Connect and chat with your friends, book movie tickets, make your "selfie" look stunning with photo editing tools – there is a mobile app for everything. From a business perspective, mobile apps are the most cost-effective and powerful way to reach out to a vast mobile market and generate revenues. What more! Fast-paced consumerization has paved the way for building apps that make business management and handling day-to-day operations easier. In fact,the enterprise mobile market has seen an exponential growth in popularity among startups as well as Fortune 500 companies in the past few years.
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On the flip side, there are many organizations that still fail to harness the potential of enterprise mobile apps. Several companies are still figuring out how they can take the advantage of these cutting-edge mobile apps to streamline business operations, manage projects, and improve revenues. If you have not yet found a reason to invest in this, now is time to do so because the enterprise mobile app market is emerging as the latest trend. There are many organizational and operational benefits of having a mobile application for your company such as optimizing business processes, leveraging analytics,and increasing productivity.
So, if you are considering building your first enterprise mobile app, it is vital to start off with a problem or business challenge, and then move to the development phase. Discussed here are some important tips to help you create a business application that’s worth your investment.
- Choose the Right Mobile App Development Platform
Considering the fact that enterprise apps may be used across different mobile devices, with unique screen sizes and resolutions, it is important to make your app responsive in nature. This means your app will deliver the same look and feel across different mobile devices, Operating Systems and capabilities. For this, it is vital to determine what platforms your organization or employees are using. Based on it, decide on a list of mobile app platforms that you would target – iOS, Android, Windows, etc. Make sure that you do not miss out web-based business apps that are more generic in nature and can be used widely, irrespective of device platform. Cross-platform application development can also be a good option here.
- Focus on Task-Specific Apps
If you want your enterprise app to be successful, make it task-specific rather than trying to do too many things at once. The latter will make your app bulky and you will end up confusing your users with things that are less relevant to them. Therefore, first identify a specific business challenge or problem, and then design an app that targets that particular task. The idea is to focus on fewer things so that your app performs better and faster.
- Design an App with Amazing UI/UX
User experience should be your foremost priority when you design an enterprise app. No matter what superb features you include in your mobile app, unless it delivers a seamless, easy-to-use experience, it will not be successful among your users. A simple and intuitive app that is bug-free and has amazing UI/UX is the key to building a great app. Therefore, focus on improving your employee experience with the app and enhance their productivity.
- Iterations to Improve App Performance
Once you create the basic design and structure of the app, continuously make iterations to add new features and fix bugs. It is only when the basics are built strong that you can easily push out the latest updates of the app. Moreover, your app should also include a feature for the users to report problems and provide feedback. This is a great idea to make further iterations and add brilliant features in the future. As your users will always expect frequent enhancements and updates, you should plan well in advance how to render iterations in a speedier and efficient manner.
- Create a Mockup
You cannot build it all at once. When you are doing it for the first time, it is important that you create a demo of the app and seek recommendations from the decision-maker. There are several wireframing and mockup tools with which you can build a mockup of your enterprise app and show it to your team to give them an idea of user experience, key features, and capabilities of the app. Creating a demo will always help in integrating new features and making iterations that will help build a fantastic product.
- Deliver Highest Levels of App Security
When you build an enterprise mobile app, rendering highest levels of security is most important. This is because the app will deal with critical and confidential business information, and employee data. Thus, you cannot take a chance with factors affecting data integrity and security of your company. When designing an app, security should be your priority. You can integrate key features like encryption, login credentials, 2-step security authentication remote access, etc. to control who can access your app. At the same time, you should strive to improve user experience.
- Know the Cost to Build an Enterprise App
No matter whether you build your enterprise application internally or get it done from an outsourcing company, the steps to create an app are the same. However, it is crucial to determine what it would cost whether you develop it yourself or outsource it. At every stage of mobile app development, you have to incur a cost. When you outsource, developers generally charge for the entire project or on per hour basis. So, before you make a jump in building an application, know the cost of app development.
- Support and Maintenance
Since most mobile app platforms roll out updates continuously, it is important that you regularly update and test your enterprise app on the latest versions to deliver improved and better performance, high security, and a bug-free, seamless user experience. Moreover, as your enterprise will undergo changes, its connectivity with the app will change. You have to be ready to provide support and maintenance for such changes in the long run. Unfortunately, many companies do not have mobile app development expertise internally and they have to outsource their app support and maintenance needs to an outside firm. Organizations should take into consideration the cost of support and maintenance; as well, this is an integral part of building a successful app.
Based on these valuable tips, you can build your first enterprise mobile app in an efficient and cost-effective manner, and ensure success.