Pega Mobile
People work in flexible, non-traditional ways and the ability to connect anywhere, anytime has become a must for productivity. With the surge of remote work, the expectation for those experiences to be mobile and intuitive is intensifying. The need to be agile to rapidly build, modify, or automate to fill process gaps is more important than ever, and seamless, intuitive user experiences are a universal expectation.
Traditional mobile app approach
The traditional approach to mobile app development is often slow and complex. Solutions commonly follow a channel-centric approach, embedding logic in each separate channel, such as a mobile app. This approach leads to disconnected and frustrating customer experiences, resulting in increased churn rates and increased maintenance costs because changes require recoding in each channel.
Pega Mobile
The low-code approach of Pega Mobile simplifies the mobile app development process by taking a Center-out™ approach to business architecture: starting with the customer journey and building out from there. By starting from the center and building out, customers can have a consistent experience as the microjourney is common across channels, including mobile. Any updates to the application are instantly reflected in the environment to which you deployed. It is unnecessary to use a native development or test environment to build a Pega Mobile app.
In the following image, click the + icons to learn about the differences between the traditional approach to building a mobile app and the Pega Mobile approach:
Offline processing
Offline-enabled mobile apps are helpful for mobile users who work in locations without network connectivity. By using offline-enabled apps, mobile users can create new cases for case types that developers enable for offline processing. Users can also process assignments within offline enabled cases while working offline. Data synchronization between the mobile device and the server occurs automatically when the mobile device is online.
Prerequisites
A Pega Platform™ application with a mobile channel configured for the application.
Approach
- Use the functionalities from App Studio and do not implement custom code.
- Identify and enable the appropriate case types for offline processing.
- Identify a stage that contains the steps that a user can take offline.
- Configure a reconciliation process after the offline stage to handle the conflicts and issues.
- Define a data synchronization strategy (for example, full synchronization versus delta synchronization).
- Define a strategy to improve the speed of data synchronization.
- Enable caching data in the offline-enabled apps to help users to begin their work without unnecessary delays.
- Disable server-side postprocessing in offline-enabled cases to avoid redundant processing of actions and increase app performance.
Case type considerations
When multiple users need to perform the same offline task, create a child case to perform the task independently.
Process design considerations
- Offline mobile apps require specialized design considerations. Pega Mobile apps typically rely on the server for various UI and processing features, and an unavailable server disrupts those features. Use offline-supported flow processing features, controls, and actions. You cannot place rules such as activities and smart shapes in the offline stage. However, you can place remote system updates and notifications at the end of the offline stage.
- Avoid using declarative indexes in offline-enabled apps to avoid duplicate index entries in the database.
- Rules that work in offline-enabled apps do not support parameters.
For more information about Pega Mobile, see the following Pega Documentation and Pega Academy content:
Mobile apps UI design
During the design of your application, remember that mobile devices are much slower than desktop devices. As a mobile app developer, focus on performance aspects more than web applications. Apply the following best practices when you design an application for mobile use to guarantee a modern, consistent user experience:
- Design a consistent, simple, and efficient user interface.
- Design a mobile-ready application by using the out-of-the-box user interface elements, design templates, and default rules that either Theme Cosmos or UI-Kit provide.
- Apply a responsive and adaptive user interface design to ensure that the content of your application is displayed correctly, regardless of the type, size, and operating system of the target device.
- A responsive user interface helps you optimize a single design or layout across various devices and sizes. An adaptive user interface determines what is displayed on the screen based on the conditional logic and the context of the layout.
UI architecture recommendations for mobile apps
The section-based Theme Cosmos architecture helps you build mobile apps by relying on ready-to-use templates, patterns, and themes, which you can customize to fit your business requirements. Theme Cosmos apps require less effort to use and maintain while supporting various mobile features making it the preferred application for mobile applications to be built on.
To make the most of Pega Mobile features and build an app with full Pega Platform functionality, choose Theme Cosmos as the UI architecture for your new app. Mobile apps that you create with Theme Cosmos offer a variety of features, including offline mode, and ensure high performance and an excellent experience for users.
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