The second in a series on Cisco’s mobile strategy.
Apps, apps and more apps, is your company experiencing a proliferation of apps? Cisco certainly is. We are moving out of the experimental stage of app development and shifting toward measuring ‘repetitive usage’ as one of the main gauges for on-going support and improvements.
Mobile user behavior is maturing. We are required to create a delightful experience for a specific task, consider usage rates and development costs for multi-operating systems. Current challenges include too many app ideas, more mobile devices and user demands. 2014 will be the year where many B2B companies streamline their app development portfolio. Let’s look at a few examples.
Both of these consumer Apps have a delightful user experience (+4 Star rating) and a focused task:
This virtual lighter shows off the accelerometer and touch-screen capabilities of a mobile phone.
This app turns your phone into a flashlight.
These Apps were both very popular several years ago, however which one do you think survived the ‘uninstalled’ bucket? Which one has repetitive usage?
The “Flashlight app” has over 400 times more user comments than the virtual lighter, an indication of high usage. In fact, it’s so popular Apple deemed it necessary to build into the latest iOS-7 release.
Over the past year we’ve seen companies start to streamline their App portfolio such as ESPN, LinkedIn, and Walmart
Over the past year there was a reduction of apps to increase focus on ‘Fantasy’ type experiences (football, baseball, etc.) and video.
Relaunched a major update and the app now consolidates both news feeds and profile search abilities.
Walmart decided a single app for ‘In store’ and ‘shopping list creation’ experiences was sufficient.
As app development costs rise, consolidation and retirement will be the direction of many B2B companies take. Here are some things to consider whether an app should continue?
- Is the original idea or task a ‘daily occurrence for your users’?
- Are there duplications within your app portfolio?
- Would a ‘responsive web’ designed approach be more cost effective in the long run?
- Are you measuring value against supporting multiple devices & operating systems?
- Have you established an app scorecard baseline for usage and experience?
What’s your favorite Cisco App? Here are a few of our most downloaded apps:
Great post!
I use Webex on my iPad. My big frustration is that the webex connection times out when I am using a different app. If I am taking notes or creating an e-mail, my Webex connection times out, and I have to rejoin the meeting. With a small display and only one app visible, Webex may be in the background frequently, and for extended periods. How do I feedback to Cisco that this app needs a control or setting to stop the timeout feature or extend the timeout interval? That would be a terrific improvement to what I already find is an outstanding app.
This gives a good rule-of-thumb for deciding “mobile app or responsive web?”
It also reminds me of the early days of the web when everyone thought they needed a separate website for every audience or market segment, then customers voted loudly that they preferred a consolidated holistic experience on the web. I suspect we’re in the same situation with apps – we all have too many, use most of them sparingly, and would prefer “super-apps” that did more, rather than lots of apps with one narrow capability.
Thank you for sharing this, Steve.