5 Tips to Secure Your Mobile Development Strategy
The rapid development of technology in business has made it even more important for companies to become mobile-friendly. Today, nearly 5 billion people are using mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets.
Surviving the future will require mobile adaptations of your company’s products or services. Mobile technology has revolutionized how people communicate, store data, shop, and access information. Many businesses have seen this rapid progression to mobility and have attempted to dive into the competitive global market without a solid strategy and failed. It can be challenging to remain unique while providing value to your consumers. Without a mobile development strategy, businesses have experienced catastrophic failures. From adoption issues to security breaches and synchronized failures between departments, there are many ways that small errors and inconsistencies can cause big issues.
The following 5 tips will help you take the right steps to prioritize plans and properly execute a successful mobile development strategy for your company, resulting in happy customers and long-lasting benefits.
1. Build Off High-Level Goals
The first step that shouldn’t be rushed is planning. Jumping ahead to app development without first taking time to do some high-level goal setting can be catastrophic in the long run. There is not one development strategy that is going to work for all companies. You want to be able to take into account your entire company's strategies, target goals, and KPIs for the next few years. It is the overall company strategy that will guide and define your mobile moves. Get started with a SWOT analysis to better understand your current positioning in the market. You need to understand your competitors approaches so you can diversify and overcome. Most importantly, you need to understand the customer journey and how a mobile touchpoint can become an asset to the entire company. Many make the mistake of forcing themselves to stick to a fixed budget, which has an adverse effect of stifling the proper development of the app for pinching a few pennies. The importance of this initial internal planning and assessment phase in the overall process is crucial to a successful app.
2. Anticipate the Customer’s Needs
This is the second area of planning that companies should devote a good portion of energy to. The development strategy is intended to make an app that is more convenient, readily adaptable, and actually applicable to the needs of your customer base. Mobile is not just like any other channel. It should be a touchpoint that allows users to seamlessly and conveniently interact with your company. The best way to be valuable is by understanding how the customer actually interacts with your company today. Reach out and engage past and prospective customers during the app development process. Their unfiltered input is invaluable and can help you gauge what is most important to them and how to best suit their needs. Once you know this information, you can position your app in that sweet spot to provide the ultimate value. Customer experience is more than supporting a visually appealing aesthetic. Slow connectivity and poorly integrated UI are just a couple of other factors that can contribute to negative user experience. The complete collaboration and cooperation between the developers, designers and quality control experts play an important role in creating a captivating mobile experience.
3. Focus on the Details
Once you have figured out what your customers need and how it ties in with your entire company objective, it’s time to figure out how best to get there. Today, many devices offer many different scaling options suited to their native capabilities. One thing for sure is that an iPhone app is a necessity. The potential to expand from there is up to you to choose the best platform or devices to target based on your type of business. For example, certain services are more appropriate for bigger screens that are available on a larger number of android devices.
4. Evaluate your development resources
Outsourcing Objective C and Javascript to developers can quickly become expensive, especially if you have multiple development teams for different device platforms. Using in-house developers will allow you further control, lower your overall cost and will utilize experts that are already knowledgeable about your customers, products and company goals. Mobile application security is one of the primary concerns. Considering that 92% of the top mobile apps have already been hacked, yours may be equally as vulnerable. Precautions to decrease your app vulnerabilities include writing secure code, keeping access and permissions to a minimum, requiring high-level password authentication, and excellent data encryption.
5. Cover Your Bases
Once you have steadily gone through the outlined steps and are ready to launch all your hard work, you want to be sure you have a defined set of tools for ongoing app management and problem-solving. Will you be able to quality check the app once it’s in production? How do you plan on tracking and fixing defects? Is there a rollback plan in place in case of unavoidable failure? All of these questions and more are important details of pre-production support and successful post-production management. Try your best to see the unforeseeable and prepare for the worst; have everything laid out and documented so you can act swiftly when launch day comes.
Mobile technology is going to continue to evolve at an even faster pace. Building a great app is an admirable feat and when done right, will prove valuable to your organization in the years to come. It won’t be easy, but a functioning mobile development strategy shouldn't be rushed. It will require a good amount of planning, the ability to cohesively align moving pieces across an organization, and the foresight to build in solid contingency plans. Success in this field can be as easy as thinking big, acting small, launching, testing and retesting, and finally improving and adapting. Remain engaged with your app, anticipate upgrades and new features, and never stop improving your ability to serve your customers.