Should Businesses Go Mobile In Today’s Operating Environment?
A 2018 Forrester study reported that 43 percent of banking customers in the U.S. used mobile phones to complete banking transactions in a three month period. Why is this important? Well, for one, it shows that business is booming for organizations that convert to some type of smartphone usage.
Increasingly, Americans are browsing their favorite websites on their smartphones— for the convenience of being on the go, or not having to set up at an in-home office, or simply because of lifestyle choices. For city dwellers especially, research finds, having a smartphone attached to our bodies at all times is becoming the norm in society, and the younger generation of millennials and Gen-Xers reports having an increased usage time on smartphones compared with older generations.
Businesses, and especially startups, can capitalize on societal changes by making their web based platform into a mobile application. But this process will also be dependent on finding a solid team of mobile application developers. That’s the catch.
The science of addiction
If there’s one reason app usage has become so addicting it’s because of the reward inducing behavior built into our brains. We don’t have to be playing games on our phones for certain neurotransmitters to fire. When using Apps, as Trevor Haynes, a neurobiological researcher at Harvard University, explains:
“Your dopamine centers have been primed by [those] initial negative outcomes to respond robustly to the sudden influx of social appraisal. This use of a variable reward schedule takes advantage of our dopamine-driven desire for social validation, and it optimizes the balance of negative and positive feedback signals until we’ve become habitual users.”
Source: Harvard/SITN
While there is a darker side to dopamine and addiction, the research also proves how a reward schedule can be advantageous for businesses and their customers, and therefore boost sales and revenue. Business owners know this and use it to their advantage.
Making sure Mobile Apps Work for everyone
However, getting from a laptop to a smartphone, as hinted at earlier, is no easy task. It takes much effort for iOS and Android developers to get there and contracts need to be set up and an additional workforce employed to get the job done. Here is a list of the most troublesome aspects of converting a website domain into a Mobile application, and problems that might result on the App itself for users:
- Sites take too long to load and need constant updating and Bug improvements.
- Users find that glitches in payments and the handling of money can be sketchy and unreliable
- Images are too large or not scaled correctly for mobile devices, leaving users with an incomplete interface and judgment of the website/organization based on its mobile performance
- Video files are delayed and don’t play on mobile devices because the Video-width and Video-height components are incompatible
- Mobile service is a huge factor. Consumers might be quick to blame the company without understanding that their service provider is to blame for lag times
- Small companies with great platforms might not have the annual or quarterly budget to make App technology a reality for scaling up.
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A 2018 Forrester study reported that 43 percent of banking customers in the U.S. used mobile phones to complete banking transactions in a three month period. Why is this important? Well, for one, it shows that business is booming for organizations that convert to some type of smartphone usage.
Increasingly, Americans are browsing their favorite websites on their smartphones— for the convenience of being on the go, or not having to set up at an in-home office, or simply because of lifestyle choices. For city dwellers especially, research finds, having a smartphone attached to our bodies at all times is becoming the norm in society, and the younger generation of millennials and Gen-Xers reports having an increased usage time on smartphones compared with older generations.
Businesses, and especially startups, can capitalize on societal changes by making their web based platform into a mobile application. But this process will also be dependent on finding a solid team of mobile application developers. That’s the catch.
The science of addiction
If there’s one reason app usage has become so addicting it’s because of the reward inducing behavior built into our brains. We don’t have to be playing games on our phones for certain neurotransmitters to fire. When using Apps, as Trevor Haynes, a neurobiological researcher at Harvard University, explains:
“Your dopamine centers have been primed by [those] initial negative outcomes to respond robustly to the sudden influx of social appraisal. This use of a variable reward schedule takes advantage of our dopamine-driven desire for social validation, and it optimizes the balance of negative and positive feedback signals until we’ve become habitual users.”
Source: Harvard/SITN
While there is a darker side to dopamine and addiction, the research also proves how a reward schedule can be advantageous for businesses and their customers, and therefore boost sales and revenue. Business owners know this and use it to their advantage.
Making sure Mobile Apps Work for everyone
However, getting from a laptop to a smartphone, as hinted at earlier, is no easy task. It takes much effort for iOS and Android developers to get there and contracts need to be set up and an additional workforce employed to get the job done. Here is a list of the most troublesome aspects of converting a website domain into a Mobile application, and problems that might result on the App itself for users:
- Sites take too long to load and need constant updating and Bug improvements.
- Users find that glitches in payments and the handling of money can be sketchy and unreliable
- Images are too large or not scaled correctly for mobile devices, leaving users with an incomplete interface and judgment of the website/organization based on its mobile performance
- Video files are delayed and don’t play on mobile devices because the Video-width and Video-height components are incompatible
- Mobile service is a huge factor. Consumers might be quick to blame the company without understanding that their service provider is to blame for lag times
- Small companies with great platforms might not have the annual or quarterly budget to make App technology a reality for scaling up.
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