Make right trade-offs in designing your mobile app

Smartphones & mobile internet are one of the defining technologies of our age. The promise of very high stock market valuation, industry disruption potential, unlimited customer reach, easy incremental improvement, low capex cost, high customer engagement and very low entry barrier has led almost every technology company and even non-tech-savvy companies to come up with their own mobile app(s). However, most companies are now facing the following harsh realities of the extremely competitive app business -

1. Usage/Reach: An average mobile user just has 10-30 mobile apps on his phone at any given point of time. Hence out of the millions of mobile apps, very few of them have more than a few thousand installs.
2. Customer Acquisition Cost: The customer acquisition cost is extremely high for a new mobile app, ranging from Rs 500/- to Rs. 1,500/- (This varies widely based on the industry). It is generally far cheaper to acquire a new customer through traditional means rather than through a mobile app for any business.
3. Retention: Customer loyalty/stickiness is difficult for 95% of the companies who are not aggregators and whose product/services do not require repeated/periodic customer engagements.
4. Customer Lifetime Value: Trying to monetize a mobile app has a direct negative impact on the overall reach & customer retention objectives. Even meeting non-monetary business objectives (indirect benefits) from a mobile app is tricky. For example, if a mobile app gives too many notifications, the customer will soon uninstall the app. Hence the overall Customer Lifetime Value (both direct & indirect benefits) frequently falls below the initial estimation.
5. Operational cost: While the capex required to create a new mobile app is low, the opex to maintain the mobile app is significant. This is especially important for non-tech-savvy companies. 

In spite of these major challenges, it is very clear to most companies that they will have to keep investing in mobile apps, till the time they get it right. If they don't do this, then they are at a big risk of their business model being disrupted by someone else.

I believe that the key to success is to understand that there are multiple categories of mobile apps and different design principles need to be followed for every mobile app. At each step of creating the mobile app some or the other trade-off has to be made. The key to success is to make the right trade-offs based on the category of the mobile app and its usage pattern. In this post, I will try to define few broad rules/heuristics for mobile app design for different categories of mobile apps.

There are multiple ways (customer need, industry segment etc.) of classifying mobile apps into different categories, but for this post, I want to classify them, based on different design requirements, into the following three broad categories -

1) Mass-market mobile apps

Mass-market mobile apps either do not require user registration or new registrations/onboarding can be easily done online with no offline component. These mobile apps are open to everyone and are not restricted to a segment of the population. They can be further classified into the following four types -

1. Aggregators & Market-Makers (Eg. Uber, Amazon, Bookmyshow, Oyo rooms etc) 
2. Networking (Eg. Facebook, WhatApp, LinkedIn, Tinder, Jeevansathi etc.)
3. Personal Utility Applications (Eg. Gmail, Maps, m-Indicator, Clean Master etc.)
4. News, Entertainment & Games (Eg. Netflix, Youtube, Hotstar, Pokemon etc.)

The mass-market category of mobile apps are most well known and they are generally cited as examples to create the do's and don'ts list for mobile app designing. Each of these four sub-types within the mass-market category, require slightly different design approach. 

Instead of exhaustively listing down all the common well-known design heuristics (such as late/delayed login, frequent controls on bottom and less frequent controls on top etc.), I will only be listing the ones which I believe are less known -

• If you can choose between using either email id or mobile number as the basis for new customer registrations, always prefer mobile number over email-id. I am still surprised by the number of product managers that are not aware of this even after Whatsapp's remarkable success story.
• Integrate voice commands wherever possible and as soon as you can. Voice commands are going to be the next big driver of almost all mobile apps in a multi-lingual world and it would take considerable time & efforts to gain expertise in this. Hence starting early will be a big advantage for most companies in long run.
• Customers worry about battery backup and data usage the most and this is unlikely to change for a long time. These can be one of the biggest hidden advantages of a mobile app, especially for mass-market apps (E.g. UG browser)

2) Target customer segment mobile apps

This category of mobile apps are meant exclusively for a target customer segment such as - (a) Customers using company's high-involvement product/service, (b) Residents of a city/state, (c) Subscribers of a repeat service/product (d) B2B services etc. Some good examples are Maruti Care, Kotak Bank, Bharatgas, e-Aadhaar etc.

The main difference between this category and the mass-market category is that these mobile apps are not meant for new online customer acquisition. At best, these mobile apps can be used for lead generation, but the actual customer acquisition process is much longer. The main purpose of these apps is to improve customer service, get repeat orders, get new customers referrals, increase customer engagement/loyalty etc.

Most non-tech company apps belong to this category, but there are very few success stories in this category. Even large product companies such as GE, Philips etc are struggling with their mobile apps.

Some common design rules for these types of mobile apps are -

• Be extra careful to ensure that there is no way in which duplicate accounts or cross accounts can be created. One of key to success for this category of mobile apps is not to give access outside the target customer group and to have zero duplicate or cross accounts even if the customers change their email id or mobile number or address or even their names.
• The app must be designed for quick installation and un-installation as most customers will install the app for doing particular tasks and then will uninstall the app. The app must be as light as possible on internal memory usage, especially when the app is not in use even if it means trading off some non-core features.
• Give customers a detailed option to customize the notification that they receive from the mobile app. Each unwanted notification has the risk of customer uninstalling the mobile app especially since the stickiness of these apps are very low.
• Companies must be open to integrate with other partners, suppliers, 3rd party agents etc. if required to meet all customer needs through a single app only (E.g. Maruti Care)
• Creating a smart chatbot (chatterbot) to be integrated with top chat applications such as Facebook Messenger, Google Chat, Yahoo! Messenger etc. is a much wiser option for a lot of companies, rather than creating separate mobile app.
• Wherever possible, prioritize giving data to top aggregators proactively, rather than creating a separate mobile app for the company.

3) Captive customer or Business Support mobile apps

These are apps meant for employees & business partners for helping them with their day-to-day job or business functions. There is no marketing budget required to make these apps a success. For example - Uber Driver, Amazon Seller etc.

• The key to success for these apps is not to be light and glossy but to be as productive and comprehensive as possible.The trade-offs for this category of mobile apps is completely different from the previous two categories.
• The initial registration process for these can be as complicated as possible and the mobile app can be heavy on mobile resources. Process workflow optimization must be prioritized over UX optimizations.
• Many organizations choose not to put their internal apps on public app stores. This is a very big mistake as without having them on the app store, there is no efficient way of ensuring that every customer has the latest updated version of the app. Making the app available on public app store does not mean that you have to spend time & money on optimize display on all screen sizes or create a way for online registration etc., which companies may not want to do for internal apps.
• These mobile apps are generally used as means to implement process changes in the organization and hence their launch must be accompanied by careful change management and training.

In this post, I have deliberately tried to avoid discussing the latest technical trends, frameworks & architecture for mobile app creation even though it is a very important decision to take. The focus has been to enable Product Managers to take the right trade-off decisions, regardless of the technical details. Many companies make the mistake to keep upgrading and redesigning the UX design of mobile app but not to change the wrong back-end trade-off decisions that they might have taken earlier. Hopefully this post will help companies avoid making such mistakes.