Untethered Healthcare

In 2-3 years, 70% of all internet access will be from mobile devices. Most commercial enterprise application providers already have or are in the process of building mobile clients for portions of their main desktop and SaaS products. The quality and uptake of these clients will vary widely, as did the first generation of enterprise desktop applications. It is no mean feat to take an enterprise application, developed over decades perhaps, with fifty to one hundred screens and endless menu selections, and map it onto a smartphone-style screen with a chiclet keyboard for input. The key is to extract the mobile use cases — usually but not always the most common ones, simplify them with reasonable defaults, and build a client UI that is familiar in style to it’s larger cousin but doesn’t need a week’s training (or any training.)  Paying for good design, rapid prototyping, user-feedback and iteration here are the keys to success. These types of apps will largely succeed or fail, based on how well mobile use cases are understood, the correct choice of mobile platform, the quality of the UI design and frequent iteration with the users.

Building a brand new enterprise application from the ground up with the intent of making it mobile is another matter. The biggest point of failure here is concentrating on the mobile application features at the expense of considering the whole end-to-end user experience. Every mobile enterprise app is a system. If you think of all the gritty details that make systems a delight or a pain to use, they are all about things working the way they should without much user intervention. Downloading, updating, configuring, authenticating, maintaining session state, syncing, failure recovery are the unglamorous but vital places where it only takes a few weaknesses to make users walk away. There is no substitute for relentlessly drilling down on all the corner cases that can frustrate users and finding solutions or simplifying. Good tools and simulation methods are available to “war game” the entire system in detail with the designers and end-users before a line of code is written. If you are automating workflows that have not been automated before, the more realistic simulation you can do with end-users during the requirements stage, the better.  The ease-of-use bar for mobile enterprise apps is being set high by consumer apps and the app store experience.  Mobile enterprise apps with all of their underlying complexity will sit side-by-side on a smartphone with simple, easy-to-use consumer apps. If the enterprise apps aren’t just as easy to use — as a complete system — they won’t get traction.

Your thoughts on what makes a good mobile enterprise app?