Stop Flying Blind: Lessons Learned While Launching Mobile Services

By Janet Jaiswal, Sr. Director, Product Marketing —

During the two years I've spent in the mobile market and having launched a successful mobile service at a former company, I've learned the hard way what I should have done and what I should have avoided. As I consider what I've learned, one phrase from a colleague sticks in my mind: “Stop Flying Blind.”


Image courtesy of Business Insider

While I hope the phrase isn't completely descriptive of how I worked in the past, I realize that there were some things I could have done that would have improved the market acceptance of the mobile website and mobile application service I helped my former company launch. I’ve summarized what I've learned into five lessons:

Lesson #1: Users Have High Expectations — At minimum, you should aim to meet these lofty expectations. A recent Harris survey revealed that 80% of adults who conducted a mobile transaction in the past year said that they expect the experience to be better than or equal to in-store. What's more, 85% expect the mobile experience to be better than or equal to the experienced provided through the desktop web.

Lesson #2: Know Your User Base — Before you launch, it helps to understand more than just your users' device types, browser versions and operating systems. You can get this information from any mobile analytics package. However, your mobile services will be much more successful if you're able to also assess if users were able to perform key activities from their mobile devices. If they weren't, what issues did they run into and—most important of all—why.

Lesson #3: Monitor Your Product/Service — Launching your mobile app or site is certainly worth celebrating, but it's also when the real work begins. Now that your site is in the hands of real users, it's critical to identify key performance indicators and constantly monitor your mobile site to see how it's performing against them. It's not enough to just obtain a list of issues, you have to know which are affecting the most users and user characteristics such as geography, time of day, user type, OS version, device type, etc.

Lesson #4: The Cycle to Make Changes to Mobile Apps is Long...and Painful — Know that most analytical packages (mobile or not) require you to tag each and every thing you want to test. If you guess wrong or don't tag something and you find an issue, you have to tag it, beg the Engineering department to include it with the next release, hope it doesn't break other functionality, submit it to the mobile app store, wait for approval, and then measure the results. Hopefully, you guessed right because if you didn't, be prepare to wait a few more weeks or months to repeat the process again.

Lesson #5: Users Are Not Forgiving, nor Do They Forget — Despite the time, energy and resources most companies dedicate to their mobile initiatives, errors still occur. And users are not forgiving: Harris survey data shows that 63% of users are unlikely to buy from the same company via other purchase channels (online, in-store) if they encounter a mobile transaction problem. And 78% of users who encounter problems when completing mobile transactions share those experiences with others. Do you really want to receive user feedback by reading negative reviews about your mobile app or site?

The mobile market continues to grow and anyone involved in it can testify what an exciting place it can be. However, both the risks and rewards are high, so it's best to see with open eyes some of the obstacles you might fly into. What are lessons you've learned when it comes to building, launching or managing your mobile products and services?