Enterprise mobile apps need to be more compelling to earn widespread adoption, warns Globo's Yad Jaura

And organisations need to do more to sell the benefits to staff, too

Organisations need to take more account of users' needs and to work harder to sell the benefits of mobile apps in order to drive adoption and usage, while making enterprise mobile apps as slick and easy to use as consumer mobile apps.

That is the advice of Yad Jaura, marketing director, Europe, at enterprise mobility management software provider Globo, speaking at Computing's recent Enterprise Mobility and Application Management 2015.

The majority of mobile initiatives in organisations today, he continued, typically involve updating a paper-based process with a mobile-based process, enabling users to key data into an app instead of filling out paper forms. While the benefit for the organisation is clear - those electronic forms can immediately populate back-end systems, instead of being re-keyed back at base - the benefits for the end-users are less clear.

"Unless the new way of working is simpler, easier, faster and better than the way that they used to work you might experience some resistance," said Jaura.

Jaura invoked the example cited at Computing's Mobility Summit last year by a representative from O2, whose friend had found an expensive, ruggedised mobile device in the gutter. He took it home, cleaned it up and found a tag on the back with a contact telephone number. When he called the number, he got through to an engineering manager, who told him that they had lost a lot of the devices "because our engineers just don't like them".

Jaura added: "That's not an uncommon story. But if there's not a good answer to the 'what's in it for me?' question, that kind of thing is going to happen."

Organisations therefore need to do more to "sell" mobile application implementations to their users, added Jaura, and to make their user interfaces as slick and easy to use as the consumer apps staff will be used to. "We have got to make sure that the apps we create are really compelling and usable for the end-user," said Jaura.

Unfortunately, too many enterprise mobile apps represent little more than existing enterprise apps remade for iOS or Android. "Mobile apps these days - particularly consumer mobile apps - offer a 21st century user interface and experience," said Jaura. "Unfortunately, a lot of the mobile apps that are being built still have a 20th century user experience."

That partly arises from enterprise developers trying to do too much in applications - instead of focusing on one thing and doing that well.

"Without the right design, you're going to suffer from functionality clutter and weak user experience. That will give rise to security issues and raise support costs," said Jaura, who offered a five-point plan for building better enterprise mobile apps.

"First, understand your target market... the worse thing is design-by-committee," he said. "The beauty of mobile is that you can do something quickly and it only needs to last a month or a couple of months and we can scrap it and do something else because we're learning and improving.

"Second, make your apps simple and intuitive, even if that means losing features. That's really important: Focus on one thing and do it well.

"Strive to deliver seamless continuity from one platform to the next. So if you are using multiple device platforms, make sure that the experience is seamless across the board, whether web or mobile platforms.

"Consistency is really important for both employee and consumer applications. The way your applications work and the experience they deliver is going to impact the way your organisation is seen. However you're delivering that, consistency is core.

"Finally, have a product-focused mindset and an enterprise-focus for detail. If you can combine those two things, that will really improve your designs," said Jaura.

You may also like: