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Making the most of your company’s mobile application

A widely quoted statistic making the rounds of various technical websites and news sites such as CNN is that 1 in 4 applications downloaded to a smartphone is opened only once and abandoned (Source).  Industry pundits have been spinning those statistics in many different ways but what does that mean for our clients who are looking to develop a mobile strategy?

  • Is the firm in the business of providing unique content or data that may be better served by a mobile-optimized web site (simpler to build and support).
  • Examine what sort of functionality that would be provided by a mobile app:
    • Would it be used frequently by a user, ie. more than once a month which seems to be the current threshold.  Anything less than that, the user forget that it is there or in the case of iPhone, it is deleted in favor of another app when the limit is reached (16 apps per page, 9 pages minus the 15 default iPhone apps).
    • The mobile solution must be developed with the overriding goal of providing positive productivity advantages to the end user.  So, it is imperative that business analysts talk to the ideal user of a mobile application (either internal or external user).
    • Once a strategy of building a mobile application has been decided on, finding the appropriate people to create the application.  One of the quotes that stood out upon reading the article was: “The big takeaway from the news for mobile app developers is that first impressions of your app matter greatly”.  This means engaging knowledgeable User Experience personal in the design of the UI.

The same would go to supporting the internal workforce:

  • How would a mobile app assist the internal workforce do their tasks more efficiently?
  • Does the client’s style of business support a more mobile workforce?
  • Does the client’s IT have the development skillsets to build a mobile app and maybe more importantly, does IT operations have the ability to support the app once it is the field?

These considerations are key points in any dialog between the IT development staff, IT operations staff and the business analysts representing the interests of final users, looking at, evaluating and leveraging current resources, skills and platforms inside the company, determining what additional resources need to be acquired and anticipating future developments in a flexible mobile application strategy.

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Perry Hoekstra

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