I have seen some recent statistics surrounding the expansion of User Experience (UX), into the lifetime value gained from the Customer Experience (CX), in the region of $3 for every $1 spent (see Customer Experience and your bottom line). 

As technology evolves, websites grow increasingly complex and with that complexity comes new challenges. Traditional monolithic architectures are often hard to update quickly. They can become difficult to maintain and scale and must rely on a single stack. We all know this scenario is far from ideal as apps can become quickly outdated this way.

Enter micro frontends. Micro frontends are a way of structuring the UI of a site around a series of independent fragments, extending the benefits of microservice architecture to frontend development. The key to micro frontends is to think about the application as being composed of a collection of features which are owned by independent teams. By breaking up a large monolithic site into smaller pieces, developers can combat many of the problems that arise from added complexity. 

In part two of this series we discussed what technology factors are important, so to close the internal apps series, we’ll discuss the architectural issues and the technology approaches which we think are required to make these efforts successful.

In part one of ‘Six Considerations for Building Killer Internal Apps’, we outlined considerations for changing our approach to building and modernizing internal apps. However, putting the business case in place is only the first step.

Digital transformation is a wide-ranging term. One of the areas of interest is internal applications. However, after years of building external-facing applications, competing with the digital denizens to capture and keep customers through attractive, responsive and easy to use interactions, did we forget about internal citizens?

Here at Eikos, we have started using Vue.js in our recent projects with much success. Although it is a relatively new framework, it’s lightweight and easy to integrate into existing applications, while still being a powerful tool when building both small components and sophisticated single-page applications. We recently published a blog post comparing the latest front-end technologies – including Vue, Angular 2+, and React – and explained why Vue.js has become our first choice for new projects. We like to think of the Vue ecosystem as having adopted the best parts of existing frameworks, while leaving clunky and outdated methodologies behind. In this article, we’ll discuss the technical aspects of Vue and the benefits it offers to developers when starting a new project or expanding on an existing endeavor.

In prior blog posts, we have discussed how a company can run the same application in the three major operating systems, Windows, MacOS, and Linux, using a single code-base.  In the blog  "Electron: Create a single app for Windows, Linux, and Mac" we demonstrate how one might implement a solution to this problem using the open-source technology Electron.  And, while it does provide a great pathway, financial companies may find it falls short when it comes to Enterprise-level integration.