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When you’re busy building the business case, collecting requirements and lining up all the technology pieces for your next mobile project, its user interface is seldom top of mind. It should be.

Truth is, how the application looks, feels and behaves in the hands of your users has as much impact on its success and ROI as some of the more technical and objective decisions you make during the design process.

#4 Critical Capability:  Create a great user experience

Good User Experience Drives Adoption

The first reason for this is that your return on investment is driven by people actually using the app. It’s been widely documented that user experience is just as important for user adoption as the app’s fundamental features and capabilities. A complex, feature-laden and slow application will often be met with resistance, especially when your employees have alternative ways of getting the job done.

User experience is even more important when it comes to solutions your employees don’t HAVE to use. This is often the case with horizontal apps (such as dashboards, HR, approvals, IT trouble-ticketing, etc.) that you may ask them to install on their own devices. Your goal with such applications is not just to give employees access to features and information away from their desks, but to actually become the app they turn to when they are bored or have down time. The only way to achieve this is to provide the blend of functionality and user experience that delights them at every encounter.

Good UI Cost Less

The other reason you should care about user experience is that its quality greatly affects support costs, training effort and employee productivity. Mobile solutions that are logically arranged and anticipate the user’s intent every step of the way are much easier to roll out and generate fewer support calls. They are also more effective to use, meaning your employees spend less time poking around the mobile app and more time doing actual work. As a rule, any time and resources you spend upfront to engineer a highly usable, intuitive solution will pay off in the long term by reducing its total cost of ownership.

Good UI Makes People Happy

Lastly, good UI just makes people happy. For applications that your employees will use only occasionally, it’s a great reminder why yours is the company they choose to work for. For solutions that some may use all day, every day, it’s an absolute must that will make a measurable difference in job satisfaction. In the world of $800 computer chairs and five-figure annual health benefits packages, giving your users a professional-grade mobile work tool is one of the cheapest boosters to employee morale you can buy.

6 Steps to Creating a Great Mobile User Experience

In an earlier blog series, we share with you the six steps to creating a great mobile user experience.  Rather than repeat the articles, I will provide you with the checklist you should consider to be successful in building apps your employees, partners and customers will love.

  1. Choose the right device
  2. Pick the right application architecture
  3. Get system integration figured out
  4. Forget the PC
  5. Make it feel native to the device being used
  6. Choose the right development approach

Thanks for following our series on critical capabilities for mobile solutions.  We covered the following capabilities you should consider: 

  1. deliver secure, scalable and reliable solutions
  2. easily develop and configure applications
  3. cost-effectively support a variety of devices
  4. Create a great user experience

Here’s to your successful mobile deployments!

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