Mobile apps are serious business, and mobile app performance is key. With this in mind, APMdigest asked industry experts – from analysts and consultants to the top vendors – to recommend the best ways to ensure mobile app performance. Part 2 of the list is all about mobile app design.
Start with Part 1 of the List
5. MOBILE APP DESIGN: KEEP IT SIMPLE
Access to information and business apps is essential for a successful mobile performance. Eliminating complexity in mobile app design while monitoring the health of the supporting IT infrastructure makes for a better end user experience. Because of uncontrollable factors outside the office such as inconsistent Wi-Fi strength, it's best to keep it simple.
Aaron Kelly
VP of Product Management, Ipswitch
6. MOBILE APP DESIGN: MINIMIZE NETWORK REQUESTS
Aside from proper back-end load testing, we found that the best performance gains are obtained by minimizing the number of network requests the mobile app requires.
Alon Girmonsky
Founder and CEO, BlazeMeter
7. MOBILE APP DESIGN: OPTIMIZE CONTENT
If you're not designing your apps with mobile users in mind, you are taking a big risk in terms of attracting and retaining your customers, and gaining their loyalty and commitment to coming back. Make sure to adjust your apps for mobile users. Even if you are using a third party to develop your mobile app, make sure to instrument the app itself to get some real user visibility. Also, if you try to push the same content out over mobile as you do over web, the site's performance will suffer. We repeatedly see organizations with fantastic web performance fall flat with mobile because they tried to push out the same content regardless of the device used to access it. If you want to win in today's omni-channel environment then you have to realize the playing field is not the same as it was a few years ago. You need to provide a strong digital experience across all channels and tailor it for mobile users."
David Jones
APM Evangelist, Dynatrace
Some of the most prominent sites on the Internet frequently experience performance issues thanks to oversized images that are not properly formatted for mobile usage. Mobile sites don't actually require full-sized images, and with an ever increasing portion of Internet traffic coming from mobile devices, optimizing images can serve as an easy means for companies to avoid losing users.
Kent Alstad
VP of Acceleration, Radware
Reduce the size of the site. We see many people who have a responsive site design, which scales the elements to fit the device on which the site is being viewed, fails to shrink images, Javascript, etc. When you're delivering 2 MB of data through images and video files, site usability design isn't enough to give you good performance; you have to shave off as many bytes as you can.
Drit Suljoti
Chief Product Officer, Catchpoint
8. MOBILE APP DESIGN: NATIVE APPS
While it's tempting to jump start your app development by using a hybrid approach, sharing code and resources with an existing web-based application, your mobile users will often have less optimal network conditions than your desktop web-based users. The best way to ensure mobile performance is to develop a native app, using local resources whenever possible.
Tana Jackson
VP of Engineering, SOASTA
Read Part 3 of 18 Ways to Ensure Mobile App Performance, covering the production side including Application Performance Management, monitoring and more.