How to evaluate mobile app experiences quality?
Apps are thought to make our life easier, doing things such as streamlining our calendars and grocery lists, offering entertainment while we’re stuck in line, and making it easy to collaborate with coworkers. Consumers associate apps with productivity. They bank, pay bills, shop, reserve hotels and make travel plans, while, of course, staying productive and connected with both home and the office.
While mobile apps may be efficient and convenient, consumers are not afraid to vocalize (or tweet) complaints about an app’s shortcomings — even minor ones. With users expecting greater experiences in mobile apps more than ever, fulfilling those expectations doesn’t just happen: It takes a conscious effort throughout every stage of the design and development processes to get it right. Performance is a crucial contributor to dependable mobile app user experience, so it should be considered a key driver in the design process. Mobile applications need to focus on a core utility, and they need to be fast and reliable in order to be valuable.
While stunning visuals attract customers by making a great first impression, a long-lasting relationship depends on the quality of each encounter, which is heavily influenced by how the app performs. An application that looks stunning but performs poorly can damage integrity. As always, consumers want fast, pleasing experiences — and mobile apps are no exception. When asked how quickly consumers expect mobile apps to load and become usable (after the initial installation), more than three-quarters of app users said they expect mobile apps to load as fast as, or faster than, a mobile website. Four out of five app users expected an app to launch in three seconds or less.
Maximize Revenue and Engagement
Across the globe, the mobile channel is growing fast. People in every country are buying more and more advanced mobile devices, companies are launching smartphone apps by the thousands, and businesses and consumers alike are using mobile phones for everyday activities (i.e., checking the weather, taking advantage of discounts, shopping, or sending and receiving financial information).
The success of smartphones and — more recently — tablets such as the iPad, along with the Apple, Android and BlackBerry app stores, has led consumers to conclude mobile apps are a must-have. Delivering fast, reliable mobile experiences is critical for businesses seeking to take advantage of the opportunity provided by increased mobile access.
How do you evaluate the quality of the mobile app experiences you deliver?
When it comes to mobile apps for smartphones and tablets, performance does matter. Most mobile app users said that if an app frustrates them, they would give it a bad review.
Ask yourself:
• Is your app performing to users’ expectations?
• Do your mobile applications perform as intended across the devices and networks your customers use?
Organizations need to identify and resolve mobile application performance issues to maximize mobile business results by:
• Monitoring mobile application performance for all your end users.
• Measuring real-user experience for mobile-web iOS and Android mobile applications.
• Using real-time, dynamic alerting on failed synthetic transactions, response time, transaction and object failures, and byte limits.
• Quickly isolating problems by browser type, device type, operating system, geography, ISP and connection type.
• Capturing details about failed transactions to quickly identify the root cause down to the line of application code.
• Isolating problems based on user segments and groups across geographies, networks and device.
Businesses that embrace the mobile opportunity, offer the most usable features, and provide the fastest, most consistent performance will emerge as mobile leaders in their category.
What Do Consumers Really Need or Want?
The answer to that question is ever changing. When it comes to apps, however, there are a few basics. Consumers want:
•Easy access to product and store information.
•Help planning and navigating trips.
•The ability to communicate in real time.
Consumers want to download an easy-to-navigate app that delivers a suite of key functionalities and mobile services through an intuitive, entertaining user interface. They expect an app to identify what device they are on and present them with the right set of options and functionality for that particular device. Consumers want proactive and relevant (to them) information and services within the context of their location at a particular time.
An app has to push out personalized content, offers and perks based on their interests, while providing the ability to share offers, news and product recommendations virally on their social networks. The caveat here is that bad experiences will also be shared. This is actually reason enough to ensure apps perform at as high a level as possible.