One of the reasons why custom application development is so popular – and important – is because instead of forcing businesses to adjust their processes to meet the limitations of technology, it bends technology to better align these resources with their own unique goals and strategies. It’s not just about delivering something that can get the job done today – it’s also about guaranteeing long-term success by delivering a solution that was built from the ground up with a business’ strategic and tactical needs in mind.
But even with all that under consideration, a custom application is not necessarily the “silver bullet” that a lot of organizations are searching for in terms of productivity. Enabling an end user to accomplish a particular task from a mobile device is only one small part of a much larger story. It’s about working smarter, not harder – which is why any custom application needs to BEGIN at the end of the process with the needs of the user and work its way backward from there. Beginning any development process without carefully considering these factors is little more than a recipe for disaster.
Custom Application Development Begins and Ends With the User
In terms of the actual jobs that people are doing with custom applications, think for a moment about the last time you watched someone put together a puzzle. Puzzles are great because you can accomplish them in a few different ways – some people like to start by first creating the border and then working on the middle section, while others like to create smaller sections and eventually stick them all together.
But regardless of how they choose to approach the task, the task still gets accomplished: the puzzle is finished and you finally get to see the singular image that all of the little pieces make up when combined.
Custom application development is a lot like this admittedly simple concept in a lot of ways. When building an application for an enterprise, you’re typically tasked with building a finished product that does X, Y, and Z. But the actual ways in which end users will interact with your application can ultimately be just as varied as the tasks themselves.
Especially in terms of UX and UI design, you need to keep all of the possible end user workflows in mind when creating an experience that isn’t just efficient but that is also enjoyable to use. Don’t try to force people to start with the border of the puzzle if they don’t want to – yes, the puzzle will get completed but not everyone thinks or works that way. To that end, one of the most important rules of custom application development becomes “don’t force your users to do a task in any one particular way. Instead, support their ability to make that choice on their own.”
To put it another way, the ultimate point of custom application development isn’t just to enable a team of people to do a particular job – it’s to allow them to do that job in the particular way that they like or need to given the circumstances. Without making an effort to better understand not just what someone is trying to do but how they’re trying to do it, you’ll wind up with a lateral move at best – something that is essentially on par with whatever methods they were already using.
Only by starting with the custom workflows of end users and then essentially reverse engineering a custom application to support and empower those needs will a solution become the true productivity engine that it was meant to be.
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Image by freepik.com.
