A step 'App' from the rest

Andre Hugo, M4Jam.

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Apps, the popular word for applications made for mobile platforms, have matured from playthings to a serious ecosystem of interactions. The main driver has been the adoption of smart devices, leading to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and a growing business case for sowing smart devices into a company's fabric.

That evolution started long before the iPhone's arrival, heralded by the numbers of BlackBerries and PDAs brandished by executives. But the modern app market is different: driven by consumer norms, embracing surgical functionality and enjoying ubiquity that transcends any work/life boundaries.

Inevitably, the question of whether your organisation needs an app - be it for your customers or workforce - will come up.

A critical step in the app journey is to treat the concept correctly. Before even considering an app, ponder the problem: what is it that you hope to achieve? Is a mobile app the best way to achieve that? Good apps don't start with good ideas, but with problems that require solving. Identifying that problem and the audience it impacts is key.

"So many people want an app straight away, without asking why," says Lynette Hundermark, MD of Useful And Beautiful. "But even before the why, ask who your audience is. Take out the word app - sometimes an app is not even the answer. Is it an end-user, a business user, etc.? Is that business user on the shop floor or an executive? Drill it down to who will actually use the app."

One way to gauge a mobile audience cheaply is to deploy a mobile website, also called a Mobi site. Although in some use cases, a Mobi site will not suffice, it's generally a good way to bring together some usage stats. Internally, you can also poll the device habits of the department or workers who would benefit from the proposed app.

"You can use web stats, like how many website visitors are redirected to a Mobi site or come with a mobile browser," says Indran Naick, senior IT architect at IBM.

Not only must a company have a flexible and clear vision for its app, but it should also assign a champion and spokesperson to represent it during the process. Projects notoriously become bloated when there are too many cooks in the kitchen, but for an app, this spells certain death.

"What typically works very well is to identify key decision-makers - the CEO, COO, etc. - and get all of those guys into a room and sell the idea to them," says Mornay Leander, UX consultant at ThoughtWorks. "We go in and get them together on a shared vision. But it will always be a team effort."

Speaking of that team, how do you find the right developer? Intervate's Craig Heckrath, business unit manager for Application Development, says good development houses get future work based on their current projects.

"You need someone who has a track record - ask them to show you their apps. Get a sense of their design and principles. If the design is bad, that's the first problem. Also investigate other aspects. For example, if your app will integrate into your business backend, choose a team with integration experience."

In certain cases, rival development houses will pool their resources, some being more technical, others more design-savvy. But whatever the requirements, there has to be a clarity of vision and a spirit of collaboration.

Poor functionality is often the downfall of a good app. A classic mistake is to simply translate existing functions into an app environment. The most common request is to replicate a company's website into an app. Says Heckrath: "I often see people wanting to put their website function into an app. That makes no sense - it's a misallocation of your budget."

There are four key distinctions to an app versus other software. First, it's consumer-driven. End-users have had expectations honed by countless consumer apps, by which other app experiences are measured. An app must be intuitive, quick to deliver on tasks and make sense on the given device.

The vision for an app can be weighed against current offerings, both in the commercial and enterprise space. For example, if your users want something like Dropbox, but you wish to have an internal app that functions the same way, Dropbox's app is a good template to study. Other apps also live in the ecosystems of ERP vendors and are worth looking at before attempting your own.

Second, context dictates content: just as many tasks on a PC are unfeasible on a smartphone, some phone features are ill at ease on a tablet and so forth. So the chosen platform has a big impact on what can be accomplished. It's not always about aiming high - for example, recycling firm REDISA uses a USSD service with a mobile wallet, because most of its contractors own feature phones and have little to spend on data.

Third, apps are surgical, not feature hogs, says Heckrath: "You tackle one problem at a time. You don't spend six months analysing the whole business and try to solve all the problems. Instead, identify a core use case and focus on that."

I often see people wanting to put their website function into an app. That makes no sense.

Craig Heckrath, Intervate

Finally, apps are always changing and you could argue an app is never quite finished. In the app world, 18 months is an eternity.

That fluid nature means that app creation has to be equally flexible. Although several development methodologies can be applied, the most supported is 'Agile', basically thinking on your feet.

"With Agile, if you produce in-product, you go in and experiment," says Leander. "You take it as it comes. There will be an overall idea of what you want to achieve, but the journey to that idea will be altered by things that you have discovered about users."

Leander says there are three reasons why app development is always an ongoing process. The first is for inevitable platform updates and the second is to respond to user-testing results such as bug discoveries. But he places the most emphasis on the third: continuous engagement with the audience to improve the app.

"We run a rate-tocracy," says Andre Hugo, CEO of staff on demand platform M4Jam. "Our biggest asset is our crowd: if we can involve them in the product development, it gives us more insight."

Hugo doesn't worry if M4Jam will be relevant in a year's time. He worries if it will be relevant a month from now. The mobile world moves fast and the biggest danger for any app's longevity is user fatigue. If an app doesn't remain useful, it's forgotten. As such, Hugo and his team never rest.

"To stay relevant, you have to develop at the rate of the internet. We're constantly polling our base and getting insights on our users' behaviour to see what resonates and what doesn't. Fortunately, we have the ability to deploy quickly and get direct feedback from our users. So we iterate and improve, or we can the feature and move on with lessons learnt."

Being able to collect and analyse the app's usage data is critical to its success, even if it's a captive audience such as a workforce. Another is to engage in a collaborative journey with the developer, which helps craft a shared practical vision. Good app developers routinely decline jobs in which they are simply dictated terms, because it's a recipe for failure.

Equally critical is to include the company. While apps can be developed in small pockets, their success is directly related to business buy-in and culture. Not addressing this, says OutSystems South Africa director Craig Terblanche, can even trip the right development approach: "Many companies have 'agile fatigue' as they tried agile in isolation, without engaging fully with the business. The key value that agile brings is speed-to-market, but the business must be directly involved in delivery."

Finally, it's key to appreciate that an app is a design project: the user experience (UX) cannot be neglected, a lesson the market is learning, given the number of UX posts being advertised. Hundermark says that if app development was a house, UX would be the foundation. It's not a simple process: "You need to allocate time to understand the type of people who will use your app, then align those with business goals. That process is time-intensive, but it needs to happen before you even get to the design phase."

Don't even bother skipping the design aspect. As Hundermark notes, apps that were designed by developers always stand out for the wrong reasons. But don't skimp on the rest either: a good app is the result of many disciplines working in tangent.

Mobility is a channel, a new pillar for a business. So the initial app investment is just the start: a company should consider creating several apps, all with different roles.

"Companies need to think about a portfolio of apps providing various specialised functions," says Terblanche. "This portfolio can be likened to an investment portfolio because some of the apps will be highly successful and others will fail. The problem is, you have to experiment and fail fast to know which ones will fail. If you have a few big applications, it's harder to retire the parts that don't work. The result is a new set of legacy that just adds to your technical debt."

Another growing function of apps is their ability to talk to each other. Says Naick: "We're seeing more capability among apps to talk with each other directly or through a backend service. It makes the whole experience far more seamless."

The future of technology interactions lie in our smart devices and apps, and will continue to shape that world. But don't simply jump in for the sake of hype, and, when you do jump in, do it with vision, commitment and flexibility.

This article was first published in Brainstorm magazine. Click here to read the complete article at the Brainstorm website.