Buying off the rack is a quick and easy way to find a generic solution to fit your needs. But what if you need something special—designed just for you and a perfect fit? To get that perfect fit, you need a partner with a great track record in mobile app development. Don’t settle for a quick overview of your needs with a one-size-fits all development process.
An excellent partner to develop your app will do more than just collect your content and put it into a mobile library on an iPad. Let’s take a sales app as an example. The development team should spend a significant amount of time understanding your needs, the context of the app’s use, and the functions that may accompany the content. Creating a mobile app is not inexpensive, and it’s not trivial. A well-designed app will deliver value in speed and efficiency and a higher success rate at critical points of the sales process. Here are the questions that a good partner will ask to design the perfect fit for your new app:
Business Context and Need
First, you’ll need to backtrack a bit. Your partner needs the context for the decision to adopt a mobile approach. Here are the general questions that you should expect:
What is the background and history of the change? Why this, why now?
How does this solution meet the overall vision, mission, and business goals and objectives of the organization?
What are the business drivers, both internally and externally?
To create a great design, your partner needs to understand what is prompting your decision to move to a mobile device with a sales performance app. Has something changed in your environment to motivate the decision? The answers to these questions describe the context for the shift and create a close alignment between the development team and the corporate drivers and goals. For example, do you need to innovate because competition has taken over a share of the marketplace? Do you need to increase market differentiation? Drive more sales? Your app development team is more than just a group of techies who can create a library to dump brochures, white papers, and product descriptions: they are a strategic partner in understanding your needs and driving the success of this segment of your sales enablement strategy.
Management Buy-in
As with any new initiative, management buy-in is critical for the success of your mobile strategy. These questions will help to clarify the framework necessary to create and implement an app that will fit the needs and vision of all key stakeholders:
How receptive do you believe the culture is to implementing a mobile strategy? Why?
How do mobile devices or the use of mobile technology supplement your overall business goals?
What staff members would benefit from the use of mobile devices, and how would they benefit?
Do you have any marketplace or industry examples or data to support the use of mobile devices for your team?
Is your technology infrastructure prepared to support mobile devices and related applications?
Are there any risks or challenges to the deployment of mobile initiatives?
A sales performance support app touches more than just the sales rep, and these questions will tease out needs and obstacles to consider as part of the design process. If you are in a highly-regulated industry, for instance, the development team will need to work closely with your IT department on security issues and regulatory on content approval.
Use Case Scenarios
With the strategic context in place, move onto the needs of the main users of the application. The needs of the end user determine the design of the app, and should even trump your extensive wish list. For the maximum adoption value, the design should be sleek and smart—even elegant—without clutter to make it clunky. As in all aspects of design, sometimes less is more. Here are the questions to determine what the app user experience design will accomplish:
Who are the users?
What is their motivation?
What are their objectives?
What are their needs?
How will designing a mobile solution solve that need?
Are there any use cases that you can describe? (use cases are the different ways the user would interact with the software to solve a need)
For sales reps:
What specific activities or tasks are you performing today that could be improved by the use of mobile? Why?
How would your customers benefit from the use of mobile devices?
Are there any mobile tools, applications, or other resources that you have seen in the industry that could benefit your role?
Unimaginative design may simply result in a transfer of binder information to a phone or tablet, without the added value and efficiency of smart functions. In order to build an application that meets the need of both content and function, your development partner should initially spend time profiling users, determining their needs, and conducting observational studies, ethnographic interviews or observations to explore their role workflow and related activities. These added functions may include an imbedded CRM or CMS, the ability to collect and email content to a client within the app during or immediately after a call, or a reminder function that will trigger follow-up without having to do a manual entry in a separate calendar. The integration of key and regular tasks will increase efficiency and maximize the value of the custom app.
Key Metrics
The development team should have extensive experience in working with corporate clients to create mobile solutions. This experience will help to inform your expectations. As you build a business case for your strategy, these are considerations that will help you and your partner to predict and measure your success:
How might this solution increase revenue, avoid cost, or increase service?
If we were making progress toward this goal, how would we know?
What would change in the business as a result of reach this goal?
Brilliant tailors won’t just ask your size and then get to work. They will work with you to understand the context of the event you’ll be attending, the image you want to project, and the exact measurements to fit your needs. In the same way, an exceptional mobile app team will partner with you to understand your business, your goals, and the needs of your end users to create an app solution that will turn everyone’s head.