Modularis Answers: Should Your Business Build a Mobile App?
With mobile users projected to spend almost $160 billion on mobile app marketplaces this year, you would be hard-pressed not to consider mobile app development for your business.
The reality is that some common pitfalls could trip you up if you don’t ask the proper questions during the discovery phase. As always, we are here to help you determine what those questions are, so you can be successful in defining and delivering the tech milestones that move you toward your business objectives.
Do You Need a Mobile App?
Many commercial enterprise applications are well established and broadly adopted; these are typically either desktop apps or web applications. This often leads to the question – should we build a mobile version of the enterprise app we already have?
What we have found is that, except in B2C e-commerce, the best bang for your buck is to build a mobile app that targets currently underserved personas within your customer and executive ranks.
For most software companies considering going mobile, particularly B2B companies, you need a mobile app that is going to deliver a streamlined data visualization and entry experience that gives your target personas frictionless access to on-premise data, in real time, on a mobile device regardless of location.
What Components Make a Mobile App Useful to a Business?
Aggregating data from the core systems that all employees are using presents the best ROI for mobile app development. We have had quite a bit of success with our customers within this arena – accelerating the construction of Systems of Engagement (SoE) around Systems of Record (SoR) like ERP solutions; the idea is to embrace and extend existing on-prem or cloud-based enterprise solutions with persona-specific mobile SoEs that are multi-tenant, cloud-centric, quick-to-build, and frictionless to use.
Investing in such mobile experiences that augment existing products kills multiple birds with one stone: you can light up new recurring revenue streams by offering mobile experiences to underserved high-value personas, deliver the modern experiences your customers have been demanding, and lay the foundation for incrementally modernizing your overall solution. And you can do this in as little as 90 days.
Common Pitfalls in Mobile App Development
Expectations in the B2B world are similar to the consumer world — people expect a frictionless experience in their mobile applications. These common mobile app development pitfalls will lead to failure:
Pitfall 1
Doing Too Much. Some user experiences simply don’t work well on mobile; there are others that do. Don’t think that you have to build a fully functional mobile version of your application; focus on the mobile components that make sense. If it takes you longer than 90 days to get the minimum viable experience (MVP) to market, you’re wasting time and money — and probably driving your developers up the wall.
Pitfall 2
One App to Rule Them All. Bottom line, purity is your enemy. Trying to make a single, responsive web app that works well on a phone, a tablet, and a desktop is a waste of time.
Many fall into this false ideal that one app should run on all devices, but it’s an example of pure thinking and you don’t want that, you want practicality. If you don’t deliver a high-quality, frictionless experience, why are you doing it at all? On mobile especially, you want to invest appropriately in designing a high-quality, frictionless mobile experience.
Pitfall 3
“Quick-and-Dirty” Development. Throwing together a mobile app with the intent to go back later and clean it up is lazy. There is no reason to write throw-away code during your software application development, even in the mobile space.
Build incrementally and make sure that what you build today is a foundation for what you need tomorrow (there’s that MVP approach again). This is part of our philosophy and is built into our technology stack and approach.
Pitfall 4
Thinking You Always Need a Single Mobile App. The answer to “do I need a mobile app?” isn’t always that you need a single mobile app. . . it’s possible you need three mobile apps. Why? Remember when we talked about personas above?
It’s all about specific targeting with common elements on the back-end (security, logins, integrations), with intentionally customized user experiences. You can use a common code base but package them differently to bring value to your target personas.
Building Net New Revenue With Your Business’s Mobile App
The only reason to build mobile is if you are going to be able to light up net new revenue, so let the revenue be your guide. The path to the most growth might surprise you — the persona you need to target may be one you haven’t considered yet. This means you need to know:
- Your customers.
- Your market.
- Which personas will amplify the value you are already delivering to the executive team?
An effective mobile application should magnify the value that your customers perceive they’re getting from you already. Bake that value into determining which features and functions you need to deliver and you’re on a winning path.
Build with a modular architecture, understand who your end user is, and invest time into automating as much of the execution as you can, so you don’t have to rebuild assets later. The Modularis approach is to automate 80% of your code, making time to stay laser-focused on the 20% that delivers high-impact value to the customer. With this in mind, you will increase your ROI and deliver effective, profitable mobile solutions — built to last.
More on How Modularis Amplifies the Value Delivered to Customers
I’m always here to have the important conversation with you, CEO to CEO, about what’s killing your mobile app development and how to strategically bring it back to life.
When it is wise to build a mobile app, Modularis starts by setting up a discovery session with you to have a collaborative conversation about the untapped opportunities you have in your space. We will help determine the right thing to do to maximize ROI on your mobile investment.
Software engineering is all about risk and return; there should be a solid return on your investment (ROI). When you work with us, it is our job to help you execute with minimum risk and maximum return; in such a way that your mobile app is built right, built fast, and built to last. We exist to make sure you have a clear understanding of your target market and personas and know how you are going to monetize this new development.
A Real Life Example From the IoT Space
Within the IoT space, we have built a set of branded mobile applications for a client who is in the air purification business. We helped them build an entire platform ecosystem of cloud services, web, desktop and mobile applications, and an administration console.
With this support, they can bring their IoT solutions to market, manage them effectively, control them centrally, and provide a frictionless experience. In the IoT space, we focus heavily on the installation and activation experience – we want this to be as frictionless as possible, and we have a great deal of experience doing that.
Successful mobile app development starts with a simple conversation. Let’s talk!