This article was firstly published on Forbes and here author is describing their views on this article. He wants to tell that if you are going to create a mobile app then what criteria you must follow.
Some companies often have no idea whether anyone uses the apps they do build. “The dirty little secret of the enterprise mobile application world is adoption,” says Richard Absalom, “They fire out apps and have no idea how successful they are. Business applications are there to transform one part of a business process, but you don’t know if they work unless you can see how people are using them.”
Why is it so difficult to get a decent mobile app at work? I’m not the only one asking this. Gartner forecasts that by the end of 2017, demand for enterprise mobile app development services will grow at least five times faster than internal IT organizations can deliver them.
And that’s where mobile analytics come into play. Chances are, your users are not using company apps precisely as envisioned—or maybe even at all. Analyzing app performance and user behavior can give developers the insight they need to reduce development cycles and increase application usefulness.
“You want to know not just about download numbers, but also about how users interact with the app,” Absalom says. “Questions like who uses an app, when do they use it, and for how long? What activities are they doing? What are they not doing? Does usage peak and then stop? The point is to understand and engage users in the context of what they are doing.”
The practice of tracking and analyzing user behavior isn’t new, but it is new to most enterprise mobile app groups, says Kaj van de Loo, Oracle vice president of development. “There are already small segments like gaming that are very advanced at analyzing user behavior, but the value is equally applicable to the enterprise.”
These five steps will help you build a mobile analytics strategy.
Measure What’s Important for Your App
Build the mobile measurement plan at the same time you define the app requirements, to make sure that the metrics are in sync with the desired behavior of your users.
“This is a new style of development that starts with business owners setting goals for what they want out of the app and working with the designers and developers to plan what and how to measure,” van de Loo says.
For example, metrics for a publishing app might focus on content consumption, while metrics for social networking apps would focus on social interaction. The development team can use those metrics to see what’s working and what isn’t, which informs the next development cycle.
Although it sounds like common sense, “defining what we want to achieve is very much lacking, especially in employee-facing apps today,” van de Loo says.
Identify Roadblocks with Event Funnels
“One way to visualize the data is as a funnel,” van de Loo says. “For example, a shopping app might measure how people browse a catalog, put things in a shopping cart, head for check out, and then make a purchase,” he says.
The ability to drill down through a path of events gives greater transparency into what’s working and what’s not. By analyzing user behavior in the shopping event funnel, for example, designers and developers might discover that only 30% of users that head for checkout actually make the purchase. From there, the team can dig deeper for the reason, such as a purchase process with too many steps.
Conduct Segment Analysis
Rather than look at all users as one unit, segment analysis breaks them into related groups with common characteristics or experiences while using the application. Now you can engage with users better by targeting specific usage patterns.
“It lets a business reach out to somebody—whether an employee or a customer—in a very highly targeted fashion,” van de Loo says.
“You want to slice and analyze by a variety of factors, such as demographics, regions, or behavior. If something changes in one of your key metrics, segmentation can help you get to the root of the issue.”
Know Where Your App Strategy Is Going
Do your best to pick an analytics framework that will support a growing user base and more mobile applications. For many companies, cloud-based platform services offer both built-in analytics and instant scalability.
“People are beginning to realize that a platform approach is a good idea,” Ovum’s Absalom says. “You need to know what you want to measure first and foremost, but platform analytics can provide some granular policy settings that let the business, UX [designers], and developers really explore how the app is being used,” he says. In particular, Absalom notes, a large enterprise with upwards of 50 mobile apps will want one central management and analytics system.
Build Partnerships
Absalom predicts that enterprises that approach mobile application development as a collaborative effort and a continuous learning cycle will stand the best chance of success. Some companies establish a mobile center of excellence, while others channel those efforts through a digital team that gathers ideas from across the business and feeds them to IT.
This cultural shift toward IT-LOB collaboration is a vital pillar, Absalom says. The other is mobile analytics. “Analytics are key to the whole thing,” he says. “You can’t succeed without it, because it’s key to know what’s working and what’s not.”
