3 Things All Successful Enterprise Apps Have In Common

In search of enterprise apps your employees will actually love

“The Enterprise App.”

It has kind of a negative connotation, right out of the gate. The enterprise app. That thing you have to download on your phone for work. They’ve got a bit of a bad name. But we’re an app developer in San Francisco. We know enterprise apps are hot. We see it here everyday. In fact, there is a statistic somewhere that says 75 percent of Fortune 500 companies have or are in the process of rolling out a mobile app.

So what’s with the bum rap, enterprise apps? That’s easy. Enterprise apps simply have not been that great. The solution? Easy. Make better apps. The reason enterprise apps have a bad name is because of poor design and, therefore, low adoption. If your employees aren’t buying-in on your app, then who is?

We’ve got thoughts on how to make enterprise apps better. Here they are.

Give Them What They Want

Enterprise apps are about making your employees’ lives easier. If their lives are easier, business is better. This is known colloquially as a “win-win.” To ensure that’s the case, get your best people involved, and involved early. Your top sellers, top performers, your aces in the hole. What do they want and what do they need? The best apps tend to do three or four things really, really, well. Find out what those key things are. Focus functionality around those. From there, the early adopters among your employees are going to use the app and commence crushing it.

Make it Worth Their While

If your app makes employees’ jobs easier, your people will jump on board. But not all at once. Full adoption takes time, and there always seems to be laggards holding on to the old, fax machine ways. No worries. Start with a walk-through program. Hold their hands through the entire app, start to finish. Once they get it, they’ll use it. It’s like your grandma and the laser printer. She’s only going to use it if you show her how. To drive further adoption, consider an incentive program. If this is a sales app, add in a scoreboard. Make it fun and competitive, then watch your numbers move in a decidedly upward direction.

Simplify

For some reason, enterprise apps tend to be… convoluted. This trend originates from old internal proprietary software software programs, back when software designers didn’t care what a program looked like if the public didn’t have to use it. So the first enterprise apps, for whatever reason, were similarly… utilitarian. These days, in a world where everyone plays with a combination of apps for an hour a day, your employees need your app to be simple and easy to understand. It doesn’t have to do everything. It need only do the most important functions, and do them right.

If you want to learn more about enterprise apps from our San Francisco web developers, please contact us today.