We’ve now taken a look at the specific areas that are often overlooked when it comes to facilitating mobile user adoption and IT execution. In the last part of this series, we’ll be delving into business collaboration.
We know that IT and business collaboration are both required to make any IT project successful. However, business collaboration is even more significant when you consider mobile apps.
Overcoming User Adoption Challenges
As discussed in the previous blog posts in this series (Part-1 and Part-2), mobile apps are successful when developed for customer-facing employees. And, the processes that these employees use may not be exactly the same as how the “corporation” envisions it to be. As a result, the IT developer may not fully understand and comprehend the processes even if the end-users are invited for an all day session to share their processes. Details will be missed which will ultimately make a big difference. In addition, user experience is always personal, and the more the customer-facing employees are involved consistently in user design, the better.
IT and Business Collaboration : A Must for Success
For these reasons alone, business collaboration must be much more significant in mobile apps. The best and most successful way to tackle this would be if the end-users and the IT developer could actually sit together for the purpose of collaboration. The IT developer would develop the app while the business end-user is right beside him or her giving real time feedback. The IT developer could tweak the user interface in real time as necessary. Once the business user was satisfied, the IT developer could do all of the “plumbing” with back-end integration and deploy the app in the business user’s smartphone or tablet.
What would be even more ideal is if the business user could provide feedback after a few days of usage to offer improvements or enhancements. Working with the developer, changes could be made, and the cycle could continue until the business user was completely satisfied. Eventually, the app would be a runaway success, and it would “stick” with the business user forever. Of course, if business processes changed, the business user could always walk into the IT department and repeat the process.
This ideal scenario would almost certainly guarantee that mobile user adoption would be a surefire hit. Unfortunately, we all know that this is very wishful thinking and could almost never happen in a real world enterprise environment.
Addressing Collaboration : Right From the Start
At appsFreedom, we have attempted to build this capability right into our platform. We proudly call our Freedom Platform the “mobile applications development and collaboration platform” for good reason. We realize it will never be quite the same as having a dedicated IT developer sitting alongside the business user. But, we have attempted to get closer to this vision than ever before in our new appsFreedom Platform.
In our previous blog post, we highlighted how the Freedom Designer enables customer-facing methodology for mobile app development. Along with the Freedom Designer, we also provide a real time view of what an IT developer might be developing in the Freedom Designer for the business user.
In other words, it is very similar to enabling a business user to watch over the shoulder of the developer during development and provide immediate feedback.
At appsFreedom, we always knew that if we could involve the business team right upfront in the UI design process, the user adoption would sky rocket. This makes perfect sense because business end- users gain input during the design process.
With Freedom Platform v3.0 and the Freedom Designer, we now allow the business user to collaborate and provide input in the UI design process. Once the business user confirms and approves the user interface screens along with the customer-focused process workflow, the IT developer can then focus on back-end integration and the plumbing to get the data from the back-end enterprise systems. This ensures the business users are always in the know and aware of what is coming their way while also providing assurance to the IT developer that the app will not have user adoption issues after all the inputs are completed from the business users.
In addition to enabling business collaboration in the design process with the Freedom Designer, we have also enabled adoption tracking and analysis through another component called the Freedom Analyzer. The Freedom Analyzer tracks all usage patterns of an app and its users and provides different kinds of reports to the administrators and IT developers. This not only gives IT the ability to measure adoption and to get early warning signs of adoption but also provides a mobile ROI measurement tool for management.
The ability to measure adoption is the first tangible step anyone can take after deployment. You can always do something about a problem if it’s visible to you, and visibility comes from measurement. The Freedom Analyzer gives the much needed visibility to the IT department to see and measure adoption and then take the corrective steps towards resolving it.
Taking these corrective steps has to be quick and iterative. Our whole platform is geared towards quick deployment and an iterative development approach. An IT developer can create a mobile app, with all its back-end integrations and business logic, literally within minutes using our graphical modeling tools and develop-once, deploy-everywhere toolkit. In other words, if IT detects a problem in adoption or receives a business request for a small change, it could literally be fixed and rolled out, all the way to production and into the end-users’ smartphones and tablets within minutes.
Delivering the Highest User Adoption Rates in the Industry!
At appsFreedom, our main focus is to enable user adoption in enterprises. Everything we do, from our Mobile Cloud Platform to Pre-built App Templates and even our value-based pricing model along with deployment is all geared towards increasing end user adoption in an enterprise. We believe the solution for mobile app user adoption problems starts from the highest levels of management : recognizing the value of mobile apps and the power it gives to customer-facing employees and, of course, at the execution level with the right philosophy and methodology centered towards end-users. But, every enterprise needs a long-term partner that shares its vision and is willing to stand beside it. appsFreedom, with our unique business model and technology platform revolving around user adoption, is the best possible partner for any enterprise wanting to leverage mobility for its business advantage.
Sound interesting? It is! Contact us today to learn more.