Nov 2, 2016
With rising numbers of mobile users, businesses are scrambling to get users’ attention. Most of the times, they do it through mobile apps. However, just having an enterprise mobile app does not help you accomplish your goals. One of the major reasons of failure of enterprise mobile apps is lack of good UX.
If the UX of your mobile app is not engaging your target audience as you would have liked, you need to rework it. Pronto. Reworking, however, takes additional time, which again means additional investment.
So the best thing you can do is get your enterprise mobile app right in the first go.
How to succeed with Enterprise Mobility?
If you think it’s easier said than done, think again. You just need to follow few simple tips, and voilà, you are done. Let’s have a look at those tips:
- Identify your audience: The first thing you need to do is understand your audience. Generally, you have two categories of users: the one who are looking for specific information or to quickly complete a transaction, and another who are just browsing. If majority of your audience is former, you need to focus on features that will enable them to achieve their goals with the least possible steps. For the latter category, you need to identify a strategy that turns them into paying customers.
- Start from bottom: It always make sense to start from the bottom, i.e., you should start from the kind of customer experience you want to give to your visitors. Once you identify it, build upon it. Add elements to enhance it. Remember that great mobile ideas are uniquely mobile.
- Implement 80/20 rule: While you are designing a UX, you need to remember that 80% of the app users are going to use only 20% of its functionality. If you already have an online presence, you need to study the user behavior over there. Identify the functionalities that are used maximum and then try to implement them into the app seamlessly.
- Designer-developer collaboration: You can never ever produce a successful enterprise mobile app if you don’t have your designers and developers working together. A designer should understand what the target audience wants, and the developer should be able to code in those “designs” and user-friendly functionalities for hassle-free performance. You can even use various tools that are available in the market to facilitate the collaboration between these two parties.
- Use familiar platform: Your user should know what they will get when they press a button, swipe the screen or touch an icon. If you are going to use custom interface, make sure that the functionalities of the interface are simple and easy to understand. Opting for a platform that works in an unfamiliar way will confuse the users as well as will slow down the engagement rate. You definitely don’t want to do that.
- Allow interruptions: There can be tons of reasons why your user had to abandon the app in the middle of a task. Keep your app simple enough that a user can pick it up from where he/she left off. One of the ways to implement this is to break larger tasks into smaller chunks, and add context consistently.
While CIOs will continue to face challenges concerning UX, few aspects that will keep this vertical of mobile design lively would be increase in BYOD adoption, security issues concerning mobile apps and agile implementation process.