Intelligent Apps: The future of mobile solutions?

When I hear the question—what is future of “smartphones”, I humbly say that smartphones are (still) the future. With the Internet of Things and other advanced technologies gaining prominence, many assume that smartphone use will gradually decrease. I believe that the smartphone is here to stay. Simply because mobile orchestration of micro moments (to enable user actions and responses) makes this device irreplaceable in the near future by any “thing”.

For businesses, a smartphone is the pivot of several intermingled virtual experiences of a user in real time. Organizations which can capitalize on this pivot and solve people's needs are going to define the future. Intelligent apps aid in exactly this, and help businesses connect with users at all times, leading to enhanced value and greater business results.

Intelligent mobile apps

Gartner named Intelligent Apps as one of the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends of 2017. Intelligent apps are being used in domains such as productivity, beauty, education, sales, manufacturing, entertainment and mark the next level of development in mobility solutions.

Take for example a daily learning app meant for high school students. It improves learning by sending the user a contextual message. The app gets visual cues on recognizing emotions via the camera. So, if the user looks confused when studying the basics of calculus, the app may suggest: “You may like to revise Calculus 101, before taking the next test”.

Another example could be that of a left-handed mobile user. The application ascertains that the user is left handed and moves the hamburger menu from the top-right to the top-left of the screen for easy access.

An intelligent app learns the behavioral, contextual and emotional patterns of a user in real time and provides a personalized experience in every successive session. Every time an input is made, the mobile app tailors a personalized response.

Anatomy of an Intelligent mobile app

• Elimination of outdated keyboard inputs: Intelligent use of gestures, speech, and biometrics at the right moments can enable a user to operate apps without keyboards.
• Use of Cognitive API: Mimicking human functions like speech, cognitive API can convert text into speech, recognize familiar faces and emotions, and give advice to users.
• Continuous personalization of UX: Personalization of user experience should not only be a design time but a run time activity. A user’s pattern of operating the app changes with time. The mobile app should change its behavior continuously to be in sync.
• Prediction of behavior based on user activity: Frequent in-depth analysis with respect to the user’s activity is critical as this would lay the foundation of app behavior in the current and the next stage.

Frameworks required for Intelligent Mobile Apps

The app design should have the provision and scope to augment the user journey rather than changing it altogether. To start with, these self-organized apps can have small additions, deletions, and discoveries based on built-in intelligence and self-learning algorithms. For such apps, the age of the app and lifetime of the app user will drive their maturity and success. To begin with, app designers and product owners can think of the following frameworks to support these apps:

• Framework to Know Your Users’ Activity (KYUA).
• Framework to acknowledge the patterns of user activity and provide support for prescriptive design changes.
• Framework to take the app to the next level of engagement and user satisfaction by rolling off quick releases.

To help businesses achieve more, Nagarro works on enabling such mobility frameworks, and delivers continuously improved, highly intelligent and usable apps for the future. Watch this space for a white paper on these frameworks and their utilities in the intelligent app space.

Read more about our mobility solutions or contact us at info@nagarro.com for further information.