Milliseconds matter to mobile-app users. Is yours up to speed?
In a previous post, “Making your app a killer app,” I made the case that the secret to great smartphone applications is development focus on performance . In my post, I pointed out that developers of top applications often make updates to improve performance, and that customers have negative reactions to applications that are slow. In a February 2015 study, 80 percent of users said that application performance was “very important” or “somewhat important” to their continued use of a mobile app.
Tell an engineer that her app is slow, and she’ll ask, “What does ‘slow’ mean?” Can we quantify what a slow user experience is? We can. In research conducted in the late 1960s, it was established that anything that takes less than 0.1 seconds appears to the human brain as instantaneous. If it takes 1 second, you have not lost the customer’s train of thought, but there is a perception of delay. More than 1 second, and your customers start thinking about other things—perhaps that e-mail they need to send to their boss. If it takes more than 10 seconds, there is a complete contextual break, and your customer is now multitasking.
Bottom line: Anything that takes more than 1 second will seem slow, but anything you can do to improve performance will increase customer engagement.
Is a half-second delay that bad?
Yes. In fact, in a 2013 study by technology solutions provider Radware in which researchers monitored the brain patterns of users, a 0.5-second connection speed delay on a website increased frustration by 26 percent and decreased user engagement by 8 percent.
More than 10 years ago, Wal-Mart and Amazon separately conducted their own independent studies and found that every 0.1-second delay (on their desktop websites) decreased their revenue by 1 percent. So, if making money is important to your business, eking out every fraction of a second is worth it.
Now that you have a better grasp on what “slow” means in the context of a mobile app, I’ll use my next post to cover some simple networking tests and optimizations you can make to take your application from slow to fast. Also check out AT&T’s free tool, the Application Resource Optimizer that can test your application’s network performance, and show you areas of potential improvement.
You can also look into how AT&T Mobile Application Development solutions can help get your apps up to the speed your customers demand.