So many businesses are convinced they need an app these days and will dump good money on a lousy implementation without strong business or user goals defined, all for the sake of saying to an executive “We have an app”. You possibly don’t need an app any more than you should be putting ugly QR codes on your (hopefully) nicely designed marketing pieces. I guarantee you the marketing design team hates that and is pissed at IT or the business group for pushing it. They aren’t catching on for good reasons.

If you bought a piece of crap that actually hurts your brand, then you just have a piece of crap app to appease your executives, who should be asking you why you sunk cash into it. “Make an app for the sake of having an app” is not a good goal.

Do you have people at your company with a keen eye for quality and enough business sense to steer you clear of third parties looking to sell you a piece of crap? You may have one internally with an internal web design team and are not utilizing them. If not, hire a firm with good mobile user experience design strategy skills and experience, not just some firm reaching for new business from you and throwing an app together.

Make sure your IT team, marketing or outside vendors have your business’s best interest at heart and have a good strategy for this expense. Is your website design, content and performance optimized for a phone’s size and utilizing the features of these newer web browsers? Slightly more Americans (36.4%) use their mobile browser than access applications (34.4%) – source via Luke Wroblewski. You should be focusing on that too.

A mobile-optimized site works for both major mobile browsers and is probably less expensive, since it uses the same kind of code for both Android and iPhone browsers. Apps require different builds and likely cost more to release. You only need a native app if you need to know more about the user, other than location, and need access hardware, like the phone’s camera, or data on the app, like an address book or calendar app.

My opinion is probably not popular, because it challenges some lazy IT management (you know you’re out there) to relinquish some control to a user experience design professional and take a little longer to do the best job possible. It may even do the opposite and discourages someone’s costly pet project at a corporation or from an unscrupulous consultant.

If you find that you do have a need for an app and did a proper cost-benefit analysis, but want to go cheap and skip the user experience design steps, you’ll get a maintenance problem instead of a solution, an IT or business manager with terrible vision whose decision making is having a negative impact that they don’t even recognize, and you get a scar on your brand integrity, all to save the cost of proper design and strategy.

Good luck to you.

And yes, I’m aware this site isn’t entirely mobile-optimized. I’m actively working on it.