For companies building and managing consumer-facing mobile apps, understanding the connection between brand experiences, your mobile app experience, and your ability to build positive brand equity is crucial.
Your Brand Experience
Your app is your brand. When users download and install your mobile app, they’re establishing a straight line between the experience they have in your app and your total brand experience. Your brand sets user expectations and from the very first touchpoint, they’re not just “using a mobile app”, they’re having a one-on-one interaction with your company, product, and ultimately, your overall brand. Imagine your mobile app as a sales associate. Everything about them from their appearance, their demeanor, and their ability to quickly help you reflect on your brand. A user’s takeaway from that experience will drive their connection in either a positive direction, or unfortunately, a negative one.
Almost 90% of mobile app users are likely to recommend a brand after a positive mobile experience. Conversely, when your customers have a negative experience with your mobile app, they are over 60% less likely to make future purchases. App performance, including mobile app crashes, drives approximately 70% of app uninstalls.
Mobile app users are most likely to report issues related to the following:
- User interface – Does your user interface facilitate actions and activities, or does it get in the way, creating friction? A smooth, effortless experience is the minimum that users expect. Are interface elements easy to use and are you taking advantage of data and personalization to assist in tedious tasks? Consistently testing options via multivariate testing is one way to create a habit of validating UI, ensuring that you’re providing your users with the best interface options for solving a task.
- App performance – Nobody likes to wait. Speed and performance are crucial for app success and generating positive reviews. Being able to measure and track app performance analytics to identify areas for experience improvement is key to staying on top of application performance.
- Functionality – Is your app doing the job your customer hired it to do? If it’s not, your users will “fire” that app quickly and move on. There are too many options for users to settle on an app that provides little to no value. Understanding the job-to-be-done is paramount to gaining the insight required to provide the right value your users are seeking.
- Device compatibility – There are an almost infinite number of devices out there across Android and iOS. Understanding the best ways to provide a consistent experience among the broad spectrum of form factors is key to growing users, reducing frustration, and cultivating a base of enthusiastic customers. When you consider the issues that users face, along with the growing number of different scenarios across operating systems, OS versions, carrier networks, and the huge number of devices in the marketplace, you can see how important it is to make sure you have a robust quality management strategy to address the almost infinitely broad mobile ecosystem.
Building a Robust Quality Strategy
A comprehensive, proactive strategy for quality assurance is vital to making sure your users are having the most frictionless, performant experience in your mobile apps. The entire mobile ecosystem is one of the most dynamic and rapidly evolving experience platforms. Brands that stay on top of quality and performance deliver successful experiences with their mobile products, while those who merely react to negative feedback have the potential to cause irreparable damage.
Identify and Understand Issues Early
The most important part of developing a mobile quality strategy is to have a solid understanding of any potential problems. Deploying analytics and monitoring solutions are one of the first steps you should take to gain insight into what’s happening with your app and when it’s happening. These solutions provide valuable real-time feedback on the state of your mobile app experience and can help you identify potential issues. Armed with this information, you can develop a better understanding of any issues that your users are encountering and plan accordingly. You need to leverage proactive monitoring and analysis to identify friction points early. Don’t wait for users to tell you what’s wrong, by that time it’s too late.
Test and Automate
Another aspect of a robust quality strategy is to ensure that you’re testing as often as you can. You should be leveraging quality testing tools and platforms and including automation where possible. This will enable development teams to guarantee that deployed code is performing across operating systems and versions, networks, and handsets prior to getting it into users’ hands. This can be implemented as part of your deployment process and provide you valuable feedback on the quality of code being written by app engineering teams.
Why Perficient Mobile Solutions?
At Perficient, we take a holistic, product-centric approach to mobile, ensuring overall quality throughout the app lifecycle. This is key to ensuring a high-quality experience across the entire mobile landscape.
For more information about Perficient’s Mobile Solutions expertise, subscribe to our blog or contact our Mobile Solutions team today!
