Study: Poor Performance Will Result In Loss Of App Users
By Ally Orlando, contributing writer
Nearly 90 percent of people stop using apps due to poor performance, an AppDynamics App Attention Span Study reports. The research, conducted earlier this month, shows users’ attention spans shorten for poorly performing apps — an important discovery for businesses that rely on website or mobile apps.
A key finding is that poor performance, including slow loading and browsing, is the top frustration of respondents when using mobile apps and websites — especially among women and millennials. Women are more likely than men to feel frustrated and stressed when experiencing problems with apps and 74 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds have deleted up to five apps due to performance issues.
A poor user experience can severely impact business revenue and customer satisfaction, especially in today’s digitally-driven economy. In fact, according to Kleiner Perkins, mobile applications alone account for one quarter of all internet traffic. Forrester Research also projects U.S. mobile commerce sales alone to top $100 billion in 2014.
“Web and mobile apps now play a prominent role in people's lives and are central to a huge, growing digital economy,” says Tom Levey, technical evangelist at AppDynamics.
The AppDynamics findings suggest that for these reasons, pressure will increase for businesses. Of those responding to the survey, 65 percent agreed that their expectations of app performance are increasing over time and almost half of all respondents said they are less tolerant of problems with apps or websites than they used to be. Additionally, users are losing patience for apps that perform poorly. Eighty-six percent of respondents deleted or uninstalled at least one mobile app for that reason.
Despite the threat that these findings could pose to businesses, the research also shows that smartphone and tablet owners are likely to reward businesses with satisfactory mobile apps. Thirty percent said they would spend more money with an organization that had a good mobile app, and 29 percent said they would pay more for a product or service if the organization's app performed better than its competitors’.
“In so many ways, for so many businesses, success is now defined by software, as customers expect seamless performance and reliability from all digital services, says Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of AppDynamics. “Tellingly, our study shows that 19 percent of respondents believe they are more loyal to an app than a brand.”
“The bottom line is that organizations must deliver a reliable, consistent mobile experience to grow and protect increasingly important mobile device revenue streams and customer interactions, even under the most demanding situations,” Bansal says. “Key to this is having the necessary depth of application intelligence in real time so that any problems can be anticipated or rapidly solved.”