With over 7 billion mobile users worldwide, there’s almost one device for every person on the planet. Not surprisingly, the most popular apps are dominated by social media, messaging and entertainment platforms. But consumers are also shopping and managing finances via mobile devices. And while most users are accustomed to waiting a few seconds for a web application response, mobile users are less forgiving and expect an instant reaction to their swipes and taps.
There is tight competition for user attention in today’s highly connected digital world and little tolerance for app crashes and slow page loads. Mobile users expect feature-rich, robust functionality at any given time. Anything else will inevitably lead to brand damage, reduced employee productivity, and possible lost revenue. These realities raise several important questions. Are service performance and response times within user expectations? Are your teams constantly putting out fires to fix user-reported bugs?
Mobile apps may seem simple on the surface because they are generally designed to be very user friendly. But the reality is that they are complex and may include many interconnected digital services, open-source solutions, and run in containerized environments hosted across multiple cloud services.
While you may not have control over what happens with hardware and operating system issues on mobile devices, you can harness the power of monitoring tools to provide the necessary insight leading to better mobile user experiences.
1. Stay on top of where the mobile sector winds of change are heading
“Knowledge is power.” So goes the famous saying. Philosophy lessons aside, the point (and reality) is that the mobile sector is incredibly dynamic and growing at breakneck speed. It pays to know where the industry sector is heading in order to better compete in terms of website performance expectations via mobile devices — and how better to monitor for optimal service to the customer base.
Here’s a brief rundown by the numbers:
- 255 billion mobile app downloads in 2022
- Average consumer spend via mobile apps in Q3 2022 was $4.86 USD per person
- By 2024, nearly half (42.9%) of all ecommerce purchases will be made via a mobile device
- Mobile commerce volume is expected to hit $620.97 billion by 2024
- 49% year-over-year increase from Q1 2020 to Q2 2021 in mobile app usage due to COVID-19 pandemic
Source: statista.com, shopify
2. Find and fix mobile issues before your users report them with the right monitoring tools
It’s fantastic when mobile developers can quickly fix and address issues that are reported to them by users. But there’s a much better approach to testing that locates those errors before your user base does. The right monitoring tools empower you to simulate user interactions on your mobile applications on a set schedule so you can identify the problem and fix issues before they impact end users. By employing the right types of monitoring — API monitoring , website availability, web performance monitoring, and transaction monitoring — there’s a much higher likelihood that key teams and management will know about issues as they happen in real-time before brand reputation suffers.
3. Know exactly what visitors experience on your site on mobile devices
Mobile apps aren’t just for entertainment or social media management anymore. They are increasingly complex and handle critical business transactions in banking, travel and more. Any additional seconds in a workflow can cause noticeable changes in abandonment rates leading to lost business. Mobile website monitoring allows test your site on iOS and Android devices to emulate and collect important data on certain processes and transactions, such as logging in or adding items to cart. Monitoring performance metrics and stats between different geographies, devices, or operating systems can be incredibly valuable towards formulating plans to improve the performance of these critical flows. Uptrends provides insight into website performance from 231 worldwide locations.
4. Add Real User Monitoring (RUM) to the mix
Uptrends’ Real User Monitoring extends on the web analytics tools you already use. A common approach would be to use RUM to see how your website actually performs from a user’s perspective and get insight into profiling these users from tools like Google Analytics.
RUM allows you to filter data, giving you insight into load times on mobile devices and how they compare to desktop, and how speed differs depending on the geographical location of your users. This information can be used to identify where, when, and why your site is consistently underperforming.
5. Ensure third-party vendors are meeting SLAs and other service agreements
Third-party vendors, like CDNs, are increasingly responsible for contributing some of the content that provides the rich customer experience and robust performance of applications. However, they can also be the source of weak spots threatening the smooth functionality that makes up your mobile app and the one weak link that can be the source of a poor customer experience. While it may be true that you cannot have complete control over performance levels of third-party integrations, SLA monitoring lets you put eyes on potential week links, catch issues before your users do, and hold third-party providers accountable to their SLAs.
6. Make sure mobile application updates function as intended
Teams used to schedule periodic releases around their customers’ low usage times. However, mobile apps receive much more frequent feature updates these days. Each update you push out is a potentially precarious situation that, if not handled correctly, could lead to a host of frustrated users.
The right mix of monitoring tools are ideal for keeping track of your releases as they are pushed out to end user and catch bugs and other problems before your customers start pointing them out on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and the like. By following best practices, monitoring your website, and focusing on improving speed and performance issues, you’ll help ensure your site offers a high quality user experience for users on both mobile and desktop. Don’t take our word for it. Sign up for our Free Trial to take Uptrends best-in-class monitoring solutions for a test drive yourself.
