5 Pillars of mobile app development
The latest advances in cloud technology such as Platform as a Service and ‘Serverless’ open a whole host of new possibilities and efficiencies for mobile apps.
As we move away from on-premises infrastructure towards a cloud-first development model, we are able to make use of a range of ‘lego brick’ cloud services including AI and cognitive services to create with.
This powerful tech presents us with a tangible opportunity for genuine innovation. But what makes a mobile app truly outstanding? What makes it innovative?
We believe innovation in this space is about introducing creative thinking, new ways of working, and the latest technology.
But that’s the table stakes; the key part is to create products that drive your business forward.
- Purpose
Establish a vision for your product - Product Design
Make your product meaningful - Architecture & Tools
Establish the building blocks for success - Software Development
Engineer your ambition - Cloud
Innovate at speed and scale
What are you waiting for? DIG IN!
Pillar 1: Purpose
START WITH A VISION FOR YOUR PRODUCT
When creating any mobile application it’s important to know where to start. For us (and Simon Sinek) you should always start with why.
The ‘why’ for your project is your product vision. A strong product vision should be inspiring for your organisation, for your project team, and for your users. It's the articulation of your ultimate goal. It will act as your true north, providing a continued direction in times of uncertainty, difficulty and decision making when creating your product.
To ensure your product vision is motivational and a source of inspiration it should be usercentric, it should also focus on the change or impact your product will provide. It needs to be ambitious, you need to think big and aim to inspire. But your vision should also be concise and clear.
Stakeholders, project players and users need to understand the vision and the purpose of the app, so it should provide clarity and confidence.
“THERE ARE ONLY TWO WAYS TO INFLUENCE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR: YOU CAN MANIPULATE IT OR YOU CAN INSPIRE IT”
Simon Sinek
WE TAKE CLIENTS THROUGH A PROCESS OF IDENTIFYING THE FOLLOWING ATTRIBUTES TO HELP CRAFT THE PERFECT PRODUCT VISION FOR THEIR MOBILE APPS:
“INNOVATION REQUIRES DEDICATION, HARD WORK, AND DISCIPLINE.”
Roman Pichler
Answering these questions gives us a strong place to start. The next step is to hold a collaborative visioning workshop. Rather than formulating a product vision and then selling it to the key people, you work to create it together.
You can use the template on pg.6 as a guide and ask the workshop attendees to describe their vision for the product. Then compare the different visions, look for common ground, and combine the different goals into a new one everybody agrees with.
We often use Geoffrey Moore’s vision formula to create something concise and impactful:
Confused.com - HELPING CUSTOMERS WIN
Confused.com is the UK’s first price comparison site for car insurance and is one of the UK’s biggest and most popular price comparison services, generating over one million quotes per month. Its purpose as a company is simple: to help their customers win.
Confused.com’s strategy is to be the one-stop saving shop for everything car, focusing on a driver-first proposition, promoting the message that the business is the No.1 for car savings. Our work focused around re-launching their QuickQuote app. We used the tools above to help them to define their vision for the product: “to get you a car insurance quote in seconds”.
This vision has laid the foundation for a comprehensive and compelling app helping confused.com on its journey to help customers win, with artificial intelligence and augmented reality features on the roadmap.
Pillar 2: Product Design
MAKE YOUR PRODUCT MEANINGFUL
Designing a new project in the digital age is quite a challenge. Modern product design is the application of design thinking to create the best possible experience for the end-user.
What is design thinking? We’re glad you asked.
Design thinking is an iterative process in which we strive to understand the user, their objectives and their behaviour to redefine problems and challenges. This enables us to build creative solutions that might not have been readily available at first.
It means you need to observe and develop empathy with your target user if you’re going to build a connected experience.
Design thinking is underpinned by 5 key stages:
Empathise – challenge your assumptions and observe users’ processes and needs
Define – analyse your observations to define your core challenges
Ideate – map out ideas that solve your core challenges
Prototype – turn your solutions into high fidelity, clickable prototypes
Test – validate your concepts with users
These stages span the entire process of creating outstanding products and experiences, starting by defining real people’s problems and thinking about possible solutions. This will lead us to the best design for your app.
“DESIGN IS INTELLIGENCE MADE VISIBLE ”
Alina Wheeler
IN OUR EXPERIENCE THESE ARE KEY DRIVERS OF PRODUCT DESIGN:
-
USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN
The way a product functionsPaint the big picture of why the user is engaging with your product. Great user experience design should strive to delight your users whilst ensuring they can complete their key objectives within the app.
-
INTERACTION DESIGN
The way a product behaves and feels
Design how the user will interact with your product. Once interactivity (animations, transitions, state design etc) is understood you should incorporate prototyping and further user testing to encourage user-centricity and get to the best outcomes. -
VISUAL DESIGN
The way a product functions
This is where the interface of the product comes into its own, think: typography, images, buttons, headers. Great interface design harnesses the power of your brand and strives for a product to be as beautiful as it is useful. Consistency of shapes, buttons etc. Setting habit-forming behaviours within the app.
SO WHERE DO YOU BEGIN?
We’re big advocates of the Design Sprint, a collaborative and considered process that can take you from your product vision through to a validated prototype in 5 days. Working collaboratively in a sprint, you can compress months of work into a single working week by instilling discipline into the decision-making process. Instead of waiting to launch a minimum viable product (MVP) to market to understand if your product will be effective, you’ll get detailed user feedback from a high fidelity prototype.
We see it as a superpower: by using the sprint you can fast-forward into the future to see how your customers engage with your final product, before making significant commercial commitments.
Find out more at dootrix.com/sprint/
Surfers Against Sewage - THE VOICE OF THE OCEAN
Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) is a national marine conservation and campaigning charity committed to tackling plastic pollution and protecting the UK's coastlines for all to enjoy safely and sustainably. Its successful “Safer Seas Service” app is the only real-time water quality service that protects all water users from pollution.
SAS came to us to innovate their existing app and give its users a more seamless, intuitive experience.
We recategorised and reordered their data to ensure that relevant information was surfaced in the right place for the user. We then improved the look and feel of the design whilst bringing in more of their brand to create a more welcoming and friendly environment for the user.
Focusing on the key drivers of great product design, we were able to build on the success of the existing app and create a new and innovative product experience that users love. Post-launch, we increased downloads and user satisfaction by double digits.
Pillar 3: Architecture & Tools
ESTABLISHING THE BUILDING BLOCKS FOR SUCCESS
Ensuring you have a clearly-defined architecture is crucial for any software application, especially mobile. A well-defined architecture enables us to select the appropriate tools for fast feature delivery, and have a significant impact on the success of your mobile app. It can also ensure optimal performance, maintainability, and future-proofing for your application.
There are two types of architectures involved in building a mobile application - software and technical.
Software Architecture This is the architecture or structure of your code and is integral to the efficiency of feature delivery, ongoing maintenance and the overall quality of your application.
You need to consider the following factors carefully:
- What language are we going to use?
- What frameworks are available?
- How will we deploy the app to my customers?
- How quickly can we get application updates to our customers?
“IT IS NOT THE BEAUTY YOU SHOULD LOOK AT; IT’S THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE FOUNDATION THAT WILL STAND THE TEST OF TIME”
David Allen Coe
STRUCTURING YOUR CODE
A common pattern for structuring your code is to use a three-tier architecture, splitting up the concerns of your application into separate, equally important layers.
DATA TIER
This is where the data access code resides. The “data” in this tier doesn’t have to come from databases, for example, you may need to access the contents of a log file and be able to present those logs to the user. Having this tier means that the rest of the app does not need to be exposed to dependencies required for the data storage mechanisms.
BUSINESS TIER
This tier houses all your business logic and controls the application’s functionality by performing detailed processing, and will most-likely involve communicating with the data tier to extract the objects that this tier needs in order to perform a specific task.
PRESENTATION TIER
This is the topmost level of the application. It pulls in the processed data from the business tier and displays it to the user. It’s worth noting that while this is the interaction point for the user, strong design of the lower tiers is critical to a good user experience.
Best practice architecture
Each tier should enforce strict boundaries through the use of public APIs. For example, the business tier does not need to know about how the application handles access to the data. We should ensure that we are not directly accessing the data tier from the presentation tier. Enforcing this architecture improves the testability of our code, because we can test each tier to ensure that the correct data is coming out of your public APIs.
It’s also important to remember that mobile connectivity is inconsistent, so you will have to consider scenarios where the mobile device suddenly loses connection.
Technical Architecture
In most cases, you are going to need an infrastructure to support your mobile app. The common building blocks required for a simple mobile app would be:
- An API
- A database
- An authentication provider
Infrastructure as Code
It is essential that there are no hidden surprises when you point your mobile application to each of your tiers, you need to ensure your environment is consistent. In Azure, you can document all of the resources required for your mobile app, in an ARM Template. This template allows you to deploy the environment in a repeatable, consistent manner.
We recommend storing ARM templates in source control and running them through deployment pipelines. Following this methodology means you have an audit trail on changes made to your infrastructure.
USEFUL TOOLS AND FRAMEWORKS
Visual Studio is a fully featured integrated development environment (IDE) provided by Microsoft. It enables developers to build cross-platform, creating rich native apps in a single environment with a single toolchain, sharing code across device platforms, saving time and money.
Visual Studio enables developers to write code accurately and efficiently with live assistance and provides tools to navigate your codebase without losing context. This gives your team the big picture and helps you to understand your code, collaborate effectively and code with confidence.
Azure DevOps is an end-to-end development platform on which to build, test and deploy your mobile application. It brings in the ability to set up your mobile application for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). This is achieved by setting up build and release pipelines, supporting teams that are working in an agile work pattern.
The toolchain is designed for Agile, with Boards to plan and manage your app’s development, Git for source control, Pipelines for continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD) for any platform, and testing plans to ensure code quality.
Azure DevOps improves developer productivity and you get a consistent and automated way to build, package and test applications.
App Center is an intelligent platform from Microsoft, that enables you to take the philosophy of continuous integration and apply that to application delivery.
The App Center platform enables you to automate the lifecycle of your applications, connect your repository, integrate with Azure DevOps, build in the cloud, test on thousands of real devices, distribute to testers and monitor real-world usage with sophisticated crash and analytics data, all in one platform.
A key challenge when developing any mobile app is building common functionality across different mobile platforms.
Xamarin (now MAUI) gives your developers a single, intelligent development platform to work in, using a single coding language and a single codebase, giving you multiple time-saving benefits as well as greater maintainability and resilience.
Xamarin supports multiple mobile device platforms, including iOS and Android, allowing developers to deliver the consistent and high-quality experiences that customers expect. It also provides native API access and can be compiled for native performance, increasing the load and response times or speed of your application.
Pillar 4: Software Development
ENGINEERING YOUR AMBITION
Software development is a considered and intricate process, from the conception through to the release of the final product. How do we approach the delivery of a modern mobile app?
There are a number of development models you could look to but, in our experience, the successful delivery of high-quality mobile apps comes from the integration of two individual software development cultures:
Agile & DevOps
An Agile approach encourages changes in how we think about development. Instead of thinking of development as a fixed challenge to address, Agile thinking presupposes change as inevitable and embraces it as part of business as usual.
DevOps can also bring its own cultural shifts within an organisation, including more frequent communication, and balancing stability with change and flexibility. Most importantly, it can significantly reduce the friction to change.
“IF I HAD NINE HOURS TO CHOP DOWN A TREE, I’D SPEND THE FIRST SIX SHARPENING MY AXE”
Abraham Lincoln
COMBINING AGILE & DEVOPS
There are proven benefits from adopting these methodologies:
AGILE DEVOPS AVOIDS SILOS
One of the key benefits of Agile is that is breaks down organisational silos, where individual business groups work in isolation and don't share information. Agile, by definition, disrupts silos.
When used in tandem DevOps widens Agile principles to include systems and operations instead of stopping its concerns at code check-in when you sync your repository. Creating separate Agile and DevOps horizontals in any organisation can impinge the success of DevOps entirely. Instead of passively accepting the silo approach, adopt an Agile DevOps mindset: It is a broad, overarching plan for building, deploying and delivering software.
DEVOPS MAKES AGILE MORE FLEXIBLE
One of the key benefits of DevOps is that it brings flexibility to the development process. When combining DevOps with Agile, we can increase the flexibility already present within the Agile model. Agile is flexible in that allows us to adapt to the changing needs of the customer and to prove that software under development works in a test environment.
Agile DevOps ensures that working software reaches the production phase faster and with less friction than before.
SO HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU NEED A NEW APPROACH TO DELIVER YOUR APP?
- Your software often contains defects
- You can’t do anything until you have everything
- Communication and collaboration are low
- Project timings extend indefinitely
- You’ve built the wrong thing
P&O Ferries - DELIVERING THE BEST CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES
P&O is one of the UK’s leading ferry companies, carrying over 10 million customers between the UK and continental Europe last year.
P&O had a big ambition for their new mobile app: to put the customer at the heart of the journey. Through our partnership, we were able to move them from a more traditional ‘waterfall’ style of development to a new “Agile-DevOps” way of working and help them iteratively bring that ambition to life. We were able to tackle a range of challenges, including integrating with existing services, engagement channels, and new backend systems, enabling personalisation features such as digital ticketing, travel updates and special offers to provide a seamless digital experience.
Since the launch of the app, P&O has increased tourist carryings by 4.5%, improved customer satisfaction ratings and P&O’s commitment to customer experience has been recognised with “Best Ferry Company” and “Favourite Ferry Company” awards at the Globe Travel Awards.
Pillar 5: Cloud
INNOVATE AT SPEED AND SCALE
Cloud technology has been evolving at a rapid pace for the last ten years and organisations often fail to recognise the impact that the latest incarnation of cloud computing can bring to their mobile applications.
Cloud, DevOps, automation, everything detailed above makes it faster than ever to build applications at amazing levels of complexity. Adopting a cloud computing platform is quickly becoming essential for any organisation wanting to innovate at speed and scale.
By implementing a cloud platform such as Microsoft Azure, organisations can build, scale and adapt their infrastructure to meet the demands of their users. Most importantly, the cloud enables innovation by reducing the friction to change, reducing cost and risk of failure.
It is no exaggeration to say that systems that would have taken years to build previously can be delivered in weeks or months; ideas that would have taken an impossible amount of compute power to even consider exploring can now be prototyped in days.
“WITHOUT INNOVATION, THERE IS NO CHANGE, NO CREATIVITY, OR INCENTIVE FOR IMPROVEMENT”
William Pollard
BUILDING CASTLES IN THE CLOUD
Modern mobile apps rely heavily on cloud services to provide everything from authentication and data services, through to push notifications and offline synchronisation. You can even make use of advanced AI capabilities which we discuss below.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings from Microsoft Azure makes building, scaling and maintaining infrastructure like this achievable at higher levels of efficiency than ever before.
PaaS platforms provide out-of-the box or low-code solutions for many of these common services, and do much of the heavy lifting regarding, failover, backup, availability and scalability. Every PaaS service has these essential services built in. This is in stark contrast to IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) solutions that are considerably more expensive to build, scale and maintain.
One of the benefits of using a cloud platform such as Azure, is that it allows us to collect, process, centralise and analyse vast amounts of data. It has become something of a cliché to say that data is the most precious resource in the modern era, but there is a lot of truth to it, and modern mobile apps use this ability to tailor experiences to the user – based on who they are, what they do and what they want.
INTELLIGENT EXPERIENCES
‘Intelligent Applications’ refers to a new wave of software, across cloud, mobile and other embedded devices, that sit atop your cloud infrastructure.
To deliver intelligent experiences for your users you must leverage the cloud to generate real insights from the data available. These insights can be harnessed through greater awareness of where the customer is and what they are trying to achieve or through the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Today, data science and machine learning have largely solved the problem of finding complex patterns in huge amounts of data. When we start to re-frame our challenges into problems that can be solved by spotting patterns in data, we have a powerful new way in which to find the solutions.
For example, telco giants Three use an AI-driven chatbot built on the Azure platform to reduce the increasing demand on their call centres by providing an intelligent, conversational bot that supports customers in completing everyday tasks on their mobile device.
COGNITIVE SERVICES
Companies like Microsoft are commoditising AI services, allowing developers to build intelligent applications with relative ease, deploying complex AI functionality out of the box, saving both time, resource and budget for your mobile app.
Azure’s Cognitive Services enable us to infuse your mobile app with the intelligence to see, hear, speak, understand and interpret your user needs and inform better decision making through natural communication methods. Sentiment analysis, image recognition, video analytics, anomaly detection and text to speech are just a handful of the Cognitive Services, powered by prebuilt machine learning models, ready for use today.
Made available using APIs and SDKs, developers can access these intelligent services without having direct AI or data science skills or knowledge. These Cognitive Services have the potential to revolutionise the experiences your users have with you.
THREE OF OUR FAVOURITE COGNITIVE SERVICES USE CASES:
RETAIL RECOMMENDATIONS THAT ACTUALLY MAKE SENSE
By using the Decision API, retailers are able to map complex information and data easily to provide intelligent and accurate purchase recommendations based on the items you’ve viewed or purchased.
A CHATBOT THAT POSITIVELY ENGAGES CUSTOMERS
By bringing together the Decision, Search and Language APIs with the Microsoft Azure Bot Framework you can take customer engagement to a whole new level. Create a bot that elevates your brand experience and solves your customers challenges in real-time, across a number of channels.
SECURE FINANCIAL SERVICES MADE EASY
By using the Face API, a number of financial services institutions are able to provide secure interactions with their apps using a smart authenticated selfie. Users can log-in, open new accounts, transfer funds and perform a range of tasks, all authorised through their smartphone camera.
Heathrow - CLOUD FOR BETTER COMMUNICATIONS
Heathrow is Europe’s busiest airport, servicing almost 80 million passengers a year. We worked with them to create an operational communications app to help their 75,000 staff keep Heathrow running smoothly.
The app authenticates staff with the Azure Active Directory with all data encrypted in transit and at rest, ensuring communications are kept confidential, safe and secure. High-level users see an entire end-to-end picture and sophisticated root cause analysis functionality enables them to analyse data over time to inform on-going improvements.
The platform auto-scales, allowing for seamless, on-demand capacity, essential for airport operations that are subject to sudden volume increases. Incidents can instantly be reported by people onsite and relevant notifications or alerts are automatically sent out to the right responders, in the right place, at the right time.
Moving away from a cumbersome and costly SMS based internal comms system to our employee app saved Heathrow over 50% of its telecommunication costs.
WHAT’S NEXT / RECOMMENDATIONS
So, there you have it. The CIO’s guide to mobile apps. Creating successful and high-performing digital products requires dedication at every level. The companies that do manage to create outstanding mobile apps ensure that they ask the right questions, collaborate, and incorporate these pillars into their product from end to end.
Enabling innovation and creating a compelling mobile app is a challenge for many reasons, but with the right approach, organisations can not only deliver the best experiences, processes and products for their customers, they can drive their commercial performance.
SO WHAT CAN WE DO TO SUCCEED?
Here is a checklist of the 5 pillars of mobile app innovation that must be taken into account to ensure your product stands the test of time, and more importantly, the test of your users.
- Be clear on the vision for your product
- Make your product experience meaningful
- Establish the right building blocks for success
- Develop your product in the right way
- Leverage the cloud to innovate faster
We hope you found the pillars and our insights valuable – that we’ve sparked some ideas, and that you get a chance to put them into practice soon.
