to the latest Gartner survey, companies are frustrated with enterprise mobile app development and are instead refocusing on responsive websites to address their mobile needs.
Even among existing business apps, more than 80% are likely to fail due to lack of data, problem insights, end-user engagement, or a lack of innovation and growth of their mobile apps to meet customer needs. Since the chances of success are high, companies need to take the right steps to build enterprise mobile apps the right way.
Pitfalls to Avoid When Building Enterprise Mobile Apps
Building and deploying enterprise mobile apps is not an easy task and most companies view it as more of a high risk, high reward situation. Done right, enterprise mobile apps help business operations run more efficiently across organizations and drive ROI. However, organizations are taking the wrong approach to business applications. More often, the lack of a clear understanding of what the application should do and who the users are, the processes the application will support, the technology/platform for execution and its management are often the main reasons for failure. business mobile applications. So what is the right way to build business applications? While the right approach depends on the situation and strategy, here are some general guidelines for building enterprise mobile apps the right way.
no clear scope
Often, the demand for business applications and their reach are simply based on the opinion and biased knowledge of a few people. Despite investing a great deal of time and money to build a business app, enterprise mobile app development teams work in a vacuum and on assumptions without even asking what their customers (internal or external) want or need. In many cases, this can lead to a project crash or a failed business application.
The right direction:
Business applications are mission-critical and are meant to accomplish a specific, highly focused task. Therefore, to be successful, companies must start by defining the problem to be solved by working with end users and other stakeholders. you must be clear
if the application will serve employees, customers, suppliers or all of them?
Will the mobile use the latest technology or will it replace existing technology?
More information and data points generally means a higher chance of success. Once you’ve prepared a list of business processes and established a roadmap around those processes, it’s time to shift the focus to understanding the end user.
Lack of end user involvement
60% of workers use apps for work activities, but business apps are more often built in isolation without talking to the people who will use them. Therefore, it is not surprising that, among the many reasons why enterprise applications fail, the biggest pitfall is not serving the user. The features and functions of a business application don’t mean much and it won’t be successful unless users start using it.
The right direction:
Above all, companies must avoid the assumption that they know what it takes.
Successful enterprise mobile apps focus on solving one or maybe two problems for the end user and the business. Therefore, companies must always include end-user feedback from the first prototype and continuously collect feedback to improvise the application until the release of the final version to be successful.
Employees/Suppliers/Channel Partners vs. Applications: Create focus groups for each of them to determine the business problems they face and how business applications can solve them.
Customer-Facing Apps – A great way is to use surveys and focus groups of current and potential customers to understand what services/products they would like to access through mobile apps, as well as what app functionality they would love to have within the app. .
A deep understanding of your pain points, issues at hand, and therefore a clear vision of your application goals. Additionally, active collaboration and user engagement can further drive interactive UX throughout the development cycle to ensure a sustainable, engaging, and ongoing experience.
Bad user experience
Forrester estimates that 64% of employees rarely use business applications due to poor design and user experience. This is not surprising when you consider that many application developers, already dealing with many pressing problems, do not give the user experience the importance it deserves.
Also, business users, designers and developers disagree when it comes to user experience and UI design often becomes a source of frustration and eventually the UI doesn’t work. meets one or more functional requirements. It’s typical for companies to want to build a Swiss Army knife of features, when all they need is a single-purpose enterprise application.
The right direction:
Keeping things simple is the key! Business applications should be easy with clean interfaces for usability. App developers should aim to create an app that has a clear purpose and meets their business goals, rather than trying to bombard the app with multiple features. An application must be easy to use and intuitive so that anyone can easily understand it and this can only happen when enterprise application developers put themselves in the shoes of their end users to avoid the worst dangers of enterprise applications.
outdated technology
Aside from poor user experience, outdated technology, and lack of strong back-end integration with back-end resources and public APIs, seeing sprawling technology is often one of the main reasons of business application failures. Many businesses continue to use legacy systems that are not compatible with mobile services and therefore cannot meet user expectations for more additions and changes with the advent of new technologies. Enterprise applications can also fail and only add to a company’s ‘losing money’ project pile if it has an inefficient API strategy or if its BYOD and MDM policies are not efficiently implemented and managed.
The right direction:
Strong and secure back-end integration capabilities, the right API strategy ensures application sustainability and relevance. Given the challenges of device fragmentation, you should strive to optimize enterprise mobile apps across a variety of platforms. One solution is to choose the platform and technology stack for your business application with an understanding of why your business needs mobile apps for which business processes, the needs and desires of users.
It may also depend on the choice of your primary audience. While at one point BlackBerry was the standard for business applications until Android and Apple’s iOS dominated the scene. Both have their own unique software and interface features. Beyond operating system and device types, there is also an industry or market preference for certain devices that tend to be a more popular choice. So, for example, in the entertainment industry and retail industry, Apple devices like iPad, iPad Pro are preferred, while many major industries and retailers prefer popular Samsung or Nexus devices for Android OS.
Poor post-launch analysis and management
An often overlooked aspect of a successful mobile app is business app analytics and management. Whereas app analytics refers to how often the app is being used and how the app is performing and leveraging and helps to provide valuable insights about the app. This information will help you understand how your app is performing and what your users are saying so you can constantly improve your app and its overall performance.
The right direction:
An app is not successful unless it drives engagement. App developers should therefore incorporate in-app analytics to help the business understand the mobile app user experience. By regularly testing the app to improve performance and using the analytics tool to measure adoption and engagement, businesses can identify usability problems and issues. Key metrics to track for mobile app analytics include app users, crash reports, session duration, performance analytics, and monetization metrics. By continuously monitoring, analyzing and managing your business application to adapt to the changing demands of your application users and ever-changing technologies you will make a dramatic difference in the popularity, life cycle and ultimately the success of your business application. .