Mobile apps were firmly in the spotlight once again this week, with the UAE hosting its third annual ‘Best mGovernment Service Awards’. And with the judging committee receiving a record 1,758 entries spread across four categories, it is clear that the region’s app development community is very much thriving.
That probably shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. After all, whether we’re checking our emails on the move, connecting with friends and colleagues via WhatsApp, or simply topping up our Salik accounts, the vast majority of us interact with at least one mobile app at some point throughout the working day.
This idea of ingraining mobile apps into the very fabric of our daily lives sits at the heart of the UAE’s ‘Smart Government’ vision, which aims to make government services readily available and accessible to the public 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And, crucially, these innovative mobile services must not only be easy to use, but also intuitive, efficient, and transparent in the way they address the public’s evolving needs.
Initiatives such as the ‘Best mGovernment Service Awards’ will only heighten the wave of mobile apps that are set to be deployed across the UAE during the course of 2016, but it’s not only the government that has identified the opportunities that exist in delivering an improved customer — or citizen — experience.
Indeed, while public sector entities are launching new mobile apps to align themselves with the UAE’s federal mGovernment strategy, IDC is seeing a growing number of private sector organisations scope new mobile apps as a way of enhancing productivity and improving customer stickiness.
Within the private sector, I expect the demand for mobile app deployment to come from multiple lines of business as the related decision-making process disseminates across various interested departments, such as marketing, finance, sales, and customer service. This will ultimately lead to a broader range of mobile apps being deployed by the organisations in question.
However, the success of a mobility strategy should not be gauged solely by the number of apps that are launched. Indeed, the focus should be on their effectiveness and actual usage levels, but all too often I see businesses trumpeting the number of apps they have deployed despite the fact that relatively few customers actually use them.
Most organisations that develop mobile apps also provide their employees with smartphones that enable them to access the internet on the move. This has helped drive high mobile app usage among employees, but the penetration rate is significantly lower for business-to-consumer and government-to-citizen mobile apps. And this is despite the UAE boasting a young, tech-savvy population that appears to be glued to their smartphones!
At IDC, we believe the key to bridging this usage gap is for organisations to facilitate a richer and more rewarding user experience by enhancing the features they offer within their mobile apps. For example, many mobile apps today are simply mobile-optimised ‘Web apps’; if you’ve ever seen the ‘mobile version’ of a site, then you’ll know what I mean. These apps typically offer limited features and are consequently often unable to either attract or retain users. At the very least, the organisations that rely on Web apps should look to migrate to native apps that utilise a much broader array of a mobile device’s functions.
That said, native apps are developed for a specific mobile platform, meaning that organisations will have to incur incremental development costs if they wish to make their apps available across all platforms. As an alternative, they could choose to migrate to hybrid apps, which enable cross-platform development while also allowing smartphone functionalities to be embedded into their features.
Whichever route they choose, the need to improve the user friendliness and experience of their mobile apps is paramount. Indeed, investments in ergonomics would prove invaluable in helping organisations to better understand user interface preferences and tailor their mobile apps accordingly.
Mobile app developers can certainly help in this regard, and it’s important that they expand their traditional code development roles to proactively educate end-user organisations on the importance of providing a rich user experience, leveraging research to highlight the inherent link that exists between an improved user interface and higher usage figures. Such messaging should be targeted at line-of-business heads as well as the CIO, with case studies depicting the benefits that can be reaped by deploying mobile apps for specific business functions.
There is no doubt that the country’s telcos also have a key role to play in driving the increased use of mobile apps, as such habits can only truly be fostered in an environment where the public has access to free, uninterrupted, and fast internet connectivity. Progress has been made in this regard over the last 12 months, with both Du and Etisalat launching hundreds of public WiFi hotspots across the UAE.
However, there is still a long way to go until the provision of such services becomes universal. In the meantime, it is up to the end-user organisations themselves — and the app developers that supply them — to drive their own demand. And the best way to do that will always be through the delivery of a compelling, feature-rich user experience.
The columnist is group vice president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC) He can be contacted via Twitter @JyotiIDC.
