Nowadays, there are mobile apps for almost everything – entertainment, news, sports… and even to make life easier for businesses! This latter type of app is commonly referred to as a “business application” or “internal application”.

An enterprise application often aims to increase employee productivity, efficiently manage large amounts of data, and / or optimize processes.

Unlike consumer applications (such as social networks, mobile games, or e-commerce applications), a business mobile application with the goal of meeting the specific needs of an organization.

In this article, we will discuss the benefits of a mobile business application and the different options available to you.

Reasons why companies create their own apps

Enterprise applications are often designed to complement other systems  used by the enterprise. They must be flexible and adapt to existing systems.

The development of internal applications has increased significantly in the last two years. Here are the reasons why an internal application can make a big difference to your business:

Better return on investment

One of the main reasons why companies invest in one or more applications is simple: Get better ROI. According to a report by VMware, companies that invest in a mobile application generate an average return on investment of 150% across all industries.

While a consumer application generates direct revenue through its monetization strategy (in-app purchases, advertising, etc.), the return on investment of a business application is measured in terms of productivity and efficiency.

Employee productivity

A mobile app can help you increase the productivity of your employees by giving them the ability to work and stay connected without being in front of their computer. They can be active and work from anywhere, anytime.

Mobile application integration has become a must have for the most competitive companies. Why? Because they allow the transmission of information and updates in real time. They can save time and money. In addition, organizations that follow this trend seem more attractive to their future employees.

Process optimization

An added benefit is the ability to optimize internal processes. For example, you can choose to evaluate the time needed to complete a task or a process. Having access to this information through an app will help you solve recurring problems and make informed decisions.

The key to optimizing processes is to start tracking them as soon as possible. With the data generated over time, the average cycle time can be used to detect weaknesses, changes or deviations in time.

Data exploitation

An enterprise application allows employees to access, for example, customer data in real time. All important data is instantly accessible thanks to the constant synchronization of the various devices via the application.

With this information, you give your employees all the information they need to keep up to date with the latest changes. In addition, it can detect problems or opportunities more quickly.

Source of information

Sharing information via an in-house application is a good solution to reduce costs and especially communication errors. Think about instructions, brochures, user manuals, safety rules and even bonus programs. Everyone has access to the same information and official versions of each document.

In addition to this, the internal application can be used to share the news of the company. A new employee? an important strategic decision? Event? Share all this directly within the enterprise application.

Types of business application for your business

Now that we have seen the benefits of creating an internal app for your business, we will introduce you to their types.

Enterprise applications can be divided into 4 categories:

• Enterprise Systems

Designed to model and automate processes by integrating information from multiple departments. The data scattered in different systems can circulate fluidly between the different departments of the organization.

• Supply Chain Management Systems

Intended to help companies manage relationships with their partners. Logistics companies, distributors, buyers and suppliers can share real-time information to buy, produce and deliver goods and services efficiently.

• Customer Relationship Management Systems

Designed to align the actions of a company’s departments such as Sales and Marketing to its customers. The goal is to generate more revenue, improve customer satisfaction rates and facilitate loyalty.

• Knowledge management system

Aims to support processes of identification, codification and knowledge sharing within an organization. Whether this knowledge is internal or external, such a management system makes it possible to centralize everything. It allows employees to train and integrate new concepts. If the company already has an intranet, it can be integrated or connected to the application.

Conclusion

Optimizing processes, increasing productivity and getting a better return on investment are just a few of the benefits of a business mobile app.

At Yeeply, we know that creating a mobile app can solve many internal problems. We see this strategy as a modern way to collect, share and analyze data to achieve your goals more effectively. As experts in the application development industry, we have helped many organizations develop an enterprise application so that they can differentiate and reap the full benefits.

Do you consider this option and look for the right partner for the development of your application? Contact us to discover our solutions!

In this article, we will talk about progressive web apps (PWA) . For that, we will first define what a progressive web application is, then we will consider its advantages and disadvantages. Finally, we will show you a successful example of PWA.

What are the progressive web apps?

When we talk about progressive web applications, we are not talking about a new structure or a new technology. It is a set of practical improvements that make a web application work in a similar way to a desktop or mobile application. The goal is to have a similar or similar experience to a native application so that the user does not notice the difference between a native application and a PWA. .

First of all, you have to distinguish between websites accessible from a mobile browser and applications that are downloaded from a store. On the one hand, we have mobile websites, responsive websites and web apps . On the other hand, we have native applications and hybrid applications.

The progressive web apps can be defined as a kind of mix between web apps and native apps. It is important to note that the fundamental difference is that a PWA can be installed from a browser window without having to go through an App Store.

Pros and cons of progressive web apps

You may be wondering why it would be more interesting to choose a web app that mimics native apps, rather than a native app directly? Discover the advantages and disadvantages of PWA.

Advantages

Progressive web applications offer many benefits for developers and users.

• PWAs usually work faster than a website.
• They are accessible offline.
• They are responsive and therefore work with any operating system and any electronic device format.
• PWAs work like a native application: the icon appears on the phone like any other application, push notifications can be sent and they have access to certain phone features.
• PWAs are found in search engines and Google’s algorithm highlights them.
• They capture the attention of the user because they allow sending notifications.

It is not necessary to install it via an app store. This is a plus for the user and the owner. For the former, this is advantageous because it does not need to go through the application store and the second does not need to comply with the rules of the app stores.

They take up less space in the device’s memory because there is no need to download it.

disadvantages

Although PWA is an innovative application and has several beneficial features such as those mentioned above, it also has some weaknesses.

• It does not benefit from app store traffic : Listed as an advantage, it is a double-edged sword because many users search their apps exclusively on app stores.
• They consume a lot of battery : the PWA consume more energy than the native applications, because the code is much more complex. The devices have more difficulty interpreting it.
• They do not have access to all the features of the phone: This can be considered as an important weak point for PWAs compared to native applications.
• Some features are not compatible with iOS : Although most users use devices with an Android operating system, PWAs are not optimized to be compatible with iOS and this represents their great weakness.

An example of a progressive web app

Lancôme is a French luxury brand renowned in the world of cosmetics and belongs to the group L’Oreal. Despite the increased use of smartphones, they noticed that there were fewer conversions on mobile devices than on computers. That’s why they decided to invest in a PWAto reduce the bounce rate of mobile devices. The result was very positive:

• Increased conversions by 17%
• Increased baskets conversion rate with 8% push notifications
• Decrease of 15% in the bounce rate
• 51% increase in the number of sessions via mobile device
• 84% reduction in time required for page interactivity

Would you like to develop a progressive web app?

The impact of progressive web apps has been demonstrated in terms of performance and conversions. In addition, it is a practical alternative and more economical , since it is not necessary to go through a specific developer for each operating system.

A mobile system development lifecycle consists of a number of clearly defined and distinct workflows, which are used by our application developers to plan the design, build, test, and delivery of the final product to the client.

Step 1. Business Planning and Analysis

The best projects start with a detailed preparation.

Our fundamental approach ensures that the product will meet the needs and frustration of customers. Careful planning helps you understand where you want to go. A meticulous market research helps you understand your idea.

Step 2. Technical specifications

In this step, you need to decide what type of operations and systems you want to create a mobile application for.

Step 3. Prototyping and design

A prototype is a rudimentary working model of a product that helps the customer test the viability of the idea or startup and save a decent amount of time and budget.

Step 4. Development

The application development process is divided into two parts: front-end and backend.

It takes about 10 weeks to create a back-end part of a standard native application (Android or iOS). The front-end development of the application with basic functionality may take about 8 weeks. However, it is not always necessary to create the back-end part of the application if you are using cloud technologies for storage.

Step 5. Testing / Quality Assurance

It is important to test every part of the product at every stage of development.

As a general rule, it should be a separate department dedicated to quality assurance.

The testing/quality assurance process includes testing of these elements: requirements, compatibility, interface, security, low-level application resources.

Step 6. Editing and maintenance

Finally, your application is ready and it’s time to say “Hello everyone!

You can submit the application to your company.

In addition, work on an application does not finish even after it is released. Every application needs updates and customer support.

Note that post-editing maintenance is not included in the initial cost estimates.

About ten years ago, almost everyone who accessed the Internet used a desktop computer. The solution for a digitized planet where smartphone and tablet users expect rich and intuitive web experiences like those found on desktops will be responsive mobile design.

The mobile design reagent is not a quick fix. This could solve the problem of layout of the screen size, but there are other intrinsic problems with the responsive approach that many marketers are flying over.

Here are some common mistakes that could affect your responsive mobile conversion.

1. inflated images

The images pose a major problem of sensible conversion. Because a responsive website uses unique markup across multiple devices, it’s important to ensure that only large, attractive images are shown on the screens.

For image-rich websites, their problems start with the speed of the mobile page due to the size of the high resolution images rendered on the wrong device. In addition, the cost of the wasted bandwidth used to send heavy images to the wrong devices is throwing money away. In this case, it is necessary to use lossy compression to completely reduce the size of the image while maintaining the depth. You should also know that hacks guarantee that you can constantly send the right images to the right devices.

2: slow loading time of the page

Web pages with slow loading times are a major problem because mobile users are very irritated by slow web pages. According to the Akamai study, “40% will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load”. And “64% of buyers who are not satisfied with their visit to the site will go elsewhere to shop next time.”

Web visitors tend to get worse if they have to wait too long to see your web content. Users can handle up to 10 seconds of loading time before they leave, but even a delay of a few seconds is enough to create an unpleasant user experience.

A number of the world’s largest companies understand that the performance of the site and the importance given to the time of their users can be a competitive advantage in the market. This is a big part of the philosophy of Google and Facebook.

3: Long Forms

Nobody likes having to fill out long forms on office sites; However, this becomes even more detestable when you have to type several details with your thumbs on mobile.

Avoid the use of long, tedious forms that make users type a lot. Long forms not only frustrate your users, but also affect your conversion rates when you use them for any type of transaction. Take the example of Expedia, which lost $ 12 million in revenue because it was using a useless form field that confused its users.

By reducing their form fields from four to three, HubSpot has improved its conversion rates by 50%. When it comes to forms, shorter is always better, especially on mobile.

4: Ignore the intention of the mobile user

Another common mistake that hurts reactive mobile conversion is the assumption that responsive design will solve all the problems. While a responsive design supports many mobile UX issues, it does not necessarily take into account the user’s goals.

According to smartinsights.com, there is a 270% difference between conversion rates for desktops and mobile devices, because people are mistaken about mobile websites.

On desktop computers, long titles and many words sometimes have a totally opposite effect to mobile devices. More text on mobile devices will hide the page and push the user away from their goal, which is mostly the call to action.

Apart from the menu bar, always be sure to help your visitors easily navigate your web page, especially the call to action buttons. When designing your site, consider mobile users and dramatically simplify their journey to your website by targeting your conversion rate.

Conclusion

Mobile media usage is growing faster than desktop, TV, radio, and print. More people are using mobile devices to access the Internet than ever before, so it’s essential to develop mobile sites that are simple and fun to use. Sites that are difficult to navigate exasperate mobile users, forcing them to leave your sites and locate other sites.

If you do not make your website truly mobile-friendly, your visitors will not fill out your forms, abandon their shopping cart, leave your site and do business with your competitors. Of course, this will hurt your conversion rate.