With Mobility becoming the center of focus for the CIOs and CTOs of top organisation, the technology uptake is moving on in leaps and bounds. Mobility focused enterprises are disrupting the way business is done, in a traditional sense, and are better placed to capture mind share of consumers with seamless experience, and market share with enhanced productivity of sales force. This has led to a clutter of developmental processes, which is becoming a challenge to keep up with.

Following list of tips and tricks, and dos and don’ts will help you breakdown the seemingly complex process into fundamentals so that you can pitch the next great mobility-driven business process to your management, while oozing with confidence.

Setting up your Mobile App for success (or failure)

There are a few areas where business analyts and product managers falter alike. Some of the most common mistakes are-
Ignoring backend development/infrastructure needs
Misunderstanding the differences between apps and websites
Failing to consider the cross-department involvement required for delivery and ongoing success
Not having enough marketing budget to promote content and educate customers about the mobile app
Not having a plan for updates to meet customer demands after the initial app launch

Let’s dive a bit further in each of the above points –
ignoring backend development/infrastructure and integration needs

This is perhaps the most common mobility app budgeting mistake people make. Its easy to assume that the application in question consists only of the screens which a user will interface with on their devices. But it cannot be farther way from reality. User Interface is a small subset of a larger system which makes the app work.
There are a number of parts which work behind the scene, and which are easy to overlook: the content management system (CMS); the backend infrastructure APIs to interact with core systems of the business and third-party integrations (push messaging, data analytics, social integrations, chat and messaging functions). Let’s deep dive a bit in each.

CMS is a platform which allows you to push content from a controlled environment to your consumer-facing application, in real-time. It sits in between the user engagement layer and the core systems. Most of the CMS’ today offer an array of automated workflows which makes the life easy for the content moderator, the go-to-market timelines seldom lead to an eye-roll.

For mobility development, mobile-specific CMS will ensure that you delivered right mobile experience to your end-users. Also, you want to avoid republishing the app as an update, and because of a parameter change in the API settings, but ensure that such changes are managed over-the-fly, without becoming a hassle for the end user.

Backend Infrastructure: Your mobile application will need to communicate with a server to handle actions that cannot be managed on-device. Some examples of these services includes authentication, business integrations like booking appointments or requesting updates on status, business processes, notifications and messages, and much more.

While, we’re sure that you would have considered these core services during project scoping, you should really think of them from a mobile context. The way information flows from a server to a mobile application is different from a desktop application. Unless these services are developed for a true-mobility use case, end-user experience will suffer.

Third-party Integrations: Your organisation would want to avoid reinventing the wheel, when it comes to point-specific problems, and if there are good solutions already available in the market. Push notifications, Analytics, Authorization and Authentication are just a few items that should be considered.

Many make the mistake of considering only the front-end when determining a mobile app budget. By doing this, they are ignoring the largest cost factors, which typically lie within the backend infrastructure and integrations that aren’t immediately visible.