Tips for Building Midmarket Mobile Apps

Mobile business applications are becoming a tool that's critical to the success of midmarket companies, but it's crucial that they contain information that makes them more useful.

To do that, companies are building what's called "context information" into their B2B and customer-facing mobile apps. By context information, we mean adding details such as the user's identity (who you are); your environment (where you are and the device you use); your activity (things you do and what you allow); and your community (whom you communicate with).

For example, legal firms have much unstructured data in word processing documents, email, presentations, spreadsheets, etc. A legal firm that built or purchased software to pull context information into a mobile app could give its lawyers an easier time locating relevant content, whether the lawyers were in court or with a client offsite.

In the spirit of helping midmarket firms build better apps, Gartner Inc. research VP Gene Alvarez has supplied tips that should help companies design better overall mobile applications:

1. Make user profile creation simple. Alvarez suggests building mobile applications that allow end-users to create and modify their profiles at any point of contact and avoid requiring the users to sign up on a separate Website before they can use the mobile software.
2. Know your device. Assuming all devices are created equal or that all networks have equal capacity is dangerous. Surprisingly, some applications ignore basic mobile development best-practices. The apps may require a WiFi connection, for instance, or require a download of files larger than 10 megabytes. Shocking!
3. Ask for community participation. Customers do not want to give up control or privacy. So asking permission before connecting their communities is important, Alvarez says. This is one of the reasons for the increase of the "check-in" model, where the user has to explicitly locate himself or herself in a particular venue before information is transmitted to other people in that person's network.
4. Don't be a nuisance. Organizations need to strike a delicate balance between using enough context information and just plain being annoying. Mobile apps should include controls so users are not bombarded by requests to update, Alvarez suggests.
5. Avoid information duplication. Don't repeat information and sources that are already available. Many organizations think that simply making their applications location-aware qualifies them as context-enriched commerce, but simple location awareness does little to increase customer engagement, Alvarez says.
6. Stay on one platform. Don't require the user to go to more than one interface to complete a transaction such as entering credit card information or changing profile settings. Forcing users to finish on a Website instead of the app they were already on is frustrating.
7. Anticipate users' needs. Avoid just waiting for customers to tell you what they want. Have at least some information about the end user, and use it to improve applications based on that user's preferences and history of interactions.

Finally, it's important to remember that customers will react differently to context-enriched mobile applications, so CIOs should track how customers respond and make changes accordingly.

"You will find out what your users like and don't like about the way you have used context information to improve their experience," Alvarez says, "and you can incorporate those findings into your development plans."