In our recent blog, Web Design versus Web Development: Information Design,
we touched on things you need to consider when developing a new
application for your business. In this article, we expand on that. If
you’re thinking to yourself, “I’m still not sure exactly what solution I
need,” we’ll help you focus in on the answer by looking at types of
users and the desired outcomes. We’ll look at internal versus external
users, and we’ll dive into outcomes such as marketing, revenue, and
operations.
Software Development: Business Outcomes
Let’s take a look at what you really need this software to
do for your business, beginning with the end in mind: the business
outcomes of our application. Look at things like lead generation, online
sales, promoting existing products, creating efficiency, etc. Those
outcomes can be segmented into three primary types:
- Marketing: The purpose of marketing is to get a product
‘off the shelf,’ which means finding prospects, communicating the
purpose and benefits of your products, and providing a channel through
which they can purchase your product. The key here is that there is an
existing product which needs to be taken to market. A marketing
application could be as simple as a dynamic website that allows
potential buyers to get all the information they need to make a
decision, including purchase options. It might be an automation system
that helps your marketing team close the engagement gap between you and
your market, such as automated emails, social media updates, text
messages, etc.
- Revenue: Revenue may feel like the ultimate outcome of
everything you do, and you might think of a Marketing site as being
revenue focused. However, when it comes to a web application, ‘revenue’
literally means a sales transaction. There are two categories of
revenue applications:
- eCommerce: eCommerce is selling your products directly to
customers through an online store. These can be products you ship or
digital products that users can download or stream. Again, the key here
is that these products already exist, and your web application is the
sales channel through which you take these products to market.
- Software as a Service (SaaS): Software as a Service means
your application IS the product. Users sign up and pay to use the
service. Often, businesses use this model to automate services that can
be handled by a software application and charge customers a monthly
subscription to access the software.
- Operations: Hidden within the shiny glow of revenue and
marketing is operations. Operations isn’t the sexy application, and
businesses often miss the great opportunity here to really improve their
bottom line. An operations piece of software is designed to automate,
simplify, and provide business intelligence on your existing processes.
These applications can clear bottlenecks, improve communication, and
save money on time and materials used to create your products. These
programs can be financial, customer service, sales management, or any
other functional area of your business. A great way to identify these is
to see where you’re still using spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are great at
crunching numbers and providing insight, but they are very inefficient.
Application Development: Know Your Users
Now that you’ve identified the desired outcomes for your
business’ new software, you need to identify who is going to use it. You
have two basic types of users:
- Internal: These are people within your company’s walls. They have names and titles.
- External: These are people outside of your business. They can be prospects, leads, customers, vendors, suppliers, partners, etc.
For each type of software mentioned above, you may have a
mix of internal and external users. Understanding who is going to be
using this software, and why, will be vital to developing this custom
software for your business.
Consider the following for each type of software:
- Marketing Users:
- Internal: Internal users will be maintaining data,
implementing initiatives, and basically running the software. Typically,
these users will be your marketing team.
- External: External users for marketing software will
likely be passive users, meaning they will not actually be interacting
with the application. The software will be making decisions based on
their behaviors and analyzing their actions, but there will most likely
not be an external user for marketing applications.
- Revenue Users:
- Internal: Your internal users will be those monitoring
activity, reacting to inquiries, fulfilling orders, and implementing new
user accounts.
- External: These are your customers. They are buying products or paying for the software as a service.
- Operations:
- Internal: Think about those on your team that spend time
entering data, generating reports, updating spreadsheets, doing any kind
of bureaucratic work that actually slows down your processes. Also
think about those to whom you submit reports, such as leadership,
investors, and board members, who might be given access to their reports
and data.
- External: Think about how your suppliers, vendors and
partners can interface with your software. In this case, a user might
even be another application, using APIs to connect right to your
application.
Conclusion
As you gather the information needed to develop your custom
software, you can simplify the design of the application by
understanding both the desired outcomes -- marketing, revenue, or
operations -- and those who are going to use it -- both internal and
external. Once you have a grip on these, the design will start to flow,
and you will end up with a great piece of custom software to help your
business get to that next level.