What Makes a Mobile App Great?

Summary

 

We live in a world, which is rapidly going mobile whether it is related to work, banking or shopping. The age of mobile apps has definitely begun and it is slowly but surely gaining control of many aspects of our existence. In this article I will try to put forward my views about what makes for a truly great mobile app and then try to predict further evolution of the market.

The Basics

If you ask a random group of enterprise apps users about what they look for in a mobile app or mobile productivity suite they are using, most responses are going to be: a good user interface (UI), an awesome user experience (UX), user friendly features and so on. These answers would seem to be copied right of the CoIT handbook (if there was one) and the same holds true wherever people are going mobile. It is no secret that new-age enterprise users are no longer satisfied by just an application that works, they want something that is easy to use, looks clean and provides an effortless increase of productivity.

No doubt that these are very valid points and the rise in CoIT is already beginning to produce an effect on the current Mobile Software Development industry as more and more companies shift towards a mobile-only strategy. However, if you ask the users about their favorite work-related apps, many would have some trouble naming a single one as they utilize multiple apps to perform the same, similar or related tasks depending on the type of work they need to do. This definitely runs contrary to the popular CoIT belief that a single application would be perfectly suited to carry out a specific task or related tasks. Such applications are still few and far between, hence, only a few of the current mobile apps are targeted at specific user segments.

The Analysis

Ever since available smartphone platforms expanded beyond RIM’s BlackBerry OS, the mobility market has been flooded with software packages for the newer platforms such as Android and iPhone/iOS. However, a closer inspection would reveal that a majority of these apps, even if not all, perform similar and closely related tasks, with minor variations in the UI, functionality etc. This has been an unfortunate side effect of the CoIT trend and gave rise to the appropriately named “crapplications”. Such applications do not provide any real value to the user and are developed to perform tasks which can be performed with equal ease in case of existing apps. These apps do not address the root cause of the problem and only thus do not usually provide users with better options than other productivity suites available in the market. 

The most pertinent question about how to be rid of “crapplications” is quite simple: “Why do we need mobile apps anyways?” The answer is quite simple too: Mobile Applications help users become more productive. How do you increase productivity? A skilled user ideally needs to have only a few tools at his/her disposal to perform the tasks efficiently and effectively. Thus the truly great app is almost like an extension of the user and the user hardly notices its existence. It seems the natural and arguably only way to carry out the assigned task or group of tasks assigned to the user. This is something that is often overlooked by developers and we end up with the same application with just a different packaging. In my view a truly great app is actually incapable of being replaced by a competitor and though we have already started on the quest, it might be sometime before we find the perfect app for our specific need.

The Possibility of Great Apps in the Future

The technology landscape is continuously changing and as the market evolves, newer apps are expected to be developed in line with the requirements of the users. The holy grail of mobile apps for the future would probably involve the user’s choices extensively in order to ensure that expectations are fulfilled in all cases and even surpassed in others. We have already started on this path mainly with respect to the open-source software market, where users freely contribute, share and discourse about changes that they can bring about in the existing coding to improve functionality, security, UI etc of the available apps/platforms.

In my opinion future mobile solutions whether closed source and open source would benefit from an increased customer insight. In consumer buying behavior, the client’s motivations for buying a product are often not quantifiable and referred to as a black box. Many mobile application development companies are realizing that the mobile apps market also follows the same principle. In such a situation, consumer surveys can only help to a certain extent, whereas, asking clients to contribute freely to the development process is sure to be a more effective way of reaching the goal – “development of a truly awesome mobile app”.