As discussed in prior articles, designing a great mobile user experience is vital to have great results, it doesn’t matter if your main goal is getting traffic, leads or downloads, a good user interface will often translate into good results, just be sure to design the whole experience based on the results that you will be measuring your mobile app performance.
How do you make sure that your website or mobile app has an interface that will aggressively bend the user towards your end goal? As super bowl Sunday was just a couple of days ago, I thought it would be fitting to prepare a little football analogy called Ready, Set, Hut, which main goal is to help you have some structure so you always know where you are in regards to designing a user experience.
In order to have your team aligned in a formation on gameday and be competitive you already have months of work and preparation, that first “Ready” means you are ready to compete and you have done your homework for the past couple of months. Same happens with website and app design, in this case, instead of shouting ready at the line of scrimmage you need to have everything ready to start designing the user experience, here are some things to have ready by this time:
With these points defined you can start working on your general design and experience, I’d love to share some tips on that but let’s save it for a future blog post as we think it deserves it’s own space.
By now your website or mobile app is visually ready and you are set to start doing some experimentation and testing, be sure to test it yourself until you feel happy about the end-product but not just that, this is the best time to start doing some beta testing, you can test it with your friends, your team or even do a company-wide beta test, the more people the better, as it can also serve as a little stress-test, having direct feedback from actual users in forms of messages or chat is great, but this is also a great opportunity to put your measuring tools in use, so be sure to utilize your analytics, heatmap tracking software, and whatever measuring tool you set up in the “ready” phase. Then do an actual stress-test to see if your website or mobile app performance can handle the amount of people you are targeting. Here’s what you need to have ready by the end of this phase:
Now, in football before the quarterback shouts the official “Go” there could be audibles, which in case you don’t know, are a series of changes the QB makes according to the defensive front they are facing, here something similar happens, and hopefully, we’ve got a lot more time than 40 seconds to put our audibles or changes in place.
You should keep calling audibles until you are happy with the % number of your main objective, it will be hard to replicate the same number on a bigger market outside of beta testing, but the better your beta test goes in terms of fulfilling your main objective, the higher the probability of converting in the real field is going to be.
Here we can actually go back to our “ready” phase and start over, feel free to do all the adjustments and testing needed until you are happy with your goal conversion number.
Once you are happy with your testing conversion rate, you are good to go. I think this phase is the most self-explanatory of the three, if you are in this phase, you are completely ready to launch your product to the public and start tracking your mobile app performance on the actual market.
Now, this doesn’t mean that you are done and you should just leave your product out there, it’s important to remember that technology moves and moves fast, so in this phase you need to keep analyzing feedback, heatmaps and most importantly, keep tracking that main objective conversion rate. Keep in mind that your version 1.0 will most probably jump to 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and so on. Don’t be discouraged if your 1.0 version isn’t working at the moment, as long as you keep analyzing, tracking and adjusting you’ll eventually get to your main goal. Try to be as methodical as you can so you can always identify the problem if it happens to be one.
We hope this article helps you on having a good structure while working on the design of your next mobile website or application, and it’s easy for you to jump from one phase to another without losing where you are at the time. Projects can turn complicated and I’ve found that having a clear structure is always beneficial to keep calm and understand where you are and what’s going on. Hopefully, next time you are at the goal line, you’ll be able to call a nice audible that will get you to the end zone.
While we are at it, remember that our top-notch engineers are 100% dedicated to achieve any goal you throw at them, if there’s something that will help you boost your mobile app performance it’s an ArkusNexus software development team, send us your info here and we’ll contact you and answer any question you have about how we can accelerate your progress through technology.
