The mobile apps space is exciting for creators and consumers alike, and generates billions of dollars in revenues for companies that get it right. Marriott’s mobile app, for example, brings in bookings worth $1.7 billion every year. If you want it in action, simply creating and deploying a new app isn’t going to win. It’s a crowded market and winning isn’t easy.
Talking about winning in the mobile apps space, Pokemon Go is probably the first case study that pops into your head. Launched in select markets in July 2016, the gaming app brought in $950 million in revenues for its developers Niantic, Inc., before the end of the year.
They did it by creating a brilliant experience for users. They used augmented reality, a technology that many others are still figuring out and by personalizing their interactions albeit in a dynamic digital world mimicking a social experience. You can do the same for your mobile app. If you’d like to change their fate, steer them away from the graveyard, and ensure they find success in the palms of your users, follow three simple rules:
- Remember that you’re not competing with the best in your category; you’re competing with the best in the industry. Your customer’s expectations are benchmarked to the best applications they have access to, irrespective of what region, market, or industry it caters to. In other words, whether your app is for B2B clients seeking to track and manage orders or for B2C clients designed to help them manage the use and monitor the performance of an appliance you manufacture, it’ll be benchmarked against apps made by Facebook and Google. To capture the attention of your users, you need to make sure your app meets expectations, matches up with leaders, or even better, sets new standards.
- Consider using emerging technologies to simplify the customer experience while increasing functionality. Bots, computer vision, predictive analytics, and other exciting innovations can work wonders for your app by making them more intuitive. Bots, for example, can resolve basic client queries about your products and their accounts or subscriptions. Similarly, computer vision could help your app process, analyze, and understand digital images. All of this will elevate the role of your app and make them an integral part of your user’s life.
- Design apps that learn users’ preferences and behaviors, and continually personalize the experience. Your customers depend on you to pre-empt what systems they access and use your apps on. Choose the right platform, technology, and method to design the app – all to ensure that your users have the best possible experience that is personalized to their devices and choices.
If you’d like to get your organization on the fast track and claim stake to a revolutionary new mobile app, read my article Designing for the Small Silver Screen in the latest edition of Perspectives, our management journal.
