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Developing Financial Apps Your Mobile Users Can’t Live Without

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Developing Financial Apps Your Mobile Users Can’t Live Without

By Mike Russo, HP Software Financial Services Industry CTO

In my previous blog (Is mobile-first the right approach for financial application delivery? A business perspective), we looked at the rationale behind adopting a mobile-first business focus for application development and deployment. Now, let’s take a look at some of the functional areas you need to address when deploying your financial apps onto a mobile platform.

Before we start, it is important to remember that security must be addressed in all aspects of mobile development and deployment. Since security is so important – and permeates across all of the areas below – I plan to devote a good portion of my next blog on how security can be interwoven into all development projects from day one.  The blog will also examine the importance of analytics for understanding how your users are experiencing your app, what services and functionality they are using on a regular basis, and other key elements. For this blog, let’s take a look at selecting the appropriate functionality for your mobile app, designing the user experience, and the implications of performance testing.

Finding the Balance between Functionality and the User Experience

Understanding exactly what your users’ need – and much more importantly, what they don’t need – is essential for a successful mobile deployment. The biggest mistake many organizations make is trying to offer far too many services to their mobile user base. These enthusiastic teams create a full suite of advanced features, only to find out that just a small subset (or even none) of their users actually need or use that level of functionality on their mobile devices.

Your mobile entity should consist of a well-chosen subset of the full suite of services you provide on your online presence. Your end consumer customers may use their mobile devices to look up account data, transfer funds, deposit checks, file an insurance claim, or conduct other streamlined functions. Your corporate users might use their mobile devices to unlock users, perform payment approvals, reset passwords, or conduct various insurance servicing and simple reporting functions. But offering too many services within a mobile application framework will complicate the user experience, and therefore limit engagement and adoption.

After determining which services your mobile customers require, you must design them appropriately for mobile delivery. You need to strike a balance between the number of features offered and solid interface design. The mobile user interface must be streamlined, user friendly, and intuitive.  It should take advantage of all of the ergonomics of user interaction specifically designed for mobile delivery and embedded within the mobile browsers.

No Second Chances! The Importance of Functional Testing

Now that you’ve identified the most important services for mobile delivery and have designed a clean user interface, you need to ensure it works flawlessly. You must get it right the first time. Mobile users are easily frustrated and generally unforgiving with flawed applications. Look at any posted review of a faulty application and you will see how quickly a poor experience can be communicated across your existing and potential future customer base.   

The mobile delivery model presents several additional challenges for your IT team. Mobile development occurs in an extremely fast and dynamic environment, with nearly unlimited variables - a large number of deployed devices, operating systems, and network types, to name just a few. Automated functional and regression testing, supporting agile software development (or other continuous development processes) with both real devices and emulators, is crucial for ensuring the functional quality of your mobile apps. Your organization will face significant costs if you implement an app into production with functional defects or inconsistencies. It has been estimated that the cost to fix an application defect after deployment is more than 150 times the cost to fix it during development! Businesses who want to grow simply can’t afford this risk.

And finally, your mobile users are social by nature. If you deploy an app with inferior quality, you won’t get a second chance to do it right. A good experience will be shared with just a few people, but a bad experience will get posted on dozens of blogs, Twitter, Yelp, Facebook, YouTube and user forums faster than you can fix the problem. This can seriously impact your business growth and the ability to not only keep your existing customers, but acquire new ones as well.

The Need for Speed - Realistic Performance Testing

As mentioned before, users have zero tolerance for slow performing applications on their mobile devices. They demand highly responsive, “snappy” interactions with all of their mobile services. But mobile applications have a unique problem when it comes to performance. They share a multitude of networks with countless other users. Service quality can fluctuate significantly, providing a less than optimal customer experience. It is imperative to ensure that your mobile applications and platforms can accommodate the anticipated high transaction load and still deliver optimized response times - despite the fact that carrier performance can and will fluctuate.

There are several critical areas to consider when validating your mobile service to ensure a quality experience for your customers, including load testing, performance optimization, and end-user-experience monitoring.  Let’s look at them individually.

  • Load Testing. You need to ensure that you have sufficient infrastructure services to handle the volume of concurrent users you anticipate.  Load must be validated based on a mid- to long-term usage model so you will have sufficient time to make infrastructure adjustments if your volume increases at a rate faster than anticipated. You should also plan for proper load balancing and failover volumes during maintenance activities or in the event of an outage.
  • Performance Testing allows you to validate the performance of each of the separate elements in the service transaction. The ability to perform both physical and virtual testing is essential, given the security restrictions to test in non-production and development environments. It is important to review every step in the transaction to identify where you may have performance problems or bottlenecks and identify opportunities to optimize the environment.
  • End-User Experience Testing enables you to fully understand and effectively manage what your users are experiencing in production 7x24x365. This is the true measure of any service and is vital to ensuring what you intended to deliver is actually what you have in production. It is also important to compare your mobile application user experience and performance to your competitors’ offerings and against multiple carriers to establish your performance baseline and determine if you need to make any adjustments.

Concluding Thoughts

Once you have identified the right balance between functionality and the user experience, and have developed solid functional, performance, and end-user testing plans, you must factor in application security, continuous monitoring, business and user analytics, and the need to take a DevOps approach. I’ll cover those elements in upcoming blogs. Stay tuned!

Click here to join my Webcast on October 11th where I will discuss this topic further and will field your questions in a Q&A session.

 

 

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Author Bio:

Mike Russo is chief technology officer for HP Software’s financial services and insurance vertical. He has direct responsibility for building professional, trusted relationships with his customers’ executive management. Prior to joining HP in March of 2012, Mike was senior vice president of channel technology and mobility for Bank of America’s global corporate, commercial, and investment banking technology group, where he built a global development team and created the bank’s first mobile banking environment for Treasury Services.


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