The impact of mobile app performance on user experience
It’s no secret that most people today feel anxious whenever they don’t have their smartphones on them. We feel lost and not just figuratively, but we can actually get lost! For example, when was the last time you had a physical map in your car?
Today, we’re far more reliant on our smartphones and the mobile apps we’ve installed on them than we may even realize. According to a report by AppDynamics, 69% of consumers say their use of digital services is like a reflex – something they have little awareness of and use automatically while 55% of consumers report they can only go without their phone for up to four hours before finding it hard to manage everyday tasks.
Since mobile apps are becoming a crucial part of our everyday lives, we’ve become quite demanding of them; expecting them to be fast and reliable (and of course, well designed, friction free, and so on). A brand could have the most elegant app with a well thought out UI. However, if it constantly crashes or takes 10 seconds to load a single screen, users will abandon it.
In this post, we’ll cover what mobile performance is. Also, we’ll talk about why it’s relevant to the user experience, and how teams can make it a group effort.
What’s mobile performance?
Mobile app performance refers to how well an app behaves on a mobile device under various circumstances and loads. For example, does the app load slowly? Or maybe crash every time it experiences a peak in user activity, which could happen during a live event or promotion? Does it drain the user’s phone battery or have memory leaks?
Performance is a result of multiple factors: the server, device, network, and even how the app is programmed. What’s most important though is how the users perceive the performance.