In 2018, the average adult spends 5.9 hours each day on digital media, according to PCMag. While this means that leveraging digital media to market your business is a sure way to reach out to them, it doesn’t mean that the modern consumer will accept anything short of perfection. When it comes to using mobile apps to bring your business closer to your consumers, the trick is to ensure that you deliver the best user experience possible.
People will always be yearning for more speed, better responsiveness, and fascinating design. Although you might focus on delivering such an experience, there are a few mistakes that will easily lead to a dismal one. In most cases, such situations can be avoided in the development phase of your application.
Here are a few user experience barriers that you need to deal with at every stage of application development:
What Platform to Use?
Applications for the iPhone OS are much faster to develop than Android ones. This is mainly because Android phone manufacturers tend to have the luxury of adjusting their OS versions to fit their brand’s needs. However, due to strict development deadlines, most developers only end up testing their applications on one device and ignoring them on those by other brands.
Sadly, this will mean that their application will potentially under-perform when it comes to other platforms that they didn’t test. The best way for circumventing this obstacle is to test your applications on a variety of platforms and collect the performance data on tools such as log aggregation tools and syslog server software. Once you have the information, you can decide on the different aspects of your application to fine tune for better performance.
Ignoring Phone Landscape Mode
Different people will love using your application in different modes. While most will use the portrait mode when walking and using one hand, others will love using the landscape mode when they are in a still position. The trick is to ensure that your application is responsive enough to react to both modes.
Well, both modes present different types of application designs as you will have to look for a different layout and navigation menu both in the portrait mode and the landscape mode. Additionally, the transition from the portrait to the landscape mode should be seamless and with little hiccups. This will ensure that no one feels unaccounted for when using the different modes.
Information Vs. Speed
When using applications on their phones, people expect to access the information they need within the shortest time possible. On the other hand, manufacturers might have a lot of information that they may want to display on their application. This often leads to them including multiple navigation pages on their application which mean consumers might use more time trying to access information.
The alternative would be to reduce the navigation pages, but this might result in an app that doesn’t provide optimal usability to the end user. For an engaging app, you need to have the right combination of information and ease of navigation. This will ensure that people can both have the information they need and within the shortest time necessary.
Unresponsive Gestures
End users tend to feel frustrated whenever an application that they are using seems unresponsive. This can include failing to swipe left when the user tries to or even having navigation buttons that do not work. In most cases, this makes the application look unprofessional not to mention that it will lead to low retention rates.
Before deploying your application, it is essential to conduct a responsiveness test. While synthetic tests are vital, it might also be worthwhile to have actual users comment on the experience they get from using it. The fewer the hiccups that the application has, the better the experience you can offer your users.
Conclusion
People will forever be impatient with an unresponsive application. The closer you can get your app to perfection, the higher your success rate at tapping into the digital-oriented customer base. Test the different parts of your app before deployment to eliminate any loopholes early.
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