Important Factors in the Move to Mobile
Mobile presence is becoming more ubiquitous by the day. Whether it is users switching to smartphones or organizations ensuring an appealing presence beyond just desktops, the move to mobile is becoming inevitable.
But the move still needs to be carefully planned and implemented. With the smaller screens and resolutions that mobile devices offer, user experience plays a large role in winning and retaining brand loyalty for mobile applications. As high as 48 percent of users could walk away from a mobile application if the user experience is not good, so it is important for apps to offer a rich yet simple experience.
Doing this may be easier for applications that don’t yet have a deep-rooted web presence and are building a mobile existence from scratch. Deciding whether to build an app or extend a current web experience is a big question. For the apps that already have a strong web presence, several aspects—such as consistency in messaging, a seamless experience, and completeness of coverage between web and mobile—will need to be accounted for when the mobile experience is being planned.
This makes the designing effort more important in the mobile space because it has to ensure the design is fully thought through and bought into by all stakeholders. More importantly, the testers will have to be brought in at the design stage to ensure it is completely reviewed. Design review and subsequent testing of the mobile application are going to be quite different from a regular test process, given the parameters of compatibility, rendering, usability, and seamlessness that need to be closely looked at.
The outcome of bad usability hits not just consumer apps, but also enterprise apps. Poor user experience has been identified as the leading cause for failure in enterprise apps. Let’s look at a likely scenario: A team from your organization is attending a conference. They share your organization’s details to the conference attendees, including your website link. The attendees immediately look you up on a mobile device. If your mobile offering is not solid, it pulls down your representation right away—quite significantly.
Testing emerges as the main answer to improve the quality of mobile apps and increase the chance for success in the move to mobile. According to a survey about mobile apps, around 44 percent of defects are found by users, and about 58 percent of those defects are UI issues attributed to poor rendering and performance across devices.
If we know what the issue is, what the solutions are, and what the repercussions of not implementing these solutions are, why wouldn’t we make mobile testing a top priority? Revisiting the quality of mobile applications will help expand and strengthen their market presence by creating a better experience for end-users.
