Mobile proliferation: Reimagining business benefits and customer experience

According to Harvard Business Review, the exponential growth in mobile proliferation and better connectivity has resulted in customers depending heavily on their smartphones to access online services and information.

Digital traffic is growing at a dramatic rate with half the world’s population having access to the internet. For businesses, it is imperative to effectively utilise the adoption of global connectivity to tap into the growing number of users and drive better business benefits. However, we are observing that this evolution of technology and user expectations is causing some real challenges including:

• Inability to access services in real time
• High-value content not receiving adequate traffic
• Items added to shopping carts but not checked out
• Low mobile advertising ROI
• Higher support costs from mobile issues

In this blog, we will dig deeper into the challenges of delivering mobile content and applications and why you need functioning mobile testing to secure your future revenues.

There is a growing problem of not being able to test how users are experiencing your product

How big is your problem?

Global Mobile Usage

• By 2020, the number of smartphone users is projected to reach 2.87 billion
• Over 70% of internet usage was mobile in 2018
• Mobile market share worldwide is 52.1% compared to desktop market share of 44.2%
• Mobile apps have higher engagement rates than mobile-optimised websites or desktop web viewing
• 26% of U.S. adults who earn less than $30,000 said they’re ‘smartphone only’ internet users
• 60% of mobile users will abandon your app or site if it doesn’t load within three seconds. Of those users, 43% said they would never return

The underlying problem: The Handsets

It is difficult to keep your content working correctly across the latest OS updates, folding phones and 5G networks. An effective mobile test strategy will utilise analytics and customer insight to prioritise testing of appropriate configurations. However, with the development of multi-touch screens and haptic feedback, valid mobile testing has requires testers to get physical devices in their hands to replicate the user journey with the change under test.

But this is expensive, procuring a library of smartphones can cost as much as an additional test team member each year. Instead, the trend has been to employ software versions of devices. Simulator/emulators are software programmes that allow your desktop PC to imitate the features of another computer or mobile device.

However, they struggle to simulate the full user experience, especially user acceptance testing. There is a trade-off of testing quality in favour of cost. They also tend to limit the benefit of exploratory testing and effective test design that can be achieved with physical devices.

For you, this ineffective mobile testing leads to:

• Lower user engagement and spend
• Poor customer experience and brand image
• Increased support and delivery costs
• Competitive disadvantage and lower market share