Application Modernization To Optimize User Experience

Posted by Neil Sheppard on September 5, 2024
Application Modernization To Optimize User Experience

Application modernization is crucial for improving the user experience for your employees and customers. Discover why both app mod and UX are so important for your business. 

Application modernization and user experience optimization go hand-in-hand. When you consider it, the connection is obvious.

Your employees and customers don't want antiquated, hard-to-use tools that lack the innovative features that modern technology offers. Application modernization is clearly beneficial, but it's also not straightforward.

To optimize the user experience, you need to know what applications your customers and team want to use. You also need to balance your expenditure and ensure compatibility between your new applications and your existing IT landscape.

To create the optimum application portfolio for both your users and your business, you need to gain clarity on your current and target states. You also need to plot a realistic path between the two.

Before we explore application modernization for user experience, you can gain clarity on your application portfolio by leveraging SAP LeanIX. To find out more, download Gartner's report:

GARTNER® REPORT: How To Choose The Right Approach For Application Modernization And Cloud Migration

 

Application Modernization Means UX Optimization

Application modernization and user experience (UX) are closely related enough to be synonymous. Modern applications are not only beneficial to UX, but essential.

Microsoft, Apple, and Google carefully use their cutting-edge technology to craft tools that offer their users an experience tailored to their needs in the modern world. Their users then become accustomed to that kind of experience with using technology.

When customers then come to use your interface, whether it be web or application, it will need to offer a similar level of experience to what they're used to or they will become frustrated. Research supports this view:

This issue becomes perhaps even more complex when you consider your employees. Just as people expect a modern user experience from the services they purchase, they also expect a similar experience in the tools they use in their work.

According to an Adobe study, 49% of US workers would leave their job if they became frustrated with their workplace technology. Since it's estimated that replacing an employee costs up to 60% of their annual salary, application modernization can have a tremendous return on investment.

 

Why User Experience Matters

Without application modernization, the user experience (UX) you offer people can leave them dissatisfied. Through simple human nature, this will make your customers and key talent unwilling to work with you, regardless of the value you can offer otherwise.

It's often said that the customer is always right, and what is UX other than the digital equivalent of customer service? Offering a desirable, premium service in the digital age means having a modern application portfolio to power that digital user experience.

In the case of your employees, there's yet another angle to the user experience. Good UX empowers users to accomplish tasks rapidly, and poor UX harms productivity.

Modern applications allow employees to find what they need, complete work, and avoid outages and downtime. With innovative technology like artificial intelligence (AI), they can even have applications complete simple tasks for them.

This is why we say that application modernization is crucial for ensuring efficiency in your operations. Often, that modernization initiative will mean cloud migration.

 

What About The Cloud?

Application modernization for user experience will often involve cloud migration. This is because modern applications are usually cloud-based due to both customer needs and simple practicality.

Offering cloud-native products brings a variety of benefits for vendors. From pushing automated updates through to the removal of distribution costs, cloud applications are easier to provide before you even consider the technological benefits.

On the other hand, the range of advantages in scalability and compatibility that cloud applications offer the organizations that buy them are well documented. Specifically for user experience (UX), the value of cloud applications is the ability to access them remotely.

People would once visit your offices, branches, and stores to acquire services, and then, in more recent times, they would sit down at a computer in their home or office. Now, both customers and employees expect to be able to acquire products and do work from their mobile devices on the go.

Migrating at least a portion of your IT landscape into the cloud is alreadt essential for enabling remote work and ecommerce. To improve UX, you must migrate key applications into the cloud.

 

How To Modernize Your Applications For UX

Thankfully, improving your user experience comes hand-in-hand with application modernization. Modern applications have a modern user experience, so in the majority of cases, an application modernization initiative will automatically improve the user experience.

This doesn't mean that you have the budget to perfect your IT landscape. You must carefully choose a new application portfolio that fills the needs of your users and employees with minimal investment to ensure the greatest return.

To achieve this, you need to complete a detailed needs assessment and have a comprehensive understanding of your existing portfolio and architecture. Since this information is far more complex than can be maintained in the human mind or even documented in a simple spreadsheet, you need the right tool to map your landscape.

SAP LeanIX allows you to build a comprehensive model of your application portfolio, so that you can create a plan of action for each application, whether you're updating it or tolerating it as good enough for now. You can even map your future application portfolio to surface the impacts of your initiative to your stakeholders.

To find out more about how SAP LeanIX can help you with application modernization to improve your user experience, book a demo: 

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