INSURANCE 2.0

The iPhone has revolutionised the mobile phone market bringing together touch screen, GPS, Maps and many user friendly apps and features to make an iPhone user an iPhone addict. The iPhone has been proven as a success; not because its a great phone but because of the great variety of applications ranging from great games, guides, currency converters, and many other interactive features. Cheaper mobile contracts and unlimited mobile internet access are helping the mobile app usage boom. Its becoming increasingly important for insurance businesses to put their footprint on the mobile app space as there are more than 50,000 apps  available through the App Store.

Here are few ideas insure businesses should consider when launching their iPhone app.

Reduce Screen Clutter

iPhone has a limited screen size therefore its important to keep the app as clutter free as possible. Usability of the app is a key success factor. Users should be able to use this app without thinking.

Step by Step User Experience

Make sure you test your app user experience before launching the app. If you are planning to launch an Insurance Quote application which involves several steps, you should build one step per screen to make it simple and engaging for the user. You can use professional tools like Graffletopia to design your iPhone App wireframe or the actual design. You can customise your iPhone app user interface with bespoke backgrounds, title bars, buttons, selectors, and other iPhone UI elements.

You could also paper prototype the UI for your iPhone (see example below). Whether you take the route of whiteboard / paper prototyping or digital prototyping, either way you have to make sure that you keep the customers journey has the highest priority.

The Development Framework

There are two options of developing the framework; 1) web technology 2)Objective-C Which is the best approach depends on what you what to achieve from your iPhone app and how fast you want to deliver it. Web Technology: This is the easiest option using Html and JavaScript. It user the browser on the iPhone to run and is a fairly simple development. Objective-C: Though the language is full of brackets, Objective-C is the iPhone development language and the best choice to develop robust applications using all of iPhone’s inbuilt assets like GPS, Maps, Camera and more. As an insurance business you might want to manage your claims like capturing accident/incident pictures, then Objective-C should be the language of your choice.

Development Tools

You need to have the right tools to develop your insurance iPhone app. Membership with iPhone developer support would be useful to get all the help needed. You also need to have a Mac OS computer and latest version of iPhone SDK. For web based development you can use jQTouch. Last but not the least, you need an iPhone to test run your application.

Test your iPhone App

Run your iPhone app through usability tests using real iPhones so you can find out how the app is performing on real people with the real hardware. Apple is fussy about accepting apps with bugs, so if you want your insurance app to be a hit with the masses, make sure its properly tested. Follow the above guidelines and launch your Insurance iPhone app with success.

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Apple recently recorded 1 billionth App download.  Thousands of developers are entering the App race to get a taste of Apple’s iphone success. Apple is not leading this race alone; there are competing wireless platforms such as Blackberry’s App World, Google’s Android, and soon to be available stores from Nokia and Palm.

Insurance industry is known for being risk conservative and hesitant to jump into latest innovation on the technology front. This is a great opportunity for insurance businesses to change their boring image and become cool as their customers are becoming more used to latest technology channels. Mobile is definitely the way forward a major communication and customer engagement medium.

Just to bring to your attention, all apps are not accepted by the Apple store. The best way to grab Apple’s attention is to develop an app keeping users in mind.

Few insurance businesses like Swiftcover.mobi have emerged on mobile space delivering quick quote. The problem with having a mobile browser version of your site means resizing content, creative and process to make it work. That is a lot of work when building downloadable apps have become much simpler. The apps are here to stay and our lives are going to get more and more dependant of them. Mobile devices are likely to be the primary source for internet browsing by 2020.

The app race is on and insurance businesses which take a lead now will gain advantage in the long-term.

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