February 13, 2017
It’s a common problem in IT projects of all types. Users can find dozens of creative ways to break your app or system.
That’s why the whole concept of a beta release exists. Put your fledgling product in the hands of users and let them kick the tires. They will find gaps, bugs and other problems your quality assurance team simply doesn’t have the time to find.
When it comes to adopting a “Mobile First” communications strategy for your enterprise, this aspect of user behavior must be weighed carefully.
In fact, cutting corners and implementing a program with a subpar user experience can make or break the entire Mobile First effort.
Mobile First & Compliance
The Mobile First trend is about making mobile devices the primary end-point for enterprise communications. Enterprises are embracing the trend as they look to achieve benefits such as retiring expensive desk phones and boosting employee reach and responsiveness. Mobile First is also central to the teleworking, remote working, virtual workplaces and work-from-home programs that are increasingly critical to the operations of many companies.
A critical aspect of this strategy is how the enterprise maintains control over the communications, especially when the communications involve information that should be secure and the communications themselves should be logged and archived.
Moving to non-traditional devices doesn’t relieve the enterprise of the compliance requirement. At the least, the mobile device should be subject to the same compliance and recording controls as the traditional end-points in your enterprise communications.
This is also true of organizations that want to enforce mobile usage policies for safety or operational reasons, such as in classrooms or for equipment operators.
That’s where a poor user experience can work against a successful Mobile First program.
In the early days of mobile Unified Communications, users were required to activate clunky clients for their mobile devices to make a call. The mobile clients often were a pain. They were not as intuitive or easy to use as the native dialer of the mobile device. In the crush of the work day, a user was likely to just activate their native phone dialer without giving the client a thought.
If a user got a call from a customer on their personal number, the user would have to hang up and call the person back using the UC client. In the middle of accomplishing an important business task, how likely was that to happen?
If the user was in an environment in which mobile usage was prohibited by company policy, the user might simply do an “end-run” around the policy and use the mobile device without the designated client.
The bottom line is that a negative user experience meant that users were less likely to use the designated mobile client as intended, and so the communications would take place outside the compliance controls of the enterprise.
The Positive UC UX
On the flip side, a well-thought-out and executed user experience can make a world of difference in the adoption of a Mobile First communications program.
Even for communications that do not require compliance or policy enforcement, a positive user experience can promote adoption of the desired communications methods and, as a result, yield benefits from a Mobile First program earlier.
In the software development and product design worlds, the user experience, or UX, has become an important discipline all its own.
It’s a best practice for enterprise communications managers to adopt the same approach. In that light, the user experience with the communications applications on their mobile devices becomes the most important part of the evaluation of a communications system.
That’s in contrast with the early days of unified communications, in which the mobile client was a secondary consideration, lower priority than the features and capabilities of the wired desk phone.
Mobile-X
Mobile-X from Tango Networks represents a decade of innovation in mobilized enterprise communications. It was designed from the outset with a superior user experience in mind.
We’ve known that user experience is paramount to successful implementation and adoption of new IT and communications programs.
As a result, Mobile-X is designed to deliver a user experience second to none. For example, users can operate their mobile phones exactly as if they are extensions of the enterprise communication system, complete with features like conferencing that are commonly used on the desk phone. It even works with Bring Your Own Device end-points, so the user can operate the device with which he or she is most familiar and comfortable. Where available, the platform can directly integrate the mobile phone’s native dialer – the “Green Button” – into the enterprise communications system.
And the platform offers powerful dual-persona management, keeping the business communications separate from personal communications with no effort at all on the part of the user.
In these ways, the user experience on Mobile-X is perfect for launching a successful Mobile First program.
Featuring the most advanced implementation of fixed mobile convergence technologies, Mobile-X from Tango Networks supports many use cases for a distributed workforce, including Mobile Unified Communications, mobile workforce communications, and programs for remote working, work from home, telecommuting and business continuity.
Tango Networks offers a range of solutions with Mobile-X that can mobilize enterprise communications and streamline the journey to Mobile First strategies. If you plan to attend this year’s Mobile World Congress, be sure to stop by our Pod #7UP.66 to check out Mobile-X.
In the next blog post in this series, we will dive deeper into the issues of communications compliance, and how to balance communications convenience with compliance requirements.
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