Tag Archives: usability

Creating Superior User Experiences

User experience is of paramount importance to today’s consumers, so making it easy for them to get the information they need or want is a critical part of today’s mobile experience. If your mobile application‘s users can’t easily find what they are looking for, they will quickly abandon your mobile application. If you offer a positive user experience, making it easy and intuitive for users to navigate your application and find what they are looking for, your brand can engage and potentially convert a greater volume of shoppers or develop a solid user base. There are huge advantages to developing applications with a sound usability strategy and a big risk that if you do not you will be quickly turning away potential customers.

When it comes to retail or online brands, offering access to immediate customer support through tools like mobile chat, brands can quickly and effectively engage and potentially convert a high volume of consumers. There is a big advantage to offering real-time, personalized assistance at a customer’s fingertips. These advantages only just start with increased conversion ratios and go on to include items like reducing overall support costs.

Another key area is personalization. Mobile users generally don’t have the patience to sift through irrelevant information on a mobile application. Therefore it is best to make sure that content is based on the consumer’s location, preferences and history. Making your users dig for relevant info will just send consumers to your competition.

With the amount of time and money that consumers are spending on mobile growing, it is more important that ever to offer well thought out consumer experiences. Better user experiences are helping to fuel the growth of mobile and those that are not offering quality experiences will quickly find that users are flocking to those that are offering what consumers expect.

Mobile More Important to Retail Than the Internet

Mobile is having a massive effect on the retail industry and is expected to have a bigger impact on the industry than the Internet ever did according to a new analysis from Deloitte.

Deloitte’s new Consumer Review is showing a sound 14 percent rise in smartphone use in the UK to 72 percent. Based on the rise in the number of shoppers with mobile devices in hand, we see retailers are quickly installing WiFi into stores, developing mobile apps, and optimizing marketing campaigns and mobile web sites for tablets and smartphones. In fact in a survey of 1,000 UK consumers, it was found that one third had already used some form of online wallet.

“There is no doubt that mobile is rapidly redefining the way consumers and brands interact even more than the Internet did,” said Ben Perkins, head of consumer business research at Deloitte. “Consumers are expecting convenience, simplicity and security in exchange for their loyalty. It is only by embracing mobile’s full potential with the right strategy that a consumer facing business can compete in a mobile-centric world.”

Savvy businesses that fulfill customer expectations are reaping the rewards while others that do not are at risk of being left behind. “Right now we see smart companies embracing the new business paradigm”, according to Kimber Johnson, managing director of Pacific App Design.”Those that are giving consumers the mobile experience they are looking for are seeing great results but I wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of a business that isn’t keeping up right now.”

This brings to light the importance of usability. Consumers are no longer content to just see a business has a mobile presence, but rather as the industry has grown and matured they are expecting that presence to be easy to use or they will abandon it.