Several of our clients are deploying enterprise mobile
solutions to their global workforce this year.
The pace of mobile adoption and change is accelerating much faster than
what we witnessed during the adoption of web-based technologies in the late
1990’s. This phenomenon is forcing organizations to quickly adopt a mobile
enterprise strategy that will have long term impacts on their users while
striving to deliver true value to the business they support. Mobile strategies must to be decided with
long term consequences therefore it is important to ask key questions before
finalizing your strategy.
Some critical questions to consider before finalizing your
mobile strategy are:
Will you deliver native or web-based applications?
Many of our clients started out in the mobile space creating
“Proof of concept” mobile apps (usually IOS) to prove they could build and
deploy an iPhone app. They quickly
found that the process of hand coding even a simple application and deploying
it was much more costly and time consuming than was originally planned. The
good news is most users embraced the new mobile app and asked for more functionality
and more support on a wide variety of devices.
Budgeted costs become challenging and they needed to choose a limited
deployment or choose a different strategy. With the evolution of HTML-5 many
companies are revisiting the native vs. Web-based mobile applications and
opting to deploy more with HTML-5. This
approach offers many features previously only available in native applications with
much broader deployment options and the ability to customize the UX for
individual devices using CSS3 and MediaQuery detects to specifically target
individual devices and deliver a responsive mobile design optimized for each
device and platform.
What devices will you support?
As I mentioned above, many companies hoped for an 80/20
solution where they could deploy an iPhone app and cover 80% of the users. As the mobile space quickly evolves, Android
devices are quickly gaining market share and the new Windows mobile platform is
poised to take up to 25% market share in the next 5 years. If
your company adopts a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) strategy you will need to
support these devices from both a pragmatic and accessibility perspective. This decision will also depend on which
geographic locations being deployed and whether this device is a primary work
device or a secondary fall back option. Detailed knowledge of the target user, personas
and usage scenarios needs to be carefully considered as part of this decision.
What is the skill level of your mobile team and timelines for delivery?
Developers love new technology and you likely will have
plenty of IT professionals in your organization eager to learn and grow their mobile
development skills. This may be a complicated
and lengthy process if you choose the native application strategy as you will
need strong skills in IOS, Android and Windows Mobile SDK’s in addition to
expanding the skills of your distributed architectures and security teams. Acquiring these skills may pose a challenge
to rapid deployments often needed to deliver your mobile strategy. Beyond the technical skills you will be User
Experience professionals who understand what the users actually need and are
competent at designing compelling, efficient and simple applications that
require little or no training.
What is your projected maintenance costs once deployed?
Mobile apps are different than traditional web
applications. Users expect frequent feature
updates and improvements (at least 4x per year) and have high expectations
about quality and ease of use. Adding features
to a mobile app tied to enterprise applications can be complex and costly. Add to this complexity of deploying these
apps to multiple platforms each supporting multiple devices and your support
costs can skyrocket.
Will you create mini-applications or deploy with a MEAP?
To address these complexities, many of our financial clients
are changing their strategy away from native applications and moving toward
deployment with a MEAP (Mobile Enterprise Application Platform). Enterprise vendors like Verivo and Sybase
are now providing platforms to handle many of the infrastructure areas
previously being built individually as mobile applications were deployed. This
allows a majority of the code and data to reside on enterprise servers with a
thin HTML5 client delivering the content natively on the device. Other
organizations are creating a small tightly defined set of native mini-applications
targeted at key user tasks to deliver mobile solutions where they best fit
often using device specific features and technology. Understanding what your users truly need will
help you decide whether a robust Mobile Application platform or a small set of native
apps will best deliver your mobile strategy.
Finally, do you know what your users actually need?
With all the possibilities a mobile strategy has to offer it
is important to first understand how your users work and what mobile solutions
can amplify their efforts and improve their performance. This is best accomplished by spending time
with them in the field, documenting how they work and then designing solutions
based on true behavior vs. guessing what they may need. One
discovery we have seen repeated with many of our clients is the data usage for
mobile users is very different than traditional web applications. Once
you have an idea of the user’s needs we recommend you build a simple mobile prototype
and usability test it with users. This
approach will lead to new discoveries and further iterations in your
design. Once you deploy your application
you will need to head back out into the field and again study how users are
actually using the application and use this knowledge to refine and improve
your design.
Interested in learning more about how to make this happen?
Our company (Classic System Solutions, Inc) has been designing mobile and web-based
applications for the world’s leading companies for over 15 years. Our UX (User Experience) professionals work
directly with clients on large-scale deployments to assure usable, effective
and innovative solutions. The classes
we offer reflect this pragmatic approach from the lessons learned while working
with our clients.
