WHAT TO CONSIDER WHEN DESIGNING OR PURCHASING A MOBILE SITE OR APP ?

I have been very busy end of the year with a lot of projects including a thesis for Information Business degree at Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences.

Besides all the ups and downs of study, family and work I have decided that I will commit myself to write at least 1000 words per day in order to have all my projects including the blog taken care. Let’s see how it comes up.

The topic of the day is the title of the post that is:
What to consider when designing or purchasing a mobile site or app?

1. Who will use your site or app?

Without knowing who is your target group and knowing basic things about them you won’t go too far. That is what in UX (User Experience) term means building PERSONAS.

Personas should be real users with their complete profiles.

Ok, now you might think – you lost me in this one, how do I do that?

Well, that is easy. You have the mobile app and site idea. 
Who is the first person that comes to your mind that you see using your app?

Now that you picture it this is your first persona. Go out to the field and find a person exactly as you picture it to participate as your user and ask if they are willing to collaborate on doing a better mobile site for them.

Now that you have the first persona, you will need the second and third one, you might need even about 5 different personas or more. NOTE that I am not talking about the same type of user you have picture the first time. You might have in mind more than one kind of person that might use your site or app that are not as important as the first one you have pictured. All of them if are different people, with different ages, or location or hobbies, etc, but are also considered important, you have to write all their characteristics down and prioritise them and finally go find them out and ask for their participation.

2. What all these different users will want to do in your site or with your mobile app?

If you have a site and want to build an app, you should always inquire from your users (that matches your personas) what are the most important things or features they value in your site that they would like to see in the app.

I know that responsive design nowadays is almost a must to every site and that people are just trying to make their sites responsive without knowing what they are putting into the mobile. Trust me, not all sites can be just converted into responsive.  If you just convert a site into responsive to be able to take mobile advantage, ask yourself:

How useful and easy to user would be this mobile site? 
What your users want instead of what do you want to expose in the mobile site or app?

Once you ask from your different personas, and prioritise the answers according to the most important personas to the least one all the feature they want to see in your app you will have it – the perfect recipe to make a worthwhile mobile site or app.

3. Where your mobile site or app is being accessed?

When you know your users through the different personas you have built, you have the possibility to activate some mobile features within the site or app code that can help you better serve your customers. For example for an e-commerce mobile site or app, knowing the geographic location of the buyer can help you to give the user the nearest location to pick the product or giving the user discount tickets that can be cashed in a location near them, etc.

There are many mobiles built with sensors. Some of them can be smartly used to give the user a better experience. Mobile users are mostly on the go, which means that if you are outside waiting and enjoying the sunshine, your mobile might be very difficult to read. The phone or tablet could sense the amount of light and adjust it accordingly show a brighter or darker screen to give the user to have a better reading experience. This is only one of the many usage improvements that can be done when considering the user first and doing everything from their perspective – not yours (business owners, developer or designers).

4. When the mobile site or app is being accessed?

Computers and mobile devices have date and time features. Businesses open hours, discount dates and time frame among other things could be brought to the user taking into consideration the user place and time instead of the business location date and time that can be brought straight to the mobile or computer user’s calendar with a click of a mouse or touch that the user does not miss the time.

Business phone contact number in mobile could use the call activation that just by touching the phone number it would call the number, instead of the user have to copy the number and dial him or herself.

As you can see simple things that take advantage of time, geolocation, calendar and the phone function are very simple to build but make a huge difference on how your customer will perceive the service you offer. These and many other possibilities are just worthwhile to experience with and very easy to implement.

I will never get tired to emphasise:

Without a user-center design mindset that takes into consideration the real different levels of personas  and their priorities depending on each business, there won’t be no mobile site or app the user will gladly want to use and will recommend to others.

There is no utility to have a mobile site that is part of a responsive design that is overwhelming and hard to use. It's the same that spend money on something the user will try once and give up on trying. In simple words, mobile sites that is a must use from the customers that are hard to use, will make users pull away from using it in a mobile faction. One example are sites such banks, or any worldwide organisation which has a lot of information about products and brochures. 
Have you tried to check your bank account on a mobile site? How easy was the experience? Is it worthwhile or do you prefer to use the desktop? 
As you can see the answer is simple: If it is hard to use, if doesn't meet the most important personas on what, how, when and why they do on what they might do on your site, the result is users will avoid to use your mobile site or app.

I work as quality assurance engineer and consulting at one of the biggest IT companies in Finland and I am used to see many customers who have responsive design that is not useful at all in mobile.

Most of the times, people don’t fully understand what responsive design means, and think that it means little changes that will fit all purposes. That is the biggest mistake business owners, designers and developers can make.

Don’t believe me? Answer to yourself this question?

When you go to buy trousers for yourself, do you buy the same trousers with the same size and colour to your mother, espouse and children? I doubt it, and that is your answer.

Due to different sizes and different tastes our trousers choice might even not be of any interest to others beside ourselves and that's is true for your customers as well.

Never assume that just by doing a site that works well on the desktop responsive, it will work well on all different mobile form factors because it doesn't work that way.
It always will depend on what kind of business it is and on what your customers need and want to do on your site. I have seen many organisations commit that error and wonder why their mobile sites and apps are not profitable or do not grab visitors attention while they know that for other organisations it works. 
It is too easy to decide to do with your website what is best based on what you think your customers want, without taking the time, effort and investment on doing a proper research to find out what your customers would need most on a mobile version. 
Your customers are the ones who pays –> this means that if you don't give what they need on a mobile version they won't use it. Is that simple. 

Remember though, these rules don't apply for IT companies, because IT companies' customers are the organisations that should know better what and how their customers need to user their sites. When they don't know they should ask to their IT companies to proper research on the personas and what they are going to offer in the mobile site to match what users want to do on the mobile site to what and how the company wants to offer it. This is the recipe to great use experience in general that is especially true for mobile sites and apps.

Bear in mind that although organisations might have a wonderful marketing department who know exactly who their customers are and how to acquire them. Marketing department don't have a slightly idea how to serve well their customers through the different form factors, because to find it out they would need UX (user experience) researches. Unless organisations have their own UX department and are constantly researching on how to proper serve digitally their customers, they will have to pay an IT company to do that for them, through their UX department. Unfortunately that is not the reality for most of the companies worldwide.

Can you see now how blind most organisations are? Even big enterprises fail to deliver mobile sites and apps that can work for them. We don't have to go too far to find out how true is this reality, just browse any site you know and use, any shopping e-commerce, bank from your tablet and mobile phone and compare how difficult and sometimes overwhelming they are to use compared with the same sites on the desktop version.

That is the reality of nowadays responsive design sites, they are blind regarding how to deliver a compelling and must to use mobile experience their customers will love to use and will spread the word about it.