The problem in retail mobility is that designing user experience for business-to-employee apps is much different than creating a consumer mobile app, but merchants don't understand this.

Retail mobility and developing employee-facing mobile apps

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Retailers know that they need to provide consumers with a mobile app in order to improve the customer experience. After all, with everyone armed with a mobile device, it seems foolish to not make brand interactions easier, more intuitive and uniquely engaging. Businesses clearly know how to create a great mobile app and meet end users’ needs with designs geared toward improving the user experience, but when applying these ideals to employee-facing mobile workflow apps, retailers often fall short.

According to an article written by Kyle Hodgson, principal consultant and software developer at ThoughtWorks Canada for Sandhill, the problem in retail mobility is that designing a good user experience for business-to-employee apps is much different than creating a consumer mobile app. The source explained that merchants need to think more long term when creating mobile workflow apps for their staff members. Therefore, retailers should consider mobile app development platforms, as these meet the three demands for long-term app use.

“Retailers need a mobile app development platform that scales over time.”

The need for scale

Instead of merely meeting immediate needs by throwing together mobile apps as department heads and executives demand them, retailers need to be proactive in choosing a mobile app development platform that scales over time. This way, merchants will have a stable environment and workflow framework that enables their IT teams to quickly create a solution for every task.

Mobile development platforms provide those capabilities, and cloud-based offerings will enable retailers to develop mobile workflow apps for every situation without draining financial resources. With a framework for creating a variety of workflow apps and support from the cloud, retailers can ostensibly design and deploy everything from timesheet and worksheet apps to order management and invoice preparation programs to store check apps, warehouse stock data apps and anything in between.

Develop with speed

Retailers cannot simply develop a large collection of apps without investing either time or money into the process. While an MADP helps keep costs low, merchants need to create mobile workflow apps quickly in order to address small problems before they become huge issues. This is where rapid development platforms help.

When developing for a consumer, retailers can take their time to make the app as interactive as possible and feature-rich, but employees don’t need bells and whistles, they need a solution to their problems today, not tomorrow. MADPs ensure that merchants have a mobile workflow app as soon as possible, and from that point, IT teams can quickly address any other issues that appear over time. For example, a retailer might only need order management or merchandising apps at the start, but when they look to ship items or sell products on the road, a mileage recording app will be essential. The company simply won’t have time to create an app that quickly without an MADP such as Mobilengine.

Using a tablet to monitor invoicing and orders will make employees more productive.Using a tablet to monitor invoicing and orders will make employees more productive.

Design for usability

The user experience plays just as large as a role in business-to-employee apps as it does in consumer-facing mobile solutions. The main difference in development, however, comes in designing the mobile app for the workflow. Developer Tech reported that user interfaces and employee mobile app experiences are just as important as functional requirements, so apps need to be built natively with mobile device capabilities in mind.

Furthermore, the source cited a study conducted by Avanade that found 86 percent of companies agree that good user interfaces are “essential to productivity.” By focusing on what data is required and what steps need to be taken, a mobile workflow app’s interface will be easy to manage, ensuring that employees can always get work done. This means having distribution apps with clear organization and the ability to simply discover data, or providing out of stock management apps that allow staff members to record missing inventory quickly and easily.

Whether retailers need timesheet and order management apps or sales teams need customer visit reporting apps, these businesses should always think in the long term. They need a platform that can support a wealth of mobile workflow solutions as well as systems that can handle scalability. Armed with those tools and resources, retailers and sales professionals can solve their mobility problems.

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Széchenyi 2020

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