The accelerating evolution of mobile channels from marketing gimmick to mainstream everyday-expectation has caught a lot of organizations on the hop. Years of watching mobile technology platforms and fads come and go seems to have generated some complacency. “If we wait long enough we’ll catch the next wave.”
For larger enterprises we typically see them getting buried in the technology issues and rapidly forgetting why they need to do this in the first place. Your customers now expect it. What’s more, their expectations are scaling up at an escalating rate – with iOS users perched at the top of the pyramid of expectation.
Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and similar applications are the ones most used by your customers – and their designers have trained your own users to expect increasing beauty and sophistication in the design and form factor of any mobile application they use. Using these apps is now more than a functional exercise, it is a brand experience reflecting your customer service and care. Apple has ensured a focus on quality design by encouraging a forum of open feedback by consumers. A grotty user experience and bad design will be attacked smartly and in public.
ASB customer feedback in the App Store.
Poor ASB Bank discovered this (I imagine to their shock) when they launched their iPhone app a few months ago. The very functional application bears a remarkable similarity to their mobile browser service. It has been slammed by their disappointed customers. What’s worse is that customers have helpfully pointed out to ASB what they really expect: one like ANZ’s goMoney app. And once BNZ launched their app, ASB’s envious customers suggested ASB take a look at that competitor app as well.
To be fair to ASB, their iPhone customers actually have access to more functionality than ANZ’s goMoney users. ANZ’s mobile offering does not yet support bill payments however ANZ’s customers remain delighted with the service. Their bank spent a huge amount of time and effort in creating simplicity and making it gorgeous.
Bearing this in mind: why would any large organisation with a lot of customers risk their brand by taking a lack of care in user interface?
It generally boils down to technology decisions. Fraught internal teams eyeball the nightmare of a plethora of mobile devices and operating systems and mentally contemplate years of angst-ridden support. This leads to a optimistic waiting period for apps to ‘go away’. And mobile browsers to prevail.
This has lead to an air of collective relief as the HTML5 frameworks hit the market from providers like Sencha Touch, Phonegap and JQueryMobile. These platforms allow developers to produce a form of hybridised mobile browser service with some native application attributes. And more importantly they promise to support a multitude of smart phones rather than just the iPhone.
The ginormous warning is that these frameworks are NOT a silver bullet. They are an excellent inclusion in your mobile technology roadmap, however the ability to support many devices at once is achieved via a compromise on control of design and an individual device’s form factor.
Putting it bluntly: you can roll out and support a very functional mobile service over a lot of devices. You can even make it nice looking – with some effort into design. You cannot deliver fabulousness. This is much less of an issue for users of low end smart-phones including the cheaper Androids. We have seen that iOS users are left disappointed.
I will flag an exception here. Xero recently launched their iPhone app. This has been developed using the Sencha Touch framework and is in fact a browser (HTML5) service with an application wrapper. They obviously put effort into the UI which while functional is clean and fresh looking, in line with their online brand. It leverages a couple of phone functions such as the camera for receipt capture but does not provide the sophisticated navigation controls enabled by a fully native iPhone app. Such as the swooping and sliding and dropping up and down of design containers on the application. However it doesn’t need to. Xero customers are business customers completing accounting tasks. The expectation of a business application is quite different from a consumer one. Even uf the consumer app is a practical one and despite any practical duplication of functions.
LinkedIn's new app has particularly lovely use of sliders, transparent overlays and drop-downs.
So what should you offer your customers?
- It is not as simple as HTML5 versus native app. Our view is you should use both. For large consumer brands: please give your iPhone customers (and ideally your top-end Android users) a beautifully designed native app. Showcase your brand. Offer this alongside an HTML5 browser based offering – implemented using Sencha Touch, Phonegap or similar. This will enable you to capture the breadth of user. BNZ has taken the app plus site approach and their gamble has paid off. Their team report that their iOS users have moved in droves towards the native app rather than the equally available browser offering.
- Look at your competitors to understand the benchmark. Whatever you deliver has to offer at least as good a user experience as the best offering in the market. Consumers are expecting more and more gorgeousness.
- Get your real inspiration for design from the most popular applications in the App Store. Look at the social apps used every day by your customers. Download and try games and other services. See how they implement navigation, custom controls and smooth design elements. These are the applications that are setting the expectations of your customers. Learn from them.
What applications do we like?
Take a look at the new LinkedIn app. This has been completely overhauled and manages to organise and streamline navigation through an astonishing amount of content via a lovely user experience. It has been beautifully designed. We also like elements of other apps such as the handling of tabs on Jamie Oliver’s cooking apps. Sliders and drop downs on Nike’s training app.
And as a final plea directly to Kiwibank and Westpac – as the two major NZ banks that have not currently got a full-featured mobile banking app in the market – you may be last but you have an opportunity to differentiate through great design.
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