According to a new study from Eptica, mobile web site users demand the same standard of website usability on their devices that they experience using the traditional web. But unlike with the traditional web, many companies are not meeting user expectations. Since more and more consumers are accessing websites via their mobile devices, the usability of mobile web sites is more important than ever and right now many users are disappointed. A survey of 1,000 adults by Eptica found that over 50 percent said over half of the websites they visited on their mobile devices were not optimized for the mobile web.
Eptica goes on to detail the issues that plague consumers’ mobile web experiences: the leading issue was the lack of functionality both on the mobile web and within mobile apps (36 percent), while 34 percent mentioned slow loading speeds and 34 percent were frustrated by websites that were not optimized for smaller mobile screens.
Clearly there are great opportunities that exist for savvy companies that offer users what they are looking for on their mobile devices. Mobile optimized web sites that offer solid fundamentals of usability and load rapidly will keep consumers coming back. Mobile apps must offer users a solid user experience or will be deleted soon in favor of other apps that offer the experience users are looking for.
“With the rapid growth of the mobile arena, there is a huge opportunity for companies that choose to give customers what they are looking for,” says Kimber Johnson, Managing Director of Vanity Point “It isn’t enough just to have a mobile offering. The medium is starting to mature and customers are looking for quality experiences. By not giving your customers the experience they are expecting you are just letting them know you don’t understand mobile and are sending them to someone who does.”
It is more and more important that marketers understand mobile and how to succeed and companies that that do understand mobile are starting to separate themselves from those that do not.
Localytics reported today that app retention rates are improving as mobile app developers and publishers have shifted their focus from downloads to customer acquisition and retention models. They stated that overall, the app industry has improved retention rates 19% over the last year.
Localytics states that “App publishers for the iPhone and iPad saw the greatest success, with retention rates 52% higher than those on Android.” Maybe most interesting is that the percentage of installed apps that were used more than ten times climbed by a solid 5% (from 26% to 31%).
iPhone has a clear advantage when it comes to retention. “iPhone’s far greater app retention rates is also an echo of the 94 percent retention rate of iPhone itself compared to 47 percent for Android,” the Localytics report states.
Clearly, a focus on creating quality mobile applications that are designed with good usability principles and are useful to users is paying dividends to mobile application developers and publishers.
While no company wants to be know for selling products that are functional and unattractive, we are seeing strong evidence that aesthetics don’t affect a mobile app or web site’s perceived usability. But conversely, poor usability will negatively affect the application’s perceived allure.
In a recent study conducted by Google, they stated:
“The results showed that the beauty of the interface did not affect how users perceived the usability of the shops: Participants (or Users) were capable of distinguishing if a product was usable or not, no matter how nice it looked. However, the experiment showed that the usability of the shops influenced how users rated the products’ beauty. Participants using shops with bad usability rated the shops as less beautiful after using the shops. We showed that poor usability lead to frustration, which put the users in a bad mood and made them rate the product as less beautiful than before interacting with the shop.”
Often we see businesses acting counter to this with by placing aesthetics far ahead of usability. As they design, they often do everything to stand apart from other applications and focus too much on the surface level design factors while ignoring real usability issues that would help increase user satisfaction and repeat usage.
To counter this, we suggest users pursue design paths for mobile and web applications using aesthetic attributes such as “clean”, “tight” and “organized”. Applications generally gain traction from the ground up and add more users as positive word of mouth spreads, which means reputation is everything. The study suggests poor usability will lead to less than favorable word-of-mouth will good usability while help you see the growth you desire for your applications.