This blog originally appeared on Wired Insights.
Television was a new form of entertainment in the late 1920’s. Unclear how to optimize this new channel, many of the first television stations treated TV the same as radio. Time proved that TV was a completely different experience and changed the way people consumed media.
I see a similar parallel to web and mobile. In the beginning, many treated mobile just as they did web. But we are about to see a paradigm shift: According to the Accenture Mobility CIO Survey 2013: 73 percent of the top 400 IT executives believe that mobility will impact business as much or more than the web did. In fact, it looks like the web looks is just the beginning of the ‘digital disruption,’ and that’s a good thing.
Research shows that end users spend significantly more time with apps than they do on mobile websites. Even as more businesses develop and push out apps, many are still ironing out their mobile testing and application lifecycle programs. Today, the mobile user experience is the main driver of user engagement and loyalty.
Real Users Means Real Results
Speed and availability are paramount to a great mobile user experience. In order understand your user, you must have more information than just, ‘is my app working?’ You’ve designed an experience for them, created user personas, diagrammed use cases, mapped paths through your application to trigger conversion. So the big question is: Do users behave the way you anticipated, have the experience you designed, and generate the revenue you projected? These are high-value performance metrics. Mobile real-user monitoring can provide the answers.
Knowing What to Ask
Modern mobile real-user monitoring tools provide rich features such as activity timers and data collection APIs to give you powerful insights into mobile users, enabling you to track, time, and analyze virtually any behavioral pattern or transaction worth studying (anonymously, of course). Some examples:
Given the demanding nature of mobile users, who are quick to move onto another app or delete an app that doesn’t meet their many expectations for speed, functionality, usability, relevance and more, it’s important to expand the definition of performance to encompass these behavioral and experiential metrics. A robust mobile real-user monitoring solution can deliver these insights, on top of fundamental speed and availability monitoring, as well as crash reporting and analytics.
The mobile experience is different from the desktop and continues to evolve. It’s a higher bar. The right mobile performance solution can make sure it is reached.
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The post Radio to TV, now Web to Apps: Creating Mobile Intelligence written by Maneesh Joshi appeared first on Application Performance Monitoring Blog from AppDynamics.