Today’s rhythm makes people get used to doing everything on the go. They walk and eat, run and study, drive and read. They sell and buy, work and have fun looking at the same display of their smartphones.
There seems to be an app for almost every aspect of our lives, whether private or professional ones. If you are reading this you must have come across an idea to make another one for your business. Building an app for any enterprise is not as easy as it might seem.
Complexity increases in direct relation to the result you plan to get after the apps starts to be used by your employees. In this article, we will uncover some useful tips that would help you to overcome the challenges you face when making your enterprise app development strategy. If you aren’t sure whether you suffice money, read our coverage on how much it costs to build a mobile app.
Things You Should Pay Attention While Developing an App
User experience
With the variety of devices and screens’ resolutions, mobile apps developers have to agree with the fact that porting is not nearly enough. To make the app look intuitive and native the UX/UI should be made specifically for the device under consideration.
Try not to port and make the mobile app the same style as your desktop app.
Be agile. Start with basic functionality, deploy the app, listen to your employees’ feedbacks and add features one by one. Short iterations of the mobile development process allow you to be flexible with your wishes and needs.
Security
Imagine, you are building a house of glass with transparent walls and doors. How safe would you feel inside that type of house? The mobile security of an enterprise mobile app is as crucial as your house security. At least it might appear it could cost you a house unless provided.
An app without strong authentication, application performance management, encryption, and secure data management features is a fragile house made of glass. Safe storage of data, business process details, reports, financial information is a must. Before launching your mobile app in the app store make sure there are specific essential security frameworks in action.
Settings
The same as your employees may adjust their working place according to their needs, they should be able to customize the app. There is no difficulty to add a choice of backgrounds, ability to alter menu items or change the order of form fields if it makes the process smooth and routine and thus fast.
Such an app would bring more fun to the process and would empower the workers to feel more authorized. They would never consider abandoning the mobile app that meets their expectations as for the user experience. A small change can make a big difference.
Convenience
Who runs the world? - the Internet, Wi-Fi to be more exact. However, it would be a more reasonable approach to not rely much on the Internet and make basic functionality available in the offline or airplane mode.
So, mobile app developers should make sure the access to the recent search results or entered data can be reached via the caches even when being offline. If the user's’ work implies using some additional devices, make sure there is an ability to connect it via the app.
App Updates
The lack of a proper app update strategy can put off or restrain you from getting the expected results. The mobile app should collect feedback, behavior analytics, app loading time, app crash rate etc.
Once the analytics gathered and fixes were made, developers should introduce upgraded versions of the app. All the app updates should be precise and don’t distort the user experience, with no regard to the device or platform. In addition, providing regular and most expected mobile app updates frequently encourages the user to keep using the app and enhance their user experience.
In a Nutshell
Do not try to copy the well-known apps for other enterprises. You do not need another useless copycat that would make no sense to your workers. Spend some time to identify an urgent necessity within your business or the whole industry that a mobile app can help solve. Think about how the app can improve the process or get better results in your field.
Take time to talk to your employees, make surveys, gather opinions and create technical specifications for the first version of the app. The process of efficient adoption of new tools and technologies can be complicated.
The implementation strategy should be based on constant communication with the users who are going to use the app, i.e. your employees. With the help of training programs, the process would eventually run smooth and would bring positive changes.