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Defining Success for Your Mobile App Project

Defining Success for Your Mobile App Project

[vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom”][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][vc_column_text]Embarking on a mobile app project is a lot like planning a vacation.

Anyone who has ever planned a vacation understands that it can be a daunting task for a number of reasons: Where do you go? What can you afford? What experiences are available? Will there be free wifi? Who is responsible for the big stuff like tickets and documents? How many people are coming? Where can you find reviews of the destination? And most importantly, how will you make sure everyone enjoys the vacation and ends up with memories that will last a lifetime?

Ideally, you want the kind of vacation that’s so good it makes you want to come back again and again. You would even recommend it to a friend. It didn’t break the bank, but you had the most amazing time. All of this is the true measurement of vacation success.

Building a mobile app has a similar trajectory.

You need to know where you’re going, and where you’re starting. You need to know who will use the app, and which types of people you can group together. What’s the journey for each of these users? What do they need along the way? Who will be making the big decisions about what features are a must, and which are nice-to-haves? Who will decide when the project is done? Who controls the budget?

Much like with planning a vacation, planning a mobile app project that is successful, both during the development phase and once it’s live and launched, is about understanding your goals and laying out a process that achieves them. Once you truly know the goal of your app, you can set success criteria and project milestones to make sure you stay on target, no matter what aspect of the project you’re working on.

When you define success with your team upfront, it will guide you throughout the process. With the help of today’s blog, you’ll get clarity on who you’ll need on your team, how to know what responsibilities they should have, what different success criteria exists, and how to pick the right success factors for your app.

Internal stakeholder team

Whether you’re building an app in-house or working with a vendor, the most important task for determining your app project’s success overall is defining who all of your internal stakeholders are.

You’ll need to determine: who plays a role in defining the scope of the project, who is involved in funding or setting the budget, who will define what and how you will measure success, who is responsible for making the final decision when needed, and ultimately who will be the voice of the customer/client throughout.

Project Stakeholders – These are the people within your team that are representative of all key areas in the business. These include but are not limited to marketing/product marketing, finance, technology, data, operations, and design. This team should make up a small but autonomous group from all key areas of your business that will not only define project scope and needs but will also develop the measurement framework by which you define success.

Internal Project Manager – While this is essential if you are building the experience internally, it is of particular importance if you make the decision to work with a third-party vendor team. You will ultimately need to assign a Project Owner within your business to ensure that there is frequent and effective communication between teams that will be key to keeping your project on track and on schedule.

This person will be the primary contact for all vendor/stakeholder questions, requests for data/information and decisions needed, and is essential to ensuring there is no drift in the overall project scope. This person is an essential resource in determining the project build and ROI in particular.

VOC (Voice of the Customer) – It is important to assign the voice of your customer to a key stakeholder throughout the project. A well-thought-out app experience that leverages the state of the art technology and an advanced feature set is only effective if it serves your customers.

It is therefore essential that you make all decisions with your customers in mind. It should be the final “gut check” on everything you do:

  • How will this help them?
  • How will it remove accessibility barriers?
  • How will it surprise and delight them?
  • How will it make them want to come back again and again?

After you launch your app, your KPIs (key performance indicators) should be closely aligned to customer experience and the metrics that measure this.

Decision Maker – A key component of your primary stakeholder team is the person who is able to make decisions that are crucial to the success and progress of your project. This person ultimately owns the budget and is directly accountable to ensuring the project is on track and on budget. They are empowered to make the final calls on all key decisions. This is of particular importance as you engage with a third-party vendor to build your app.

While the day-to-day communications would still fall to the project manager, the decision maker is empowered to make final calls on behalf of the larger stakeholder group and the business to ensure you have velocity of decision-making, keeping the project on track and moving forward. While this is often the CEO or founder within the company, it may be a proxy who is empowered as part of the stakeholder team to perform this function.

Ultimately, you are looking to build accountability into your project as a measurement of success. When you have a key group of people from diverse areas of the business that are empowered and directly accountable to the outcomes and KPIs of the app project, your likelihood of success goes up exponentially. With regular communication, project review cycles, and customer experience checks applied to every decision made, you are setting up your project for success from the outset.

360-degree view of your target customer

Now that you have an engaged and – more importantly – accountable representative project stakeholder team, it’s time to get down to the essential work of defining your target audience for your app experience.

While you may have an idea of who your core customers are, few teams are able to communicate clearly who their top customers are, their needs, and how a mobile experience built for them will align with your business goals.

If you had to name your top customer/client and how much they spent with you in 2020, could you? If you were asked to clearly articulate the demographics and behaviours of your most loyal and engaged group of top customers, could you? If you had to name the top three things that are commonly communicated to your customer care teams by your customers, could you?

The only way to measure the success of your product or service is to fundamentally understand (and measure) everything about the people that use it.

Realistically, most teams in an organization are more able to communicate product/service benefits and company financial or growth performance and less able to articulate clear and concise customer/audience profiles.

Building a new app experience or building upon and improving an existing app experience is the perfect opportunity to nail down a clear and concise customer profile(s) and align this view across the organization with success KPIs. Companies who are making decisions tightly aligned to their customers and customer feedback loops are better able to measure success overall.

Customer KPIs

Below are some key benchmarks that will help your core stakeholder team determine who your target customers/audiences are and how you will define success by understanding the users in a meaningful way.

Available Audience – Who is the specific available audience and what does this audience look like in terms of numbers and propensity to download the app and use it? What is the market for this product and what is important to that market?

For example, imagine you are building an app that helps hockey parents in Canada connect with coaching staff, track schedules for games, track player stats, trade equipment amongst other users, and chat in-app with other parents in their respective teams. You first want to understand what the available audience is for this experience. Based on available data, how many parents are there that could/would use this type of app?

This will help you measure critical success factors like penetration in the market, market share overall if there are competitor products in the market, and give you a sense of the overall technology load that you are building for.

Existing/Known Data About Your Target Customer – This is an optimal opportunity for your core stakeholders (in conjunction with your vendor discovery team if you are working with a partner) to brainstorm and present existing data on what is known about your end user/existing customer base. Remember, you are building a technology-based platform to create a very specific customer experience, so it is important to understand what you concretely know about your customers/clients/end users

  • What demographics of your customers are essential to understanding your target audiences? Languages spoken, platforms used currently, devices used, frequency of use/demand for products and services, age ranges, geographical considerations, and accessibility considerations all come to mind.
  • Are they tech savvy?
  • Are they using another app currently?
  • Are there commonly shared and communicated challenges from your customers either directly or indirectly?
  • Have there been major shifts in their day-to-day lives (e.g. COVID-19) that have fundamentally shifted their “normal” behaviours?

Take a data set of your most engaged customers/clients and create a detailed profile of this optimal customer – what is important to them, how they shop or engage with your platform currently, the specific challenges they need solved, and how you will create real value that does not currently exist in the space.

This will also give you a clear understanding of what you don’t know but need to learn about your target audience and how you will ultimately create an opportunity for learning more (via data collection) as part of your app build.

Market Fit, Market Differentiation, Functional Differentiation – This is an important part of building your customer personas as the guiding framework for your app project. Once you have gone through the exercise of looking at your available audience, you now have to look at the “fit” for your product/service in the marketplace. This has huge implications when defining the scope of your project overall.

Essentially, here you’re looking at what problem or challenge your product/service solves for, how your product/service will solve these challenges or problems better or differently than competitors currently in the space, and what features, enhancements, and feature sets you will offer to bridge the gaps that currently exist.

Your stakeholders are looking for those key whitespace opportunities that create real value, a differentiated experience, and a competitive advantage compared to existing products in the market. These ultimately become the contributing factors for success.

Defining shared KPIs

With a solid understanding of your target audience shared across the organization, and a solid understanding of the experience you are looking to build, how will you definitely know that you have solved their “problem”? How will you correlate what you have built to what you deem successful? The short answer is KPIs. Choosing a clear set of data indicators that will not only measure but also inform all future decisions is integral to defining success.

Measure what we treasure and treasure what we measure

So what do you measure? The short answer is: it depends on who you ask in your organization.

As noted above, there are several ways to measure across various departments, but how does this help a team measure overall success of your app project? Ultimately, your stakeholder team will need to define and agree what you will measure, clearly communicate this across the organization, and set up a repeatable process where you are sharing and discussing what you are measuring over time. This also determines how data gathering is built into your app project so you can harness and leverage all of the raw data you will need to measure success in the future.

Aligning on an agreed upon “dashboard” of KPIs at the outset of the project is the glue that binds the stakeholder team, aligns internal resources and efforts, allows for experimentation and testing, and ensures that if you are working with a vendor partner to build your app experience, they are clearly aligned with how you will measure success and will align the build and maintenance of the app experience accordingly.

Everything you measure, regardless of the teams that are measuring, must map to your overall business goals. The company as a whole (in part the responsibility of the stakeholder group) will work together to clearly map out and define the business goals. Once that is done, all other measurements within departmental teams must directly align to these goals.

Three key areas of company (and app) performance

Most companies align overall performance against three key areas:

Growth: new audiences or markets, new ways to engage this audience and create resonance and loyalty, net new products or services to engage, new revenue streams or higher revenue from existing channels.

Profitability & Efficiency: The ability to increase overall profitability by doing things quickly, more efficiently across all areas of the business.

Customer Service, Retention, LTV: A customer/client base that is engaged and happy with the overall app experience will be loyal, spend more and prove valuable over time as your costs of acquiring new customers is pushed down.

While departmental teams will continue to measure success based on their areas of direct influence, it is essential to define these core and shared business goals to ensure that your shared dashboard is directly tied into these goals at every step of the process. The best and most effective way to ensure that this happens is to directly tie accountability (read: bonuses, salary increases, and promotions) to these app project metrics and KPIs.

Common team metrics

As a starting point, let’s look at some of the key ways that members of your stakeholder group and their functional KPIs would likely define measurement or measure the success of your app. Please note that this is a list of common metrics and is not inclusive of every way that teams are measuring success of their app projects

Marketing Teams

The marketing team will fundamentally be a strong voice of the customer and will look at all KPIs as they directly relate to customer behaviour. Some of these include but are not limited to:

  • Monthly/daily active users
  • Downloads (how many people have downloaded your app)
  • Opens (how many people open and use the app and what is the frequency of these actions)
  • Revenue (lift in revenue or change in revenue and recurring revenue)
  • Lifetime value of a customer (LTV)
  • Cost per acquisition
  • Engagement (how are your customers interacting, purchasing, frequency that they come back)
  • Conversion
  • Basket size (how much they purchase and changes or lifts over time)
  • Referrals
  • Reviews (direct product or service reviews as well as app store reviews or industry review platforms)
  • Customer service feedback or direct customer feedback
  • Direct response to offers or campaigns in market (coupon codes, loyalty offers)
  • New product or service testing and the associated customer feedback loop
  • Key demographics and traffic sources (where they live, their age, their average income, average purchase, how they found you)

Finance Teams
The finance team will fundamentally care about the nuts of bolts of the investment related to your app project, including profit and loss and maintaining a tight control over budget.

  • Revenue (net new or changes in revenue over time)
  • CPA (cost per acquisition and return on investment in these costs)
  • Cost reductions (efficiencies to be found across all company functions)
  • ROI (what is the direct return on all dollars spent, including labour costs associated with building and maintaining your app project, vendor costs, and efficiencies)

Technology/Product Teams
The technology or product team is going to closely watch the daily and weekly health of the app and the satisfaction of customers.

  • App store reviews
  • Monthly/daily active users
  • Downtime
  • Load times
  • Conversion rates
  • Bounce rates
  • Retention rates
  • User actions per session
  • Net promoter scores
  • Customer satisfaction scores and feedback
  • LTV

Design (UX/UI) Teams
The design team focuses on the in-app experience and how the app handles and feels to the users themselves. Instead of looking at quantitative results, they are looking at qualitative metrics to understand how best to improve the app for the user.

  • Abandons within features
  • Overall engagement
  • Path to conversion/conversion rate (can users easily navigate through to conversion points and are they converting as intended)
  • Accessibility feedback
  • Direct customer/user feedback and satisfaction
  • App store ratings/reviews
  • Referrals
  • Users are able to do more in less time overall (e.g. autofills, predictive experiences)
  • NPS (Net Promoter Scores) overall

The critical juncture exists here between what individual teams measure and what the company will measure to gauge success of the overall app project. Individual team metrics allow for a more detailed and in-depth conversation around specific behaviours, testing and experimentation, and – most importantly – direct feedback from your clients or customers. They provide the “whys” behind what you are seeing in your dashboard.

Don’t be afraid to evolve your KPIs over time

It is also essential to understand that KPIs can and should change over time. As your business, and more importantly your customers evolve, so should your benchmarks of success. For instance, you may look at the rate of adoption by your users as a KPI because you are launching a new technology into the marketplace as part of your app experience. As your customers (and the overall market) become more comfortable with this new technology, you would evolve your adoption metric into a retention metric.

Do not be complicit with a “set it and forget it” approach. Evolving how and what you measure will ultimately help you continue to define the success of your app over time and will inform crucial decisions around the next evolution of your app project.

Budgeting

Budget is perhaps the most often-used measure of success (although not always an accurate measure of success) when it comes to a project of this nature. Did you get your money’s worth? Did it further your business goals as a direct result of the spend? Can you clearly show a good return on the investment?

The biggest factor in using budget as a measure of success is ensuring you have set proper budgeting from the start as part of your app project goals. Good project scoping at this stage means fewer financial surprises down the road and ultimately a final product that is closely aligned with your business goals and KPIs.

Good budgeting is as much a measure of realistic expectations as it is a measurement tool for success. Essentially, it is the delicate balance between what you want versus what you can afford. So where do you start?

This is the first task of your internal stakeholder group prior to embarking on any next steps, including engaging a vendor partner or project team. There are a number of different variables to consider as part of your budgeting process.

Resources

This is the opportunity to look at all of your resources as part of your internal team and then compare them to the resources needed to complete the project. You’ll then assign a budget to bridge these gaps.

  • Do you have the development resources needed to complete the complexities of the project?
  • Do you have a design team that is skilled in both UX (User Experience – ensuring all aspects of the app meets the needs of your customers/clients and it is a seamless experience overall) and UI (User Interface – anything the user interacts with including screens and touchscreens, keyboards, sounds etc.)?
  • Do you have an experienced and skilled technology team that can match your needs to technology that will solve your major customer/client challenges towards meeting your goals?
  • Do you have experienced project managers, scrum masters who will ensure that the project is on track, on budget, and – most importantly – on schedule?

This is where your stakeholder team will need to be tough on themselves to ensure you have an accurate forecast of what is possible internally and what resources you will need to seek from an external vendor. The vast majority of organizations seek external vendor partnerships with app development companies for these projects as it is often challenging to allocate so many dedicated key resources to a new project without leaving gaps in the running of your day-to-day business.

A vendor who specializes in developing and building app experiences will have a well-oiled machine of talent that is deeply experienced in your industry and can leverage the 360-degree view of the project from the outset. This ensures that you are considering all major components of the project that will make it successful. This is what they do – every day – with clients just like you.

This is also an effective way to realistically budget for your project and have reasonable expectations about how much it will cost so you can go back to your company goal setting and align spend vs. expected benefits.

So how exactly do you get to a reasonable budget for your project and what goes into setting a budget that allows you to build a best in class experience for your customers/clients while ensuring that you keep the company efficient and profitable as part of the process? The answer is, it depends on what you are looking for. In the next section, you’ll see a list of all of the key considerations that your stakeholder team or vendor partner will take into consideration as part of the budgeting process.

Project Complexity

This is another important task of your core stakeholder team, and arguably the most important task. It pertains to not just budget but also alignment across your organization on what you are building and how it will help you meet your business goals in both the near and long term.

This task is essentially detailing all of your feature sets for your application. Some of these items include but are not limited to:

  • Brand new experience or building on an existing experience – Are you looking to build a brand new customer app experience? Or are you looking to build upon an existing app and what are you looking to improve, add onto, or change?
  • Chat – Do you want to provide your customers/clients with a chat function to be able to speak directly to customer service? Do you need the ability to have live chat functions between a health provider and patient?
  • Rating and Reviews – Do you want to be able to allow customers to access and write reviews or do you want to have integrations of reviews from other platforms?
  • Notifications – Do you want to be able to send push notifications to your customers about new products/services, sales, or events?
  • Map Integration – Do you need to have GPS or a live mapping functionality as part of your app?
  • AI Experiences – Do you have plans to leverage artificial intelligence as part of your platform, including “ virtual try on” or “virtual space planning”?
  • Photos and Videos – Do you have plans to include photos and videos as part of your platform? Do you want your users to have the ability to use this function?
  • Advanced Search – What will the search functionality look like? Do you want customers to be able to filter, provide multiple search terms, or save results?
  • Offline Support – What capabilities will you need with regards to automated support functions that will address preliminary or simplified customer queries when customer service/support is not available?
  • In-App Purchase – Do you require your customers to have the ability to purchase directly within your app experience? What integrations with OEMs/platforms will you need to make this happen?
  • Languages and Regional Functionality – where does your target audience live and what specific services will you provide for in-country language support? Are there regional requirements around privacy or accessibility?
  • Timing – What are the requirements for when you want/need this to be launched? If you need a complex, brand new app experience launched in market in six months or less, that requires an army of dedicated resources working through the process from discovery to MVP to launch in order to meet this timing. Discussing internally or with your partner vendor about go/no-go stages, blockers, and milestones will help you accomplish this and set realistic timelines.

Mapping all of this out in advance will be essential in determining what you want to build and what is required for development, and will help you stay aligned to the needs and wants of your customers. It should be stated here that this is a daunting and extremely challenging task as there may be conflicting requirements or asks/needs from your various stakeholders.

Ultimately, finding unanimous agreement from your stakeholder team is crucial as this provides the essential framework for what you are building and how/what you will measure as a benchmark of success for years to come.

This is also an opportunity to engage an experienced and skilled vendor partner, as they have deep experience in guiding the team through this process and creating an opportunity for alignment with all key project stakeholders. They will help you determine a realistic timeline, create a dedicated resource requirements list, and can provide a preliminary budget based on this scoping exercise.

How does this work in the real world?

So what does this look like in the real world? Let’s take a look at one of our clients as a means to understand how this works.

We recently developed a full-scale, brand new app experience for an international retail/ecommerce player in the direct-to-consumer food/grocery industry. Our client had existing brick-and-mortar locations as well as an online web experience, and was looking to expand their customer base by offering a digital-first app experience that also integrated with the in-store and ecommerce customer experience.

Discovery

As part of the discovery process, we worked with the client to clearly define company goals. The company goals were aligned to global growth (more customers globally), customer experience and satisfaction, and net new revenue from this new platform. By clearly defining these core measurements, we then built this into every part of the process and encouraged a frequent and transparent sharing of these measurements throughout the development process. This also included looking closely at how we could build in key data collection as part of the app experience to ensure that they were able to continue to look at key data as it directly related to user behavior.

We also spoke at great length with our client about the industry in general. What were their direct and indirect competitors, what did they currently have in the market, and were there critical considerations about when they wanted to launch this product into their customers’ hands?

With this information, we worked with the client to dig deep into who their customers are. We looked at:

  • Geography
  • Existing sales
  • How their customers currently engage with the online platform and with in-store technology
  • Key demographics of their customers (both existing and potential)
  • Revenue as it pertains to the most profitable products across the board
  • Direct customer feedback

We then spoke to all internal stakeholders to define the aspirational experience they were looking to build to meet and exceed their customers’ expectations.

How does this work in the real world?

The next biggest discussion came around what exactly they were looking to build. We had lengthy discussions that started with moonshots and all-encompassing brainstorm sessions around features and customer experiences. Together, we determined a clearly-defined set of features and functionalities that laddered directly to their overall company goals for the next few years.

We had deep discussions between the internal team and the project team around integration across all company assets, including the in-store experience and their online experience, and made the customer UX/UI a top priority to create a seamless and delightful customer experience from start to finish.

We helped our client get out of the way of their customers and allow them to do what they wanted to do – in this case, a combination of shopping across three different areas with the purpose of purchase and decision-support for purchases. It was the balance between what they wanted features-wise versus what they had budget for, and what would help them grow while deepening and evolving an exceptional integrated customer experience for existing and new customers.

Project plans and expectations

With clear information about what their company goals and KPIs were, as well as key info around timing, customers, competitor data, market gaps, and the essential features and experiences the client stakeholder team wanted to create for their customers, we were able to set a realistic timeline and a budget to suit.

This created some success benchmarks for us as well as the internal stakeholder team. Their KPIs became our benchmarks, and we focused the feature set, overall development, and launch timing on meeting and exceeding these benchmarks.

How did we know we were successful? We have a client who feels good about the process, the project was delivered on time and as outlined, and – most importantly – they are seeing a direct lift in the core KPIs and company goals that align with customer experience, such as growth, revenue, and customer satisfaction.

 

Measuring the success of your app project is about intrinsically understanding the process of building an app itself. It is about defining what a true return on investment looks like for your individual company or team by defining global company goals and how each team and project’s KPIs ladder to these global goals. It is about deeply understanding who you are building the experience for and a relentless commitment to making decisions as closely aligned to the customer as possible.

With a well-balanced and representative stakeholder team that is not only deeply aligned with each other on company goals, empowered to make key decisions, and is customer-centric, you are setting yourself up for success from the outset. It is the commitment to alignment, transparency, and accountability that will guide you through the process and help you to measure true success.

You need to commit to balancing what you want to build with what you can or are willing to invest financially, and you must prioritize your customers’ needs above all else – ultimately creating lifelong and loyal customers that fuel your company goals.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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How User-Centred Design Impacts the Success of Your Products and Services

Image of hands drawing low fidelity wireframes - How design impacts the success of your projects

[vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom”][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][vc_column_text]What’s often forgotten about design is that it’s not just about a pretty picture or functional object – design is all about the user. Whether you are looking at a digital product or physical one, it’s consistently designed with the user in mind – and not just aesthetically, but intuitively and empathetically.

After a decade of rapidly evolving technologies, we are seeing businesses return to this idea of a deep commitment to the customer – whether it’s through new contactless payment methods, the rise of pre-order and pickup, or the surge in on-demand delivery options, companies are once again putting customers at the core of every business decision.

At TheAppLabb, this type of work is the core of what we do as experienced mobile app developers in Toronto – it’s the beginning of our thought process and the end of our usability testing. From A to Z, we focus on what the end users of our products will see, hear, feel, and touch – and the most successful products combine this mindset with laser-targeted end-goals to create what we in the business call the user’s “happy path” (more on that later).

In this blog, we’ll be showing you why design matters for business key performance indicators (KPIs), what different aspects of design are considered during mobile app projects, and how you can incorporate this mindset into your own processes and products.

The goal of good design: simplicity

Good business leaders fundamentally understand most key performance indicators like revenue, engagement and total lifetime value, but what about some of the unseen but highly impactful customer KPIs?

A huge component in building out exceptional customer experiences lies in the hands of designers and the work they do. Throughout every touchpoint, designers are looking to reduce friction, remove barriers and create intuitive, accessible and predictable experiences.

Given the rapidly changing nature of technology, design has rightly become a key partner for ensuring that customers can easily navigate the complexities that often accompany emerging technologies.

How design impacts your business success

One of the core benchmarks of design is to simplify complexity for the user while achieving business goals, and a strong UX/UI (we’ll get into this a bit later in the blog) has become the embodiment of this mission.

Do most of us intrinsically understand why design matters?

More importantly, why should anyone looking to build out exceptional digital products make design a core tenet of their project – and ultimately their project budget?

A 2016 design study of 408 different companies found that the more a company invested in and focused on design, the more sales they saw.

Those companies who had design as a central tenet of their business strategy (referred to as “design unicorns” in the study) found a measurable impact on core KPI’s like sales (+14%), customer retention (+44%), customer engagement (+21%), and faster product cycles overall (+30%). Whether a website, mobile app or B2B tool, nearly every business with a digital presence across industries can benefit from a successful design strategy.

Investing in good design is essential as part of your user centric business goals and objectives. In the next section, we share some of the key KPIs that should be included in your customer-centric dashboard when creating your app development strategy.

The McKinsey Design Index

The team at McKinsey have started to look at design as it relates to an integral part of an overall business strategy and have developed what they coin as the McKinsey Design Index(MDI).

This index rates companies by how strong they are at design and – more importantly – what this means for key traditional business KPIs like revenue and returns to their shareholders. The companies they looked at included medical technology, consumer goods, and retail banking industries.

The business benefits of user-centric design

The data from both the McKinsey research and the NEA report undeniably support the benefits of user-centric design. The biggest takeaways show an impact on annual growth, market share, customer satisfaction and overall cost reductions – here are just a few:

A strong focus on design equals higher revenue overall

Of the companies McKinsey categorized as being in the top percentile of the MDI, they found that they outperformed their competitors by showing an annual growth measured by revenue at 10% as compared to between 3-6% for those not indexing high on design as a central tenet of their business strategy.

An increase in overall usability scores (customer satisfaction) has a measurable impact on market share.

The McKinsey team also unlocked a study of a medical equipment group that tied usability metrics and customer satisfaction scores to executive bonuses as a means to meaningfully ward off competitor threats. The company focused heavily on developing over 100 concepts and prototypes that were deeply focused on usability and customer experience.

In the end, this strong focus on the end user and usability (customer satisfaction) meant that their final design’s usability score exceeded 90 percent (and market share increase of 40%), compared with less than 76 percent for the machines of its two main competitors. Through a company-wide focus on and prioritization of the end user, the company was able to unlock the key to impacting their strategic business goals.

A strong focus on design thinking and user-centric design at the beginning of a development project has huge implications for the overall costs of the final product

By investing in up-front user experience (UX) research, you are reducing your overall development and engineering costs by reducing the total number of iterations needed, and ultimately reducing your customer/client support costs once the project is completed.

A user-centred approach assures that you are building the right experience out of the gate, that end users have very little friction or challenges with your end product, and that they therefore require much less custom support once the product is in market.

A frictionless experience also means an overall increase in sales, customer retention and engagement overall

The team at NEA conducted a study of 400+ design centric start-ups and from this group looked at subsets of companies that they deemed Design Mature (raised at least $20mm in funding) or Design Unicorns (valuation of $1 billion). The criteria for these groups was having 20+ designers on their team and a shared belief that design had a material impact on their success. Overall they found that design had a measurable and positive impact on their success. Of the Design Unicorn subset they found even more proof of the impact of design thinking as a critical impact on results.

  • Design leads to higher sales: +14% among design unicorns
  • Design leads to higher customer retention: + 44% among design unicorns
  • Design leads to higher customer engagement: +21% among design unicorns
  • Design leads to faster product cycles: +30% among design unicorns

How we incorporate design best practices from the start

It is clear that design thinking and design-centred customer strategies are yielding positive business results, but how does this look in practice?

At TheAppLabb we view design as integral to the process from discovery right through to delivery and launch of the product in the market. This means that design and user-centred thinking informs all of our build and process decisions on behalf of our clients.

At the outset of the discovery phase with our clients, our design team performs field studies and builds personas for our clients’ target customers to help us find valuable insights based on specific customer needs and wants. Based on these insights, we then start to draw out some simple pen and paper sketches of what the product could look like as it directly relates to the customer experience.

These rapid prototypes help us in brainstorming and improvising on the desired design and its overall user experience at an early stage so that we can decrease the risk of errors closer to the launch. We refer to these initial sketches as a low fidelity prototype or wireframe of the application we are building.

Think of the process of designing a new kitchen, as an example. The first step would likely be a pencil sketch of the overall look and design you are seeking. You are trying to get an idea of what design elements you want to include, basic measurements to make sure that functionality is at the core of the project; can I have an island and still make it easy to get to the fridge or stove?

This would be the low fidelity wireframe part of the process. With effective user testing (e.g. is my kitchen still functional and easy to use based on observing everyday use and user interviews), we also identify usability problems with a design as early as possible, so they can be fixed before implementing or mass producing the design.

By incorporating deeply user-centred UX processes at the very start, we can then confidently move on to refining the prototypes and designing an aesthetically appealing user interface (UI) for the entire product. All these design strategies combined provide us with a greater confidence to be able to launch a desirable product in the market.

With the kitchen planning example, you would now have a digital map of your plan which includes concise measurements of cupboards, flooring and appliances as well as a detailed visualization of materials, swatches etc. This allows you to truly visualize the space and functionality and to confirm that it meets your specific needs and wants.

Core design concepts every leader should understand

User-centred design also includes thinking about some of the other core concepts of design that we keep in mind while designing a successful mobile app.

User experience versus user interface

UX and UI design are commonly paired together and are prioritised by tech companies to build winning products. However, the two terms are commonly interchanged, and understanding the difference between the two concepts is vital for any business.

User Experience (UX) is the overall experience a user goes through with a company’s product or services. Good and bad user experience design is determined by how easy or difficult it is to interact with each element of the app design. A successful UX design results in a simple and an extremely user-friendly experience, and aims to turn customers into loyal users.

At TheAppLabb, our UX designers base their design thinking on market research, understanding customer pain points, potential market gaps, and competitor analysis. We also look at user behaviors, their functional interactions, and emotional reactions throughout the user journey. This all becomes the foundation of our UX strategies. We then take into account the business goals and objectives of our clients, and align the experience with the company’s visions and missions.

For instance, at the UX stage we find solutions to common experiences like:

  • Is the user flow smooth, seamless, and intuitive, or is it confusing?
  • Does the button color and position encourage people to click and take action?
  • Does a descriptive and easy onboarding process add clarity for the user?
  • Does improving the UX copy or tone of the content increase conversion?

By asking and answering these questions, a good UX designer creates solutions and solves problems users are struggling with.

In comparison, User Interface (UI) is the visual representation of the app’s graphical user interface. A successful user interface decides how appealing and instinctive each element of the product will look, including buttons, placeholders, text, images, checkboxes, and any other intuitive interactions.

While our UX designers decide how the interface works, UI designers focus more on the aesthetics. They carefully study each client’s brand guidelines and align them with a style of color palettes, button styles, animation, graphics, typography, diagrams, widgets, etc. Our UI designers also optimize interfaces for different devices carefully considering the growing need for responsive design for both desktop and mobile users. Saving time and money for our clients with such expertise, we therefore create one version of the overall design that scales content and elements to match any screen size.

With a strong team of UX/UI designers combined, we carefully look at every aspect of design and why it matters for a great mobile app experience. We take into account the various concepts of human-centred design and always aim to design an app that is future-proofed for our clients. We want to build the perfect kitchen that is not only beautiful to look at and exactly what the client wants in terms of look and feel, but that is functional and frictionless in everyday life settings.

Cognitive load

The landscape of technology has changed the way information and design is viewed, from smartphones to tablets to your personal computer. Gone are the days where apps were built only for a single monitor screen. But with more screen variations come newer challenges for a user to understand, interact and process the same information now packaged in different sizes and formats.

For example, in mobile apps, due to the limited screen space, designers have to format information much more efficiently and different than how it would look on a computer screen, in order to help ease the experience of a new user.

Further imagine if you are presented with an app which has too much textual information on the onboarding screens in a font size that is hard to read. You are then prompted to take an action in order to proceed further, but you have too many options to choose from without any proper directions or explanations. What if you are then presented with a set of icons which you can’t interpret or have never seen before?

The fact is that the human brain needs time to process all this information and when an app provides too much information at once, it might overwhelm the user and make them abandon the task. This is the theory of cognitive load in mobile design.

At TheAppLabb, our design team will try to minimize a user’s cognitive load in order to enhance their app experience.

Using simple design concepts of font weight, font size, and color, we add visual weight to the interface while making it clear and easier for a user to navigate an app. We create seamless design flows that take the load off from a user and eliminate elements that create unnecessary distractions.

Designing intuitive experiences to increase overall engagement

Think about the first thing you do when you click on a mobile app.

  • Do you expect to sign up for the app as a first time user with your personal information?
  • When you login, do you expect to see a home screen that tells you more about the various functions of the app?
  • Do you expect a button to be clickable to perform a certain action?
  • Do you expect to find the profile/login/logout button in a certain place and you intuitively find it there?

In design thinking, this is often referred to a user’s mental model. And as Jakob Nielsen from the Nielsen Norman Group popularly defines it: “A mental model is what the user believes about the system at hand.”

UX designers are trained to consider ‘predictability’ as one of the fundamental principles while designing mobile apps. By understanding the users’ mental models, we build products that are intuitive and engaging for them.

For businesses, this means providing customers a seamless experience that helps them use the app longer, more efficiently and become loyal to the experience as well as the brand.

Making design responsive by optimizing content for both web and mobile

In the early 2010’s, when more users started accessing web material on handheld devices than on desktops, a historical phenomenon in digital design occurred. Designers now had to craft several versions of one design in order to cater to all three screen sizes (mobile, tablet, and desktop), and make each have fixed dimensions, costing both money and time.

Finding a more powerful and economical solution to this change in digital dynamics, a new approach called responsive design became popular. Adjusting smoothly to various screen sizes, with responsive design a designer now creates a single, flexible design that will stretch or shrink to fit any screen.

In today’s world where a single user has a variety of devices in their possession, it is vital for businesses to create products that are responsive in order to cater to every type of user and at all times. They should be able to use the same product on their mobile, but switch to their tablet or desktop at any given time without compromising on their experience.

Catering to this need, design teams specialize in optimising content for every required interface.

For instance, by using fluid layouts and a ‘mobile first’ approach, we scale up phone-sized content to suit larger screens with design techniques such as typography rules, font use, font family and color contrast.

Another example is CTA buttons. While buttons on the desktop are easy to click with a mouse, when adjusted for mobile they become bigger with a better clickable area for accurate interaction with fingers.

Adapting interactions for touchscreens and fingers

According to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, the average finger tap for mobile is 44X44 pixels, which defines the target amount of screen space that a human finger touches when clicking on a button on mobile. This also means that while interacting with a mobile app, a minimum tappable area of 44pt x 44pt is essential for designing all controls.

Designing for touch (for fingers, not cursors) is therefore the core concept of design for app development. A successful touch design reduces the number of incorrect inputs and makes interaction with an app more comfortable.

Our designers at TheAppLabb are masters of interpreting human gestures made with hands and translating them into digital interactions. Some of the core gestures that run across all our platforms are tap, swipe, long press, long press and drag, pinch and press, pinch-to-zoom, and double tap.

Designing for inclusivity and accessibility

Accessibility can mean different things in different contexts. In design, accessibility means how many people can actually use a product’s interface. Therefore, accessible design involves designing for people with color blindness, vision loss, hearing loss and other disabilities.

Making this a fast-approaching norm for all digital businesses, the Accessible Canada Act ensures that everyone has the same rights when it comes to the internet. Starting on June 30, 2021, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) will mandate WCAG 2.0 AA compliance, and businesses and nonprofits with 20 or more employees, as well as public sector organizations, will be required to fill out an accessibility compliance report.

Designing with accessibility consideration essentially means that designers aim to build products and services to be AODA and WCAG compliant from the start, while also helping clients identify their compliance issues and making the required fixes to their web platforms.

While all WCAG 2.0 AA guidelines should be adhered to, the following are priority items to focus on that swiftly bridge the gap between non-compliance and mostly compliant:

  • Making sure the website design considers keyboard interactions like visible focus indicators and logical tab orders that allows everyone to be able to use a site without a cursor.
  • A web design that considers mobile gestures, touch interactions and navigation
  • A color contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text.
  • Alt Text/descriptions for images and other important graphics.
  • Providing Close Captions and transcripts for video content on the site
  • Making page structure (headers, landmarks etc.) and documents in a accessible friendly format for screen readers
  • Building forms with proper labels, interacted with and submitted via alternate input methods.

While still in its relative infancy as it pertains to published data and long term studies of strategic design-centric development approaches, early signs point to these strategies becoming more and more vital for any business today as an integral part of their growth and retention strategy.

Design matters

A thoughtfully designed app that is fundamentally based on user research and a user-centred design approach ensures that you are putting a product in the market that creates a delightful and frictionless experience for your customers.

In doing so, you carve a clear path to positive customer engagement and loyalty, an increase in overall revenue and growth and, ultimately, customer loyalty for years to come.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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“Off The Shelf” App Solutions Can Level the Playing Field

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Accelerate time to market and reduce the overall costs without sacrificing on customization and flexibility with our comprehensive White Label App solutions

It is safe to say that much of our world is driven by mobile phones and they are a powerful piece of technology that now lies in the pockets of almost 70% of the world’s population. Apps are quickly becoming an essential part of our daily lives and an important consideration for all business planning. Building an app can be a complex (read costly) and time-consuming process; one that requires detailed planning and sometimes an entirely new dedicated app development company in Canada in order to build a custom app from scratch. As a trusted partner in building over 600+ apps across a number of industries, The App Labb team sometimes found that our clients were challenged with the process of “starting from scratch”, particularly with regards to resourcing, time and cost. To alleviate some of these daunting challenges, we began building our own white label or ‘off-the-shelf’ solutions, which are pre-built platforms exclusively designed across a range of popular industries such as retail, on-demand services, healthcare, restaurants, events, and transportation.

These pre-built solutions have helped a number of our clients by providing the fundamental functionality they require, allowing them to focus resourcing on specific customizations unique to their brand and market and have allowed our clients to get to market quickly so they can start to build out brand equity in the space and collect valuable customer data allowing them to learn from and adapt with their customers over time.

Perhaps the biggest win in choosing a white label solution is the ability to accelerate time-to-market. White label solutions offer standardizing essential components and fundamentals in industry learnings and market needs in order to deliver a best-in-class experience right out of the gate. The solution is quick and easy to brand with all the fundamentals of a well-performing app already laid out. The client can then invest time and resources on branding, customizing and developing other key areas needed for their individual business.

In one such example, our team at TheApplab created a unique recognition algorithm while customising our retail whitelabel solution for a fast-growing grocery delivery company. The custom algorithm was able to quickly begin learning the buying patterns of its users and notify them when a specific product was currently on sale based on the consumers buying patterns. Personalized product recommendation and reward programs ensured our client was able to increase revenue by 400% while driving loyalty. This retail platform helped the company to get to market quickly, focus on select features unique to their brand and disrupt the grocery delivery services in no time.

Another essential benefit of our white label solution is that it can be a cost-effective solution for all business sizes and fits in a more affordable budget. Building an app from scratch requires deep resources both financially and human resources for the planning, mapping and building process. Choosing a white label solution is allowing our clients to start further along in the process and direct resourcing to customization and refinement.

Building an app from scratch can be a daunting process for many of our clients with regards to defining the starting point and “ready to launch” point, assembling resourcing needed for the project and securing budget for a project of this size. Not many businesses have a fully formed and skilled development and design firm in house to tackle these large-scale projects. White label solutions provide clients with a fully operational platform that leverages a deeply experienced design and development team to incorporate all of the platform fundamentals based on deep industry experience. This also means that you are potentially avoiding some of the pitfalls that can occur in early stages of a project such as project drift, key approval and regulatory considerations and data security and functionality considerations. With “off the shelf” solutions, smaller development teams that sit in house, can now focus on maintenance, feature set customization, trouble-shooting and refining based on customer data and feedback – it’s like getting a head start in your “get to market” solution.

Another key consideration we have in building out white label solutions is the ability to offer clients the choice of a “head start” solution that also offers the flexibility to scale with your business as it grows and changes. App builder solutions, while offering customers a pre-built answer, often have rigid feature sets and restrict further development that falls in line with new feature requirements or changes as your business grows. With this in mind, we build out app solutions for key industries that allow you to customize or add and subtract feature sets based on business needs. This in turn means you have an app platform that scales with your business as it grows. These solutions are an attractive option for clients who want the flexibility of a custom app with the “head start” of a pre-built solution.

One of our fast growing clients from Toronto, who offers their customers third party home delivery service from a wide range of retail and marketplace vendors, was able to quickly ramp up its reach and drive net revenue per vehicle with the help of our On-Demand white label app solution. Our augmented reality standard feature set allows customers looking for delivery of their purchases to provide size estimations (particularly for large items like furniture) based on product scans using the app on their phones. This in turn, is making it easier for drivers to more accurately plan out vehicle space and delivery requirements. Our built in trip scheduling engine makes end-to-end delivery of anything from anywhere possible from customer order all the way through to home delivery. With real-time customer/vendor visibility on pickup and delivery status, our app solution ensures our client is able to deliver on convenience and satisfaction promises to their customers.

In today’s market, creating a brand experience in an app environment is the key to unlocking additional revenue potential, creating an exceptional and unique customer experience and being able to grow and scale along with your customers as their needs and the market itself changes and evolves. Brands are tasked with weighing the cost vs benefit of building out customer app experiences that deliver a feature set that is unique, fully functional and seamless for your customers while delivering on profitability and business KPI’s. Choosing a white label solution means that you can start much further along the path with a fully functional platform that gets you to market quickly, reduces the overall costs of the project and allows you to focus in-house teams on powerful customization features and experiences unique to your brand. Launching quickly also means that you can beat competitors time to market and start to collect valuable customer data and turn that into new and refined features that continue to build customer loyalty and customer acquisition for years to come.

As Covid-19 continues to accelerate digital transformation across industries, our Whitelabel App solutions can help you achieve innovation and scalability. Explore them here.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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Investing in our community is a large part of our DNA and we will continue to strive for it

[vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom”][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][vc_column_text]It feels incredibly privileged to have participated and won the inaugural Paddle for Good Charity Tournament in Toronto earlier this year. It was a wonderful opportunity, especially in today’s times of greater need, to contribute towards a great local cause as TheAppLabb and Srinarayanathas Foundation present (in a socially distant way) a gift of $20,000 to the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital Foundation , a charity chosen by TheAppLabb team having won the Paddle for Good Charity Tournament. The Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital Foundation is committed to creating a world of possibilities for kids with disabilities through specialized programs, clinical care, rehabilitation and complex care. The donation was made to provide support towards research, programs and services for kids with disabilities.

L-R: Kundan Joshi, CEO, The AppLabb; Muraly Srinarayanathas, Deputy Chair, Srinarayanathas Foundation; Sandra Hawken, President and CEO, Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital Foundation.

 

TheAppLabb team with the winner’s cheque.

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Retail Grocers Pivot to Mobile Innovation Amid COVID-19

[vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom”][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][vc_column_text]COVID-19 has had a significant impact on the grocery industry across the world. While panic buying may have eased off lately, grocery retailers are continuing to fall behind the curve as far as order fulfillments are concerned with unprecedented blip in sales and almost near empty shelves for essential products.

The impact of the Coronavirus on Grocery Retail

As shoppers are flocking to e-commerce to fulfill their needs, we are witnessing a rapid increase in online shopping account registrations and mobile app downloads from the previous month. Overall, demand for retail delivery is now booming with Shopping app global downloads hitting 106 million during the week of March 29 and April 4, 2020, according to App Annie  — that’s up 15% from the weekly average in January 2020.

With growing online footfalls, grocers’ systems and services have been pushed to their limits. From increasing shopper support calls, scaling database servers and website/app crashes, grocers are struggling to keep things intact. Even the grocers with robust e-commerce stores are challenged right from inventory management to supply chain disruption. This is impacting deliveries with extended delays becoming frequent.

Online shopping for groceries is still a relatively novel idea for the vast majority and forming habits takes time. According to a recent report released by Dalhousie University 9% of Canadians are now shopping for food online for the first time.

What can grocers do to tackle the ongoing situation?

To ensure grocers are able to support their shoppers and communities, its imperative for them to focus on the essentials: On-Demand fulfillment, communication, online and in-app customer experience and omnichannel strategy.

  1. On-Demand Fulfillment

In order to counter hoarding behaviour among shoppers, grocers will have to build robust inventory management to ensure that essential products are available to more members while better managing out-of-stocks. Grocery retailers can manage inventory by:

  • Placing purchase limits on high-demand products in-store and online
  • Building on-demand delivery engine and/or seamless integration with existing third-party delivery providers, and hence effectively communicating inventory and purchase limits
  • Monitoring real-time inventory at store level and adjusting online accordingly

 

  1. Communication

Frequent and effective communication is essential to build trust among shoppers and empowering employees to keep your business running.

Grocers can update their shoppers about product availability by providing:

  • Frequent updates to your product catalog (out-of-stocks, order limits) online, in-store and your connected third-party applications
  • Notices and updates for your shoppers both in-store and online
  • Direct notification of product availability, and alternative stores with available stock
  • Using personalization tools to automatically help shoppers easily find the products they want and need and appropriate product substitutions, as needed

 

  1. Improving the experience

Based on an understanding of in-store consumer behavior and their perception, retailers can provide optimal, memorable experiences through intuitive UI/UX. The key objective of a mobile app during this pandemic is to provide shopping convenience and efficiency to users, therefore, here are the few important features that your grocery app requires:

  • Intuitive UI/UX for effective navigation that’s simple, clean and easy to navigate
  • Mobile Product Catalog for customers to browse through product catalogs
  • Shopping Cart & Mobile Payment enabling checkout and pay on the go
  • Store Locator enabling location of nearest grocery stores
  • Sales Chatbot to simulate conversations with customers using artificial intelligence, in order to guide them through the buying process
  • Push Notifications to keep your customers updated with the latest offers, discounts of stock added to your store
  • Loyalty program to ensure customer stickiness and user engagement
  • Personalized AI-powered 1:1 Experience
  • Product recommendation and messaging based on dynamic segmentation
  • Voice-based Ordering allowing customers to order efficiently
  • AI powered Product discovery enabling discovery of preferred products

  1. Omnichannel Strategy

To provide customers memorable experiences across channels, grocery retailers need the right technology in place to streamline the entire customer journey from product pages to checkout to tax calculations to fulfillment on an e-commerce site or a mobile application.

To stay relevant in a world increasingly growing towards omnichannel commerce, grocers will have to augment their customer experience to align with consumer expectations.

The COVID-19 is the single most disruptive force ever to hit the grocery industry. Key lies in building resilience, reimagining the next normal, and embracing innovation cutting across all business levels. At TheApplabb, it is our endeavor to ensure business continuity for grocery retailers without the risk of exposure, by focusing on design solutions that provide grocery retailers with exceptional capabilities which leads to improved customer experience and brand loyalty.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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The Importance Of Design In Mobile App Development

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Mobile app development encompasses many elements, but one of the most important is design. While it’s possible to create a mobile app from a pre-built templates, it’s well worth investing in design talent that can help you create a truly tailored product. You only get one chance to create a first impression, and design is what makes that impression. If you’re a business looking to use your app for revenue generating purposes, then good design is especially crucial.

 

 

In 2019, mobile users spent an estimated $83.5 billion USD on in-app purchases, subscriptions and premium apps. That figure should tell you something about the money-making potential of a well executed mobile app. Without good design, however, an app can quickly be forgotten, resulting in nothing but wasted time and money.

 

Top-tier design is about more than just having an app that looks good. App design is vital for app performance, achieving business objectives and encouraging widespread use.  Here are some undeniable reasons that good design is fundamentally important in mobile app development:

 

1) Good Design Builds Trust

 

Good design immediately displays thoughtfulness, professionalism and attention to detail. This creates a sense of trust between a product and its users. When a product has finish and polish, it builds trust. When a product offers value, it builds trust. Trust facilitates the user journey and makes for smooth transactions.

 

Trust is one of the strongest currencies in the growing sharing economy, so it’s important to consider whether the look of your app promotes trust or instills doubt. Thrown together design indicates a disorganized strategy process. Your users will be extremely hesitant to enter personal information such as their home address, credit card or driver’s license if the app has obvious flaws in its basic design. 46.1% of people surveyed in a study by Stanford University indicated that design is their main criteria in deciding whether a company is credible or not.

 

2) Good Design Indicates Professionalism

 

You don’t have to be a professional design guru to create a nice looking image, but you do need design expertise if you want to create something that will be on par with industry competitors. The biggest companies in the world have dedicated design departments that adhere to strict brand guidelines and quality standards. Having a poorly designed mobile app tells the world you’re not at the level of your industry peers.

 

More than keeping up with the Joneses, good design shows that your business is meticulous when it comes to their product offerings. The design of your mobile app is a direct reflection of whether your business strives for the best or is content with merely mediocre. In short, how you do anything is how you do everything.

 

3) Good Design Brings Value

 

In design there is a concept called the aesthetic-usability effect, in which beautiful things are perceived to be easier to use and are regarded to be more valuable than ugly ones.. The same can be said of a well designed car versus an old beater. Both may get you from point A to point B, in effect delivering identical value. A beautiful luxury vehicle, however, is highly correlated with greater value, ease of use and increased enjoyment. This raises its value perception significantly.

 

The same is true with apps, where design is on display at all times. A well designed app projects value to the user. A poorly designed app projects an impression of being cheap and breakable. Which would your business rather project?

 

4) Good Design Results In Higher Conversions

 

Whether you’re aiming to maximize revenue through in-app purchases, number of sign-ups, ad revenue or other means, good mobile app design makes for increased business outcomes.

 

At least 71% of people delete apps because of design issues. When almost three quarters of users who make the conscious decision to install an app end up getting rid of it, you end up losing a major amount of leads.

 

 

Good design doesn’t just prevent user attrition, it can channel people towards making the conversion you desire. Experienced design talent will take into consideration psychological principles that help people make decisions, move them through the sales funnel and make the process as easy as possible for the customer. A user may have every intention of using your app but will quickly give up if the design doesn’t help them to do so.

 

A great mobile app is made of two components: great user interface (UI) design and great user experience (UX) design. Scrimping on mobile app design in your development budget will make the challenge of attracting and retaining users much more difficult. Good design is essential in creating a trustworthy, professional customer facing image and will maximize your return on investment, validating all the hard work and strategy you put into your app.

 

A beautiful and functional app requires a mobile app development company in Toronto with a heavy design focus. If you’re looking to build an appealing app that will make a mark in your industry, contact TheAppLabb at (416) 745-3164 or visit our contact page.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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How AI Is Revolutionizing HR

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Thank you to Enlightened-Digital for this guest post

Over the past few years, artificial intelligence (AI) has ignited change in a number of industries, altering the ways in which we perform daily tasks, complete our work and even how we find work. AI and automation have revolutionized the processes and responsibilities of human resource departments and the value they can provide to the rest of the company. Let’s examine some of the benefits of integrating AI into HR departments as we learn to embrace and take advantage of this technology.

 

Recruitment

 

According to IBM’s 2017 survey of 6,000 executives, 66 percent of CEOs believe cognitive computing can drive significant value in HR. For this reason, major companies such as Oracle have integrated AI into various parts of their HCM suites, and as CEO Mark Hurd noted at the SuiteWorld 2018 conference, its already contributed to internal success. Hurd says, “If I asked our head of HR, ‘Would you like an AI application?’ I’m not sure what she’d say. But if I told her that I could help her do a better job of recruiting the 2,000 college kids we recruit every year, by knowing things like whether their GPA would do a better job predicting their future success at Oracle, or the school they went to or their major or any of these hundreds and hundreds of correlations… she’s going to buy that every single day.”

 

This kind of automated assistance is what makes AI in HR so appealing, starting with its emerging role in talent acquisition. Utilizing recruiter-defined parameters such as location, skill set and industry, AI can deliver lists of potential candidates, predict their readiness for a move, develop and send communications and map responses, relieving HR professionals of extra work and expediting candidate sourcing.

 

Additionally, as Johnny Taylor, CEO of the Society for Human Resources says, [AI] will help democratize, equalize and significantly reduce hiring bias. AI’s capacity to remove bias in writing style, photographs, alumni and other affiliations leads to better and more diverse shortlisting. All in all, the reduction in hiring time enabled by AI can provide a competitive edge in the fight for limited resources.

Training

 

Once you’ve selected your new employee(s), AI can provide further assistance in getting new-hires up-to-speed. Employees are 58 percent more likely to remain with an organization after three years when they’ve gone through structured onboarding, so a fully-optimized process is critical. Leveraging AI to automate tasks that traditionally take hours allows HR personnel to focus their attention on engaging new employees.

 

AI-powered chatbots are a great tool for enhancing user experience and providing an interactive assistant for initial onboarding procedures. Outlining company-wide policies, setting up office accounts and arranging meet-and-greets with team members can all be automated and assisted by AI. Deepak Bharadwaj, the VP of HR Business Unit at ServiceNow, predicts that chatbots in the workplace could reach adoption rates of as high as 75 percent by 2020, with employees accessing these bots to resolve frequently asked HR questions and access HR solutions anywhere at anytime.

Culture

 

AI has an effect on the overall company culture as well as the individual experiences of new employees. As responsibilities are re-prioritized, the methods in which workers accomplish tasks and collaborate with one another will also evolve. With routine and mundane tasks automated by AI, uniquely human attributes such as creativity and problem solving will allow employees to flourish in more productive sectors, further proving that  AI will not eliminate jobs but alter the nature of them. As workloads and positions change in line with AI, performance metrics will shift as well. For HR, this means rearranging how employee performance is measured. Rather than assessing someone’s ability to complete routine assignments, an employee’s ability to create new business value though more creative and innovative behavior will be recognized.

 

Regardless of the connotation artificial intelligence may hold, AI is slowly but surely making the workplace more human-focused. With a stronger, more qualified team of mobile app developers in Toronto and the automation of historically tedious responsibilities, the implementation of AI is a win-win for all. As the technology advances and more organizations shift toward a more innovative mindset, the benefits of AI in HR will multiply.

 

-Maddie Davis

Maddie Davis is co-founder of Enlightened-Digital and a tech-obsessed female from the Big Apple. She lives by building and redesigning websites, running marathons, and reading anything and everything on the NYT Best Sellers list.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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USMCA Agreement Versus Tech Stakeholders

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Goodbye NAFTA

Cars and cattle have been the historic “hot” issues for trade agreements such as NAFTA, but that was in a time before innovative technology was in the hands of nearly every consumer. Now, technology is one of the biggest wealth-generators in our economy, and elected officials aren’t sure what to do with that.

 

Canada is a prominent country on the world stage when it comes to technology. We’re leaders in artificial intelligence and blockchain technology, and we have a thriving startup ecosystem. Most startups hinge on proprietary technology, and technologists worry that NAFTA negotiations fail to address the finer points of tech law.

 

The new agreement, titled the United-States-Mexico-Canada agreement (USMCA) gives the US greater access to the Canadian dairy market and puts mandates on auto manufacturing. Conspicuously missing from coverage, however, is how technology professionals will be affected by new trade laws.

 

Kundan Joshi, CEO of TheAppLabb and Jesse Hirsh, both respective technologists and industry leaders, weighed in on the CBC this past weekend.

 

The Main Issues

 

Intellectual Property is a huge consideration for Canadian startups, for most of whom see the United States as a goal market within two to three years of being founded. Entrepreneurs and developers who wish to travel to the States, as so many do, had to obtain a temporary visa for cross-border work. This is an area tech professionals want to see expanded going forward.

 

Joshi emphasized that IP laws must be “not only equal, but fair” for Canada-US-Mexico technology enablement. Canada is absolutely wealthy when it comes to talent and inspiration, but sometimes suffers from the short end of the stick with over-regulation. Breaking into the American market is a sign of positive progress for Canadian businesses. IP laws need to be structured to assist Canadian businesses, not hamstring them.

 

Also discussed was tariffs on items bought online in cross-border purchases. With the advent of e-commerce, Canadian and American retailers are able to go more head-to-head in targeting each other’s traditional customer bases. The internet allows customers to shop internationally from the comfort of their homes, which allows Canadian businesses to expand more aggressively through electronic mediums.

 

Summing up the discussion on NAFTA was Joshi’s advice to regulators: take data seriously. As personal tech grows, so does the collective reservoir of data. It’s essential that negotiators recognize tech as being a dominant force in the economy, and that they create policies to enhance innovation rather than stagnate it.

 

Technology stakeholders want fluid but secure cross-border movement when it comes to telecommunications, intellectual property and digital products. If the Canadian, US and Mexican government can uphold these desires then we’ll see an innovation landscape that produces great players, expanding on the already dominant framework of technology.

 

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