I Think Our Business Needs an App

As smartphones and apps become more prevalent in our work and lives, creating pertinent, secure apps is becoming a business necessity. At the same time, decision makers remain hesitant about them. Needs, costs, and risks are all worries that slow decisions.

In an informal poll of professionals about their principle worry about creating an app for their business, worries about cost and user adoption tied for the top concern. These even outweighed worries about security by a wide margin.

In spite of the interest, we find companies teetering in the balance between the cost, and the fear that their app just won’t be used.

How to Move Forward

How can we overcome the worries, and benefit from this omnipresence of smartphones in the hands of our customers and users?

1 Cardinal Rule: Make your app matter to users.

Start by focusing on users and the value you can offer them by:

• Solving their problems
• Making them more efficient and cost effective

When we understand users and their challenges, the way ahead becomes much more evident. That’s what our colleagues at Cotherm did. With their first app, they targeted appliance configuration - an activity their users didn’t relish even though it could save them money. Their mobile app made all the difference simply by making a tedious task efficient and easy. You can read more here at st.com.

Ultimately, the app that your company creates is the reflection of your knowledge of users' needs. So, this is where to focus the efforts that will guide the design.

Have a vision and pursue it long term.

Creating and maintaining your business app will be a journey. Don't just create it, publish it, and then let it gather dust in an app store. That's the sure way to ensure that the app is not pertinent, eventually becomes a security risk, and erases any return on your investment.

Instead, think long term. First, deliver an app that solves some key user challenge to win user adoption. Then evolve the app incrementally with changes in your products, services and your users’ needs.

Take advantage of the "evolutivity" of apps.

This goes hand in hand with a long term vision. Apps can evolve rapidly and independently of your material products. They can change more readily to offer new features. Some features may even become paid services that enhance your revenue and your value to your customers.

App stores also offer excellent infrastructure for delivering apps and updates to users worldwide. There's no need to invent a delivery system. However, do consider how you will push announcements to your users to keep them aware of future evolutions.

Don't feel you have to do everything in-house.

Smartphones are rapidly evolving, feature-rich platforms. Maintaining compatibility is a key challenge. So, enlist the tools, expertise and effort of others.

Take advantage of no-code and low-code design tools. These allow your teams to create apps with minimal effort and expertise. Your designers benefit from code libraries that manage OS and smartphone features without having to write, test, and maintain all of that. Instead, they focus on your users' needs and providing features to meet those needs.

No-Code / Low-Code for Ease and Flexibility

No-code tools like our App Creator get designers started rapidly working in a WYSIWYG, object-oriented coding environment. This drastically improves the quality and speed of creating early proofs-of-concept for market testing that will ensure that the design begins with a user focus.

The ideal tools allow customization by adding code or plugins (a.k.a. low code). They also provide the full app code for validation, customization, and archiving.

The right tools should offer cross platform app development, i.e. the same tools work for Android, iOS, Windows and other platforms. This optimizes costs by limiting the number of tools that designers must master and maintain.

Professional tools do come with a cost, but this is rapidly outweighed by eliminating the cost and effort of maintaining huge amounts of code and multiple design tools for different OS.

Where to Start

Interested in creating an app for your business? Contact our team via our IoT App Creator page. We can introduce you to tools and pertinent demonstrations that will help you rapidly assess why and how to create mobile apps for your company.

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