POV Mobile. Special Edition, 2017. by POSSIBLE

A POSSIBLE Publication

SPECIAL EDITION

State of Mobile: WWDC, Google I/O, Mobile World Congress, CES 2017 Jeff Hasen, Ben Reubenstein and Jay Graves Originally published in The Drum.

Best in Show: My Top Picks for UX/UI Danielle Reubenstein

Scratching the Surface: Why Testing on Mobile Is Different Meghan Dever

Going Native Chris Fox

VUI: How to Design for an Invisible Interface Danielle Reubenstein Originally published in Mobile Marketer.

With the leadership of Ben Reubenstein, POSSIBLE Mobile’s team of masterminds have built apps that have been continuously featured on top 100 mobile app lists. The team’s apps were downloaded over 25 million times in 2016, and continue to accelerate year after year. POSSIBLE Mobile has reaped the rewards of pushing the mobile envelope and they enjoy working with clients who share the same courageous nature.

Get Smart About Your Mobile Notification Strategy Brad Gagne Originally published on Urban Airship.

POSSIBLE Mobile is not only a leader in mobile, they also have in-depth experience executing on a wide variety of

Put Your Users First: It Benefits the Brand Ben Reubenstein

The Roadmap Less Traveled Brad Rossini

with design and development teams to ensure the applications are built with the right balance between business and user objectives. The team continuously consumes data to improve their applications, and they are also well suited to optimize entire marketing programs.

While the team specializes in native app analytics, their expertise doesn’t end there. They’ve worked with many clients to design and implement end-to-end analytics solutions across web, mobile apps, TV connected devices, wearables and voice. The POSSIBLE Mobile approach to digital measurement and optimization is both device and vendor-agnostic.

Responsive Web vs. Mobile App: Where Should You Invest? Brad Gagne

Count on and Plan for Even Greater Expectations from Mobile Users Jeff Hasen Originally published on SailThru.

Comprised of true mobile craftspeople, POSSIBLE Mobile marries management consulting and software development to design and build high-quality apps for the brands you love. The team applies their passion and deep understanding for the mobile space to deliver custom user experiences for a variety of audiences. The Android and iOS developers, creative designers, management consultants, and strategists don’t just create mobile solutions, they execute top-tier mobile products that are intuitive, appealing, and consistently engaging to your community. Some of the top brands that trust their mobile experiences to POSSIBLE Mobile include

Turner Sports, JetBlue,

PGA Tour, GSK, CNN, Major League Soccer, Pac-12, and the list continues.

other platforms, including on the Alexa

Voice Service, Chromecast, Apple TV, Apple Watch, Android

Wear, and Roku. MLS Live showcases POSSIBLE Mobile’s knowledge of developing apps for a multitude of different devices including Chromecast, Apple Watch, and Android Wear. The team’s expertise in Android and iOS development can also be seen through apps such as JetBlue, PGA Tour, and Pac-12. POSSIBLE Mobile’s analytics practice is also a key differentiator in the native app development space. They work closely

POSSIBLE Mobile pinpoints the intersection between what a user wants and the business goals of the client. After all, it’s not just about making something beautiful, it’s about making something that works. For an in-depth look at their insights and capabilities, visit possiblemobile.com.

Editor in Chief Rebecca Bedrossian, POSSIBLE Portland

Contributing Editor Alexandra Austin,

Design & Art Direction Paz Ulloa, POSSIBLE Costa Rica Tony Aguero, POSSIBLE Portland

Producer Arce Caban, POSSIBLE Portland

POSSIBLE Mobile Denver

What Reduces Your App Churn? Brad Gagne

Four Problems Your App Architecture Should Solve Bradford Dillon

Copy Editors Laura Wolf, POSSIBLE Seattle Melissa Beseda, POSSIBLE Seattle Liz Fairchild, POSSIBLE Portland

Printer B&B bbprintsource.com POSSIBLE is a WPP Digital agency. possiblemobile.com possible.com

stroll through the virtual mall in hopes of finding

From desktop to handheld— what a difference a decade makes. In 2007 the iPhone launched, the next year the App Store opened, and my life fundamentally changed. Prior to this, my career had been entirely based on delivering digital experiences on the web—via the desktop monitor. Now it was thrown onto that small, 3.5” screen. The ensuing 10 years brought much in the way of innovation and we saw two main players emerge. Apple and Google, pillars of the mobile platform, take very different approaches to how they relate to users one tap at a time. Today, the Android and iOS screens are larger than they once were and the underlying tech much faster, but the biggest changes in mobile are the required skills and perspectives required to deliver a compelling digital experience. Our team now includes strategists, software engineers, designers, UI/UX experts, quality assurance engineers, project managers, business analysts, and account teams. Each brings a key component to today’s complex mobile landscape. On the following pages you’ll find a variety of articles covering everything from the practical applications of our craft to fundamental strategic approaches. The common thread? Mobile experiences drive our daily lives; our team has a passion for constructing those experiences and we do it at scale. Enjoy.

Ben Reubenstein iPhone Nerd President, POSSIBLE Mobile Denver

#WeArePOSSIBLE

APPLE SETS UP A DECISION BETWEEN PRIVACY AND PERSONALIZATION Jeff Hasen Mobile Strategist, POSSIBLE Mobile Seattle While way short of a doomsday scenario, marketers hearing about the coming autoplay video blocking and anti-tracking options on Safari should view the news out of Apple’s WWDC 2017 as a call to up their games. It is logical to believe that given the choice, some mobile users will elect to separate themselves from brand messages. The numbers in the US, at least, say that smartphone owners have yet to make that decision. In fact, despite the availability of multiple enabling sources, 94 percent of mobile ad blocking happens in Asia-Pacific, according to PageFair’s 2017 Ad Block Report.

Will this change with Apple’s next version of its operating system? We need to know more, especially if and when the announced desktop functionality will make its way to iOS. In the meantime, mobile marketers must work to improve the experiences that they deliver. Too often, ads are intrusive, not relevant to individuals, and fall too short of a level of creativity that fits into the compelling category. Surely, some mobile users block ads and shun other marketing because they can. However, others choose to exchange their personal information for value. In fact,

75 percent of consumers are more likely to buy from a retailer that recognizes them by name, recommends options based on past purchases, or knows their purchase history, according to Accenture. The key for brands is to use the gathered personal information wisely and to not be creepy, especially when more blocking options—such as the one announced by Apple—become available. Beyond ads, despite the absence of an announcement on a new iPhone—widely rumored for the Fall 2017— Apple’s two-and-a-half-hour keynote brought much for marketers to consider: One could argue that the only thing more hyped in mobile than the Apple Wallet has been augmented reality. And there were significant strides made with each.

First, Apple unveiled a person-to-person Apple Pay option that enables the easy transfer of money in seconds through iMessage. This certainly will bring new users into the payment world and make mobile owners more comfortable in transacting without cash, checks, or PayPal. The ramifications for marketers are many, including the need for retailers to bring in mobile payment options. Apple claimed that half of US retailers will have Apple Pay by year’s end. Those that don’t will be in danger of being at a competitive disadvantage. The AR advancements are noteworthy, in part, because the ease of inserting differentiated experiences into apps will give many marketers reasons to step on the gas pedal and create environments to help sell products and separate their apps from those of their competitors. Surely, some brands will move from thinking that a mobile website is sufficient given the new functionality in apps and the reach to iOS users. The most anticipated announcement delivered a home speaker now known as HomePod, which will go on sale in December 2017. What was most interesting was the heavy concentration on sound—not Siri. HomePod was positioned as the best way to play music in your home, not as an Amazon Echo or GoogleHome slayer. This may be the only way that Apple could go, given the still unsatisfactory experience of Siri. We expected lots of talk about improvements to Siri, especially since Mary Meeker reported that Google’s accuracy is at 95 percent. Instead, we got lip service that sounded more like silence. For now, at least, marketers shouldn’t view the HomePod as an effective way to sell products. Amazon and Google are the best options there. When it came to the AppleWatch, the company said that the next version of the operating system will allow for a two-way data exchange between the watch and a piece of gym equipment. But it would be prudent to believe that the wearables category is still a work in progress, especially because Apple didn’t move the needle meaningfully on the mission of telling users what the figures mean, and what the user could or should do with the information. So that should limit mass adoption. But overall, Apple showed enough innovation at WWDC 2017 to give consumers and marketers reason to believe that the upcoming introduction of the 10th anniversary edition of the iPhone will capture hearts, minds, dollars, and our attention.

AI FIRST

ADIÓS, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS

WHERE’S THE BEEF?

Ben Reubenstein

Jay Graves

Ben Reubenstein

President, POSSIBLE Mobile Denver

Chief Technology Officer, POSSIBLE Mobile Denver

President, POSSIBLE Mobile Denver

The 2017 Google I/O conference was highly focused on artificial intelligence (AI), moving on from the mobilefirst mentality. Whether it be through text, voice, or visual input, Google’s strategy hinges on knowing everything it can at that exact moment for providing maximum context to the user.

Mobile World Congress represents a macrocosm

When I arrived at CES, I first affixed a “10+ Years” ribbon to my badge, reminding me how CES is an annual pilgrimage and not just a business trip. Over the years, I’ve attended the conference as a student, as a founder, and as an executive.

Instant Apps were among the enhanced products announced at I/O. Instant Apps can not only be used as an onboarding tool for new users of a full app, but marketers can also provide slimmed down versions of the full app for certain scenarios such as attendance at a two-day music festival. This provides a very seamless experience to the user and will create a new vector for generating a sale or an app install. In all cases, Google is looking to bring user learnings into play. An example is the Smart Reply feature with Gmail, which suggests to the user quick responses to emails automatically by utilizing machine learning to adapt to the user over time.

Google has beefed up several other offerings, including Assistant. Assistant can now be leveraged by manufacturers building new hardware with a new software development kit (SDK). This approach is comparable to Amazon’s where we are now seeing devices hit the market with Alexa built in. The Actions developed for Google Home are now available from the Assistant. Actions are similar to Skills on Alexa. With Google Assistant released for iOS and already on Android, this is a significant increase in addressable audience, which will make marketers looking for scale happy.

Google Lens is also powered by this underlying AI and will be layered into multiple Google products, including Assistant and Photos. Lens can recognize things within photos reading WiFi information off of a router to login or understanding a building in a photo. Google Lens offers many potential uses for marketers, including the ability to drive sales and increase engagement.

of the technology landscape. Here are a few key themes we saw at the 2017 conference. DEVICES At this year’s show, a common theme was the amount of differentiation seen in devices. Device manufacturers are not afraid to change up the industry and push the boundaries in new directions, and MWC really gives these companies a chance to shine. VR/AR Of course, virtual and augmented reality were everywhere. Some presenters even used AR/VR to really bring the wow factor to their presentations. Seeing AR/VR flourish at MWC is evidence that they’re continuing to push themselves further into our daily lives. AUTOMOTIVE The biggest trends in terms of automotive at MWC were network connectivity, smart automation, and data aggregation over the typical Android Auto and CarPlay integration. However, POSSIBLE Mobile has seen some great new SDKs for creating telematic experiences on top of these recently introduced automotive platforms. 5G The coming 5G network was by far the most future technology exhibited at MWC. Even though standards are still being worked out, multiple providers were showing 5G network speeds and proselytizing the potential of future applications that this technology will allow.

MWC does an excellent job at bringing many different technologies together. POSSIBLE Mobile is excited to build for these technologies and provide forward-looking solutions for our clients.

AUTOMOTIVE On the automotive entertainment front, there will soon be more ways for app developers to integrate enhanced experiences into cars. When it comes to how we drive our cars, self-driving cars are coming, and much sooner than most people think. VR I look forward to the day when AR and VR are a part of our daily lives. Brands should be in experimentation mode as mainstream consumer VR is still some ways off, but it’s still fun to watch it progress. VOICE CONTROL New devices that contain the Alexa technology were everywhere. Amazon’s approach allowing developers to create both hardware and software that interacts with Alexa creates a truly customizable platform. Brands without Skills or an Alexa strategy need to be formulating one now. CREATIVITY There were plenty of new devices shown at CES to capture VR video, underwater video, and many more creativity tools. Brands and agencies should be looking at their internal workflows and tools to consider any replacements, especially regarding 360 video capture.

Bottom line? Even for this jaded veteran, CES is a great place to meet with friends, current customers, new customers, and if you’re lucky, there may be a new idea seeded into your consciousness.

Google also laid out a clear vision for how the developing world will be brought online. Starting with Android Go, each version of Android will have an Android Go configuration that will be optimized to use less bandwidth, less power, and provide apps specifically designed to use less resources. An example included YouTube Go, which allows users to select the quality of a video, download a video, and even share that video with other users while offline.

Apple is winning hands down the mobile profitability battle. In terms of sheer users with two billion monthly active Android smartphones and tablets, the Android Go strategy will help to ensure that, as mobile infects the planet, Android will be the platform it uses—and that’s important for marketers to consider. 4

The Android and iOS Human Interface Guidelines not only help make your app beautiful, these features also enhance the mobile experience of your users. Below you’ll find my top picks from the Human Interface Guidelines for Apple and Android. While there’s some overlap, my selections were chosen for the specific platform based on how helpful I found the documentation to be when solving user experience and design problems. In our ongoing quest to make apps beautiful and efficient for our clients, there are many UX/UI elements and guidelines. Here are my favorites.

ANDROID FAB BUTTONS When used correctly and according to guidelines, floating action buttons are the best of mobile experience: simple, utilitarian, and quick. FAB buttons are great for calling out one single action that every user wants at the “touch of a button”.

TAB BARS On Android, menu drawers used to be the go-to nav-

My Top Picks for UX/UI Danielle Reubenstein Executive Creative Director, POSSIBLE Mobile Denver

igation. I never cared for them much because editing app experiences is hard when you have “all the room you want” (as a client once said to me). Tab bars are a far superior navigation structure. They are limited to five main actions and are always visible. The former helps prioritize functions to keep apps light and the latter gives users an anchored sense of where users are in an app and where they can go.

CARDS Cards are not a new concept in mobile UI, but by writing requirements around them, Android solidified cards as a template that can be used to either merge varying data into a single view or separate visually similar data into different sections. Data feels smaller and more manageable when split into cards.

ANIMATION User Experience is about storytelling and motion communicates more with less. When I save something, it goes into this tab? What a better way to communicate that than to see the object fall into it. Small interactions and visual feedback are easily communicated through a well-designed animation.

APP ICONS Android app icons enjoy a freedom that Apple icons do not. They are not bound by the shape of the rounded rectangle. If designed to the guidelines, Android app icons should come away feeling tactile and three dimensional, as if designed with physical materials.

iOS RICH PUSH NOTIFICATIONS The only time that you can initiate a conversation with users is through push notifications. With the additional rich functionality (video, images, and action buttons) of push notifications, you can engage with users more meaningfully—before they’ve even entered your app.

3D TOUCH The ability to use a fifth direction to unlock or uncover a piece of functionality is one of my favorite things on the Apple platform and devices. Prior to 3D touch, extra features and gestures were designed for a long press that would sometimes get lost. With this new feature, experiences can be more tactile and interactive.

FONTS I love San Francisco font. As a system font, it is fabulously designed to be readable on various device sizes and from varying differences (I see you Apple TV!). It’s tall yet space saving, and can range from light and friendly to big and bold simply by selecting a weight.

TOOLBARS Toolbars are one of my favorite ways to communicate available actions in context. The ability to hide toolbars when interacting with the view also make it a non-invasive way to add functionality to a busy view.

SIZE CLASSES AND MULTITASKING Size classes are a tough concept to explain clearly; instead of designing for every possible layout and device size, size classes are split into either regular or compact—which is supposed to translate into a design fit for every device. It wasn’t until multitasking was introduced that size classes really started to sing for me. Now I cannot create without this essential design guideline.

Of the features I mention, cards are my top favorite. Especially with the changes to the Apple App Store coming with iOS 11. There’s something so clean about being able to let content shine through in its own little boxes and using cards to create templates for recurring data types.

Meghan Dever Designer, POSSIBLE Mobile Denver

Every design task reaps benefits from doing user testing. No matter which design space you practice in, user testing provides valuable feedback you cannot get from inside the walls of your design team. However, when it comes to mobile, user testing is a bit more complicated, and the primary reason is in the name: “mobile.” Mobile design exists everywhere, on many device sizes and platforms. Even when we are targeting a niche market and know our users well, we will never be able to predict when and where our designs will come to life. To understand why testing on mobile is different, you have to understand the platform. Designers who live and breathe mobile know that their work is influenced by the platform, as it should be. Apple and Google share their user interface guidelines to give us a strong base to build on. We are given well-researched documentation crafted by the leaders of UX design. Throwing this out would be comparable to throwing out the rules of Gestalt. We design for users who know their platform and have learned how to navigate it.

LOOKBACK +Pros

For instance, navigating a segmented controller in iOS or tapping a floating action button in Android becomes second nature. Designing on mobile requires you to begin with a good foundation of these guidelines. You want your app to feel familiar the first time users open it. When creating an application that strays away from these guidelines, designers should ask themselves:

> Records user and screen while they interact with the prototype > Available on both iOS and Android devices > Works with InVison, Proto.io, and Marvel prototypes > Low monthly fee of $29/month for unlimited testing

“What value am I adding by making this different?”

-Cons

This will help you determine if your design execution benefits or hinders the user experience. There are times when straying from the guidelines makes sense. Consider a situation where the loading time will be longer than normal and a standard progress indicator fails to keep the user engaged. Using an unorthodox transition to hold a user’s attention is better in this case, but should be recognized as a custom transition that needs to be tested. By doing this, you are able to address these discrepancies in user testing in order to check their effectiveness. Although there might be other goals when your design enters the user-testing phase, deviations from platform guidelines should always be tested. Once you determine what the focus of your user testing will be, it’s time to decide what type of testing will be the most beneficial. Services available online have made user testing more attainable for designers. These services work with the prototyping software you build in (InVision, Proto.io, etc.) and distribute your prototype to users remotely or provide you with a link to distribute to users yourself. This option allows you to circulate your prototype with little effort, giving you more quantitative results. Using services to perform testing tends to be more effective in the final stretches of a design launch and soon thereafter. Getting numerical results rather than an in-depth analysis of user flows provides a design team with the validation they need to make small tweaks and changes before and after a release. If you intend to use a testing service to carry out your testing needs, it’s important to research the service you’ve chosen. Some software will only test a functional prototype while others are able to test basic wireframes. For the sake of simplicity, let’s focus on a scenario where you want to test a prototype in the early wireframe stage. Here are some services that support mobile testing in the early prototyping phase:

> Designers have to find their own testers

Lookback is a bare-bones testing service that gives you the most bang for your buck. With a low-risk monthly fee that doesn’t charge you per test, you are able to distribute your prototype to as many or as few users as necessary. All this sounds great, but if your team doesn’t use a recruiting agency or have an experienced team member to handle the task of finding users, I would consider another option. VALIDATELY +Pros > Hear and see users interact with your prototype > Supports InVision, Marvel, and Axure prototypes > Offers moderated and unmoderated options > Offers a range of recruiting options > Provides analytics and reporting

-Cons > This service can get pricey, with options ranging from $199-$399/month

Validately gives you a variety of choices when it comes to test moderation and recruiting. They provide you with 36 studies (group of recordings) per year, but give you the option to add another 36 studies for an extra $99 dollars. This is definitely a long-term and more expensive solution, but gives you more wiggle room to customize different testing scenarios you encounter.

If you want more qualitative feedback on your prototype, consider taking user testing into your own hands. LOOP11 +Pros > Provides extras like heat maps and path analyses > Once tests have been completed, reporting is done for you > Fair price of $149-$199/month

-Cons > You have to find your own users, although Loop11 provides some resources to help with that > Geared towards website testing

This program provides a middle-of-the-road option as far as pricing goes. Although this platform is geared towards website testing and consulting, it recently added support for mobile prototyping using any interface that can be built in InVision, Axure, or JustInMind. USER TESTING +Pros > Works with most prototyping tools including InVision, Marvel, Flinto, Axure, JustInMind, and

Proto.io > Results are available soon after testing has been completed > Gives you the option to build your own test, or have them assist you with planning, moderating, and creating presentations for your testing results

For the right project, it makes sense to have users on-site so you can moderate their testing. This allows you to have more control over testing variables, giving you the ability to shift the focus of the test if needed. However, this does place the burden of having to find users on the internal team. Recruiting participants to test your app should not be taken lightly—the type of users you recruit will have the most influence on your test results. A large reason why you may want to consider running your own user testing when designing for mobile is the ability to control the lab environment. Desktop and mobile are used in different situations and circumstances. Desktops are stationary, and while laptops are more mobile, they move around in similar environments. This may sound miniscule, but consider the function of a fitness app. Environmental conditions will be different for each person, and each time they use the app. Let’s take a simple list-building app into consideration. Suppose I have prototyped an app that enables users to add items/tasks to a list and complete them. A user can create a grocery list, add homework items, workout routines, etc. A mobile application will most likely have more than one primary environment, much like our list-building app. To improve testing results on mobile, designers should have testers perform tasks in primary environments to see how users interact with their app on the go. In a perfect world, extending the testing timeline to include multiple environments would not be an issue, but if scope doesn’t allow for that, making a few adjustments to a typical testing process could help. One option could be recruiting fewer users to allow more time for each user to test the application in multiple environments. Another option could be trimming the tasks that users complete. Consider focusing on one or two specific tasks for the user to run through, allowing for more time to switch environments. Whatever your solution is to accommodate multiple environments, when testing a mobile application, environments should be your first consideration since they have the most influence on how your user interacts with your design.

NO MATTER HOW YOU DECIDE TO TEST YOUR APPLICATION, REMEMBER THAT THERE ARE CHALLENGES UNIQUE TO MOBILE THAT REQUIRE CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING. User testing is just one step in the process to creating a user-centric design. Platform guidelines, device sizes, and environments are only a sample of variables that need to be heavily weighed in each step of the design process.

-Cons > Expensive: the individual plan will run you $49 per test, while the enterprise plan varies

The most common service when it comes to user testing. A great option if your company uses more than one prototyping tool to carry out user testing. Both plans offer access to basic testing capabilities, but you have to opt for the enterprise plan in order to unlock more extensive research options. 8

Chris Fox Design Lead, POSSIBLE Mobile Denver

“Above all else, our brand wants to create a unique experience for our users.”

SOUND FAMILIAR? Being unique is a choice that should be entered into carefully when it comes to mobile design. Users have grown very familiar with their devices over the years. Gone are the days when a user would expect (and even embrace) to have to learn a new app and spend time doing so. Innovative undertakings are always encouraged but should be thoughtfully considered if they fit the user’s expectations. Today’s users expect familiarity. If an app does not function as expected, then it will be poorly perceived. If it’s familiar to the user, then it feels intuitive. Uniqueness for the sake of being unique is contrary to usability. From the very beginning, users are introduced to the native apps that come with their devices. This cohesive ecosystem forms expectations for how subsequent apps that they download should feel and function. This is the primary aim of Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and Google’s Material Design—to provide a method that will immediately feel familiar to the user and meet those expectations. We call this a “native experience.” These guidelines form a foundation for functionality. With that foundation established, we can integrate the brand’s ambitions and their own guidelines. There will always be business goals that drive decisions in the design process. The HIG and Material Design allow us to create the least amount of friction for users to achieve these goals. Knowing when to deviate for the benefit of the brand and the user is crucial.

To know if the product benefits from deviation, user testing is required to validate that the deviation feels natural. By user testing throughout the process, we can ensure that the innovation remains intuitive, improves usability, and adds value. This validation will take more time, resources, and, you guessed it, cost. And that’s okay, but it should be an exception. Creating an exceptional experience is the goal, not breaking convention.

Apple has embraced consistency from its very beginnings. The first Human Interface Guidelines were released in 1987 for the Macintosh. This is what created loyalty for Apple’s products—though most users would never be able to pinpoint it.

Good UX should be transparent. “Graphics are not merely cosmetic. When they are clear and consistent, they contribute greatly to ease of learning, communication,

and understanding. The success of graphic design is measured in terms of the user’s satisfaction and success in understanding the interface.” —Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, 1987 Apple created a foundation to rely on, ensuring that their users would feel comfortable. They have honed that foundation through the years, but many of the core principles remain. Apple has learned from errors so brands don’t have to. Similarly, Google has learned a lot in a long, strange journey towards unification of its Android platform. Comparably, Material Design is still in its infancy, but allows a consistency that we can follow to make an app (and the user) feel at home on the platform. Following conventions provides a solid baseline, helping to avoid pitfalls and delays. What these guidelines don’t do is restrict brands from creating something great. They can be anywhere from a conversation starter to a pillar. They can instill confidence and provide a means to speed up our process. Guidelines allow efficiency in development and provide risk mitigation by following a standard that will be successful and polished. They allow creative teams to focus on the real challenges that brands bring to the table, helping them decide when deviation is worth the reward.

Danielle Reubenstein Executive Creative Director, POSSIBLE Mobile Denver

To those in the know, VUI is pronounced “vooey,” and it stands for voice user interface. It even has its own bad joke. Because voice control lacks a screen, there’s nothing to touch or look at. So it’s an interface without a “face.”

If you think it’s a gimmick, however, think again. The promise of VUI is huge. If we create intelligent auditory interfaces that understand speech and context, we’ll be able to deliver what people ask for, hands-free, and with almost no effort. For a quick breakdown, Siri and Wolfram are stepsiblings with a shared lineage. Both are glorified search bars that serve users by supplying answers to queries. Siri can take on extra tasks by accessing other apps and software development kits, but everything else becomes a web search. Next we have the conversationalists—Alexa and Google Assistant—both of which power numerous devices and applications, such as Google’s Allo and Home, and Amazon’s Echo and (soon) Ford cars. These two can, to a limited degree, talk to you and provide functionality. They both adeptly handle search, play

audio, and answer questions in a conversational way. That said, there are several differences between them. Alexa currently has an SDK and is open to third-party developers, while Google plans to do the same soon. Home’s Google Assistant can use its understanding of data to be personalized and predictive. Alexa is not as user-centric and doesn’t rely on that type of personalization.

CONVERSATIONAL Human beings do not usually dictate, they converse. As a result, brands should work towards making the tone of their interactions informal and conversational, while not straying too far from the personality of the assistant itself. The more you make users deviate from their normal conversational patterns, the more difficult the interaction will be.

Moving forward, we should expect VUIs to become both more conversational and widespread. Which brings up the inevitable question: How can brands get into the

In addition, you have to remember the limits of conversational interaction. “Seven, plus or minus two” is how George Miller put it in a classic research paper. We only have a limited number of things we can keep in mind, so individual answers to queries or interactions shouldn’t be too long.

act? How do we make experiences that are wanted and useful, rather than annoying? Here we have an emerging set of guidelines requiring that any assistant be conversational, natural, simple, and habitual. Let’s look at each in turn.

NATURAL Most VUIs require some unnatural communication, like a wake word, so that they can understand when they’re being spoken to. However, you should make sure that your application allows users to make requests that are as natural as possible. You should not only account for the most common way people ask for something, but also as many variations as you can find. If you ask an app to show you a recipe for Chicken à la King, it should show you one. But if you say, “Tell me how to make Chicken à la King,” or “Find me Chef John’s Chicken à la King,” both of those should work too. SIMPLE We all take a mental leap when we talk to a computer, undergoing a training phase in which we learn how to use an app. That’s why great voice apps always start out simple, doing one thing well. Then, with every iteration or upgrade, you can add a new function. It’s a crawlwalk-run mentality. And remember: even as an app grows more complex, information hierarchies should still be kept shallow, as users can easily get lost. HABITUAL Because your app is invisible, it can easily be forgotten. Instead, make it something people can use every day. The list skill on Alexa works well because it is something you can use multiple times a day. Creating an interface without a face may seem a complex undertaking, but with good experience design and a willingness to take baby steps, we’ll be well on our way to achieving the promise of VUI. We will be able to give orders, receive information, and get things done effortlessly. One day.

For now, let’s work smart and together, one app at a time.

Brad Gagne VP, Device Analytics, POSSIBLE Mobile Seattle Mobile notification and message centers continue to evolve into live, interactive spaces to communicate with your customers. The opportunity to re-engage users while adding value to their experience has been shown to reduce churn and add real business value to brands. For example, when my favorite sports app sends me a push notification that my home team is about to pull off the upset, I’m likely pleased. If they follow up with a notification that includes a video clip from the “play of the game,” it might excite me enough to open up the app and start following along. But what if that notification stream becomes a live game play-by-play? Too much? Or perhaps I’m left wondering why the app didn’t alert me when the game first kicked off.

The options for how and when to best communicate with your audiences are endless. For many users, the default notification settings are all that stands between loving your app and annoying them to the point they turn off notifications completely. So how do you determine the optimal cadence and triggers for your audience? Start by measuring the right things. USE A COMBINATION OF METRICS TO IMPROVE YOUR MOBILE APP NOTIFICATIONS STRATEGY For app marketers, it’s inspiring to know that your notifications drove a million launches. You might see push notification users engaging at a rate 50 percent higher than direct launches. But by focusing on those two metrics alone as your KPIs, you would be completely unaware of the declining percentage of users responding. Worse yet, you might not realize that many are turning off notifications completely or uninstalling the app.

KPIs followed in isolation become vanity metrics. We suggest using a combination of mobile analytics that indicate reply volume, along with in-app engagement and opt-out rates to improve your notification strategy in the short term—without increasing churn in the long term. Your KPIs should be monitored consistently, with benchmarks set at key moments to account for seasonality, campaigns, or app updates. These same KPIs should be applied to any tests conducted.

FINE TUNE TO AVOID TUNE OUT Circling back to the matter of optimizing your mobile notifications strategy: It’s always best to start broad. While A/B/n content tests and landing environments are highly valuable in determining what inspires people to act, the question of “when” may determine how often they will read them in the first place. Triggers and cadence are two levers that you can pull to tune your mobile notifications strategy for your entire audience. In some cases, they can be mutually exclusive. For example, a retail app may want to test sending push notifications to users triggered every time a sale begins, compared to a weekly “flyer” that promotes the best deals that week. A travel app could test award-point bonus opportunities compared to hot hotel deals, examining them exclusively or together. The focus of the exercise is to learn broad preferences of your audience. This will inform default notification settings, as well as the types of personalized notification settings you enable. BOTTOM LINE Like the marketing mantra says, “delivering the right message, at the right time, to the right audience” will always be the end goal. But in the mobile app world, it seems that timing is everything. A broad, well-planned strategy to optimize when mobile notifications are delivered will have both immediate and long-standing benefits.

USER ONBOARDING, “WHAT CAN YOU DO FOR ME?”

DEEP LINKS

It takes work to have users download an app, and first impressions mean a lot. That first impression should be owned by the app creator, not Apple. But all too often apps give their users a smack in the face upon launch with a permission dialogue from Apple. Apps definitely need access to location and the ability to send pushes for engagement, but those prompts don’t need to be immediate.

Experiences scale. On mobile, the most basic experience scale is mobile web to native apps. Having proper deep links ensures that users visiting mobile web, tapping on a call to action in email, or potentially tapping a message delivered via SMS will drop the user to the best experience on their device. This is an effort that you must get right and requires coordination between websites, apps, and third parties. It is also important to keep up to date as Google and Apple change these behaviors between releases.

Instead, developers can choose when these prompts appear. A large part of user experience testing and refinement should be dedicated to nailing this interaction. The deployment of analytics helps to fine tune the process over time. A good strategy for product owners is to delete their app on their phone regularly, say once a week, and re-install it to go through the onboarding process again. All too often product owners become blind to the new users of an app. Don’t let this be you! STOP LOGGING ME OUT If your app requires an account to use, don’t log your user out. Ever. There is nothing that tarnishes users’ impression of your product more than logging them out after they’ve gone through the trouble of creating an account and logging in. When is the last time that Uber logged you out? Facebook? Twitter? Your email? They don’t. When the app upgrades, don’t log the user out. When the app restarts, don’t log your user out. Just don’t do it. My favorite example of this is the WebEx app. I depend on this app for a majority of my meetings. I often travel for work and the other day, as I went to join my first meeting on the way to the airport, I was logged out. The app had recently updated. I have what feels like a million usernames and passwords, so I used a password manager to pull up the login info. Logged in, took call. Ate some breakfast. Went for call two and, hot damn, it logged me out again. Unacceptable. It was frustrating, time wasting, and it reinforced a negative feeling about the brand.

LEARN FROM USER BEHAVIOR FOR PERSONALIZATION

Ben Reubenstein President, POSSIBLE Mobile Denver I architected my first app in 2008 with prerelease tools from Apple. Although the App Store, the phones, and the software tools have improved year over year, there are key principles that continually guide our interactions with users. The following guidance takes a user-first approach that results in better ROI for the brand.

Personalization is easier than most companies think, as long as you have a couple of building blocks. The first one is a push solution that allows for users to be placed in certain categories or tags depending on the push provider terms. As the consumer uses the app, certain behaviors can start to tag the user. If the user creates an account, tag them as logged in. If the user engages with content under a specific topic, say art, tag them with art. Over time, these tags create very targetable audiences. Modern push solutions allow for the combination of the tags to send targeted pushes for specific content. That is powerful in creating personalization with a relatively low lift. Proving personalization with these basic tactics can allow business justification for future investment.

YOU WILL NEED TO START OVER Over the last 10 years, of iOS in particular, a lot has changed. The very language you write apps with went from Objective-C to Swift. Best practices evolved, go-to libraries for things like networking matured— then faded, and frankly, technical debt grew. If you’re doing mobile at scale, there comes a time when the entire solution needs to be rethought. If you’re reading this and it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, you have probably been putting this off. Long term, refactoring is worth it. The process reinvigorates a team, causes problems to be rethought, and assumptions to be challenged. The bad news? Users will hate it no matter how much better it is. That will fade over time. Don’t get too caught up reading daily reviews and observing star ratings. RATINGS DO MATTER The basic strategy to great ratings is directing people who are happy to rate your app in the App Store and direct people who are unhappy to your product support teams. Unhappy users can give great insights into things that might actually be bugs or use cases that have not been considered. There are tools such as Apptentive for helping with this, and iOS 10.3 includes new workflows to prompt users to leave app reviews. Take time to have a strategy here. In conclusion, the most pronounced change with consumers in the mobile era is a significant increase in expectations. Delight them and they will come back for more. Disappoint them and they may never come back. What’s the insurance against disappointment?

Put the user first.

ROADMAP THE LESS TRAVELED

Brad Rossini Project Manager, POSSIBLE Mobile Denver

If you’re not planning and executing, you’re not discovering. If you’re not analyzing and adapting, you’re not evolving. Without a vision, you don’t have alignment. SO, WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN?

It’s important for companies to clearly define their product vision. From there, they should formulate a roadmap which outlines product initiatives that will help them meet their goals and effectively measure results. A product roadmap is the plan for success, and as a companies navigate this path over time, analytics, user feedback, and intuition determine how they need to adapt to effectively run a business. At POSSIBLE Mobile, we work closely with our clients to understand the decisions behind their product roadmaps. Through our discovery process, we review our client’s goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). The roadmap should align with the client’s strategic goals and metrics. We not only want to know who owns the roadmap, but also identify the key stakeholders who influence changes to the roadmap. As communication is key, it’s important to understand the roles and responsibilities of all the key players. Our discovery process allows us to start strategic relationships with our clients to help them meet their success criteria that’s driven by their specific objectives.

A SHARED VISION

SHARE YOUR ROADMAP

A great product roadmap begins with a clear vision statement. It’s best to define the vision through the consensus of key stakeholders. This can be challenging because stakeholders’ roles can range from executives to sales to technology to marketing, and a good product manager helps facilitate discussions among all of these groups.

From running a project to owning a roadmap, transparency is key. When we have visibility into a client’s roadmap, we are able to understand short-term priorities as well as comprehend where the business is heading. This allows us to evaluate priorities, dependencies, staffing needs, and how future results will be analyzed. We use this insight to help provide recommendations that will help clients meet their core business goals.

Here are some questions to ask when defining your vision: • Have we determined our user personas? • Are we creating a balance between intuition and analytics? • Will this differentiate us from our competitors? • What are our users asking us for? • What positive change will our initiatives help us achieve? • Will this solve our customers’ pain points? One way to document the key objectives and strategies of the business is to create a mind map. This involves brainstorming the vision for its products and services, then creating a visual hierarchy that shows the relationships between each key initiative and how they will meet the business objectives. Another option is a product vision board, where you define your target group, the user’s needs, the key product features, and the business goals. Whatever path you take, the idea is to create alignment within the business.

CUSTOMIZE YOUR ROADMAP Determining the right content to include in your roadmap should take precedence over the format of your roadmap. The vision that was defined early in the process should live as a supplement to the roadmap. The features should be prioritized and typically fall into a particular month or quarter. Any nice-to-have features would be grouped together for later consideration, which allows the business to adapt throughout the year as new data is gathered and new opportunities arise. Each product initiative should be articulated, including an overview of its purpose and the key tasks to accomplish it. From here, start to think about what else the business wants to track and include the most important factors in your roadmap. • Are there known budgets assigned to product initiatives? • Is there a minimum viable product if time becomes an issue? • Who will be responsible for each initiative? • Are there estimates to accompany the highest priorities? • Are there any specific dependencies to consider? • Is there any mandatory work, such as supporting a new mobile OS? • Are there any product release dates already planned? As you work through these questions, you may find the need to create multiple roadmaps, as you might have multiple platforms with unique strategies. A high-level roadmap should still be maintained to help keep alignment and identify efficiencies.

As an example, a client may be considering taking on a push notification strategy or changing their current push service. Our team provides recommendations of providers based on our past experience, our client’s needs, analytics package options, costs, support services, and much more. We’d also advise on any technical limitations and the best practices from Apple and Google for user experience. OWN YOUR ROADMAP As much as a product manager needs to be transparent with their roadmaps, they also need to take full ownership of them. They may find that stakeholders want to shift priorities last minute or close a deal and make promises without consulting anyone. This becomes even more complex when you have multiple teams or business units and they aren’t communicating well. Weekly meetings to check in on roadmap priorities can help alleviate some of the struggles. Let’s use a mobile app example, where the project team is working on an extensive refactor of an application. What happens if a client comes back to us in the middle of the development effort and says that there are additional features that must be added because another stakeholder sold work and made specific date promises to an advertising sponsor? The project team needs to figure out if they can scale to accommodate. They need to figure out if there are conflicts, such as a new functionality that needs to get added to a view already being refactored by another developer. Thus, questions about risk get introduced as well. As you ask more questions, you may realize that adapting is either easy or complex. It all starts with the product teams. If they are communicating and planning well, it becomes easier to adapt when it makes the most sense. Product roadmaps guide us. They keep us focused. They give us benchmarks. If taken seriously, a product roadmap will keep teams in sync and allow them to adapt as needed.

WHAT’S ON YOUR ROADMAP?

As an example, even though the user experience and user interface may be unique among different platforms, when teams are able to align on the timing of testing, they can mock common data states to test shared use cases. This makes it easier to troubleshoot issues to determine if it’s a product-related issue versus a backend data problem. 18

Brad Gagne VP Device Analytics, POSSIBLE Mobile Seattle

This is one of the most commonly asked questions by our commerce clients today. It is also one of the most complex. In many cases, the answer is not so much one or the other, but more a question of budget allocation and priorities. Despite the advances in mobile web user experiences, a recent survey by Adobe found that when it comes time to buy from a retailer, 57 percent of consumers preferred the mobile app buying experience over mobile web. Another study by Criteo found that average order values on native apps were nearly 40 percent higher compared to mobile websites.

SO HOW DO BRANDS DETERMINE THE OPTIMAL MIX WHEN CONSIDERING THE INVESTMENT IN MOBILE? We start by assessing where, when, and how often your unique customers are likely to buy. Then, consider how they will find you. Most of us have a favorite retailer or brand that we frequently buy from. I trust them enough to know my size, home address, and when I enter one of their stores. There is a connection I feel when they offer me something of value for the personal data I entrust them with. I enjoy being notified of products and sales that are relevant to me, and perhaps most importantly, I love the convenience of the purchase process. Conversely, there are a greater number of retailers I buy from solely because their price is competitive for the commodity I need. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want a relationship with them, nor do I want them knowing anything about me other than where to ship the goods. These examples illustrate one of the fundamental considerations when deciding between a retail app experience that enhances customer relationships versus a mobile website that simply facilitates a transaction to the widest audience.

You need to ask your analytics team several important questions: What percentage of profit is generated by repeat

purchasers over the course of time? How many are onetime buyers that only show up around sales and holidays? How profitable are orders from the former compared to the latter? How much does it cost to acquire them? What is your customer lifetime value? The answers to these questions (along with some data modeling) are a great way to begin optimizing your investments. While your customers are the primary focus, donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t lose sight of the ever-evolving nature of search indexing. For instance: a few years ago, web search indexing was profoundly influenced by the mobile investment of a brand. It seems like yesterday when organic search consultants stressed the importance of developing mobile-friendly, or responsive web sites. Search engines became aware of whether a website was viewable and fully interactive on small screens. As a result, some websites were summarily rewarded or had their credibility diminished by indexing algorithms that added weight to mobile-friendly experiences. Similarly, with the relatively recent advent of universal links and app links, we expect Google and Apple search algorithms to further reward brands that provide mobile apps that complement the web experience.

The upshot?

I’m hardly the first son-in-law to shake his head at something his wife’s mother said, but I could be the only one to do so as a result of hearing:

“How come I can’t stop my Angry Birds game on my iPhone and continue where I left off on my iPad?” It’s a great question, made greater by the fact that it was posed by an 87 year old. Upon more thought, I’m convinced that there is no way that my experience is unique. Why? Expectations of mobile users, whether they are young kids or octogenarians, are increasing as fast as the pace of innovation.

Consider this: Amazon says that a page load slowdown Jeff Hasen Mobile Strategist, POSSIBLE Mobile Seattle

of just one second could cost the company $1.6 billion in sales each year. And Google has calculated that by slowing its search results by just four-tenths of a second it could lose eight million searches per day. This would lessen opportunities for brands and significantly reduce Google’s revenue.

Optimize for mobile, or else. Users look for top-shelf experiences. Under-deliver and many will leave for a competitor and never come back. Furthermore, employees also have unmet mobile expectations. According to several studies, including a recent one conducted by ArcTouch, relatively few employees are satisfied with their company apps compared to their personal, non-work apps.

How do we meet, or even beat, those expectancies? With more collaboration between marketers and their IT counterparts.

The differentiator for brands is best-of collaboration that positively affects business outcomes. So how can we get there?

“There is nothing fundamentally different between marketing and IT,” David Chan, director of the Centre for Information Leadership at City University in London, told Computer Weekly. “It is about the culture of the organization. If the departments work together, you shouldn’t have a problem.” But how should we collaborate? Thoughtfully, with minds open, and through the sharing of understanding across functional departments. For an example of marketing and IT teaming up to top mobile users’ expectations, I’ll point to the JetBlue mobile apps built by POSSIBLE Mobile. These apps have received high reviews from users and are said to be seamless and convenient while also representing a huge breakout in an industry known too often for inconvenience and frustration. The JetBlue mobile app makes traveling more enjoyable by providing the appropriate features you would expect from the digitally-minded airline. A joint production between the airline, ROKKAN, and POSSIBLE Mobile, the JetBlue app offers air travelers a paperless mobile boarding pass to expedite the travel journey. When you launch the JetBlue app on a smartphone or tablet, the first screen always has relevant information based upon where you are in your JetBlue travel experience. Booking an upcoming trip? Check the home screen for local weather and other destination information. Time to check in? Retrieve your mobile boarding pass directly from the home screen. Unfortunately, the excellent user experience that comes with the JetBlue app is not always present in the apps we download.

According to leading app analytics firm Localytics, about one in four new app users will abandon an app after a single launch. In fact, two out of three users will have deleted an app before their 11th session. Customers value and demand high-quality apps. When leaving a one-star review, 50 percent of the time the user mentions the app’s stability and bugs. When leaving a five-star review, 60 percent of the time the user mentions speed, design, or usability.

Of course, the mobile user doesn’t care how the sausage is made. Whether 7 or 87, users only want, even demand, a better and more personal experience. It is vital that more collaboration occurs between marketers and their technology counterparts, resulting in fewer silos, smoother processes, and better apps that drive loyalty and sales. According to Forrester, mobile moments are the battleground to win, serve, and retain customers.

“I think expectations of consumers in the app environment are very high, and if you don’t get it right, it’s so glaring,” Paul Sweeney, US Director of Research at Bloomberg Intelligence, told Adweek.

Missteps are noticeable, even to old eyes. We have to do better. My mother-in-law is watching, and she is demanding answers.

Brad Gagne VP, Device Analytics, POSSIBLE Mobile Seattle

According to leading app analytics firm Localytics, about one in four new app users will abandon an app after a single launch. In fact, two out of three users will have deleted an app before their 11th session. Clearly, retaining users is becoming increasingly difficult in an environment where tens of thousands of apps compete for time and space in every possible category.

So how can your app maintain its prominent place on your customers’ devices? You can find articles all over the internet promoting strategies for creating “sticky” apps. Gamification, push notifications, and social features are just a few worth considering. While many of them are very likely to encourage retention, it is impossible to compare their value among your unique audience just by reading. At POSSIBLE Mobile, we lean heavily on behavior data to support feature development priorities. By examining user data in a thoughtful way, we can be more cost effective when allocating limited resources to optimize an app. But first things first: Thoughtful analysis is next to impossible without a carefully planned analytics implementation, so let us start there. The most important analytics consideration when trying to plan for retention optimization is to take the time to build a robust and intuitive measurement strategy. As part of the process, you should identify and tag only the key events that make an impact to your business and user experience. Over-tagging an application can make it difficult to discover and prioritize opportunities given the amount of “noise” in your data. Some examples of areas we typically focus on are video milestones, process completions, information capture, bookings, and achievements. Each event should be tracked within an appropriate hierarchy and/or contextual data model. This enables the flexibility to create intuitive ad-hoc behavior segments that might correlate with higher retention. While some analytics vendors offer far more in the way of custom segmentation capability, all the major platforms should meet your needs. POSSIBLE Mobile is agnostic when it comes to analytics vendors, but the vast majority of our clients use Google Analytics, Adobe, or Localytics.

Now that you have all your event and content tracking in place, let’s take a deeper look at how we might assess user behavior in an app to optimize retention: After monitoring traffic, content, and feature usage patterns, you should have a good understanding of where people are going and what they are doing most. The next step is to build behavior segments in your analytics platform that are based on highly used features relative to their exposure. For example, group A “responded to X alerts” or group B “watched three videos.” The goal is to discover wide behavior variations within these groups, but more specifically, which ones correlate highly with increased retention rates. Do visitors who have a greater

propensity to leverage certain app features end up staying longer? Do they do more of what we want them to do relative to others? Are they visiting more frequently over a longer time span? As we begin to see high correlations between certain features and retention, we need to take our analysis a step further. Our goal is to prove causation within our correlations. In other words, do they return more often as a result of this feature or do those that stay just happen to use more of it. In an ideal scenario, this involves a basic A/B testing tool such as Optimizely or Leanplum. If we wanted to prove that push notifications cause retention, for example, we would divide our audience into “test” and control groups. Our test group (let’s say five percent of all new users, to minimize impact) launches an app with notification settings completely hidden. Our control group maintains all of the available features. Now let’s compare. Did the test group have better, similar, or worse retention over time? If the delta is large and statistically significant, it may be a signal to invest more in push. But we shouldn’t stop there. In order to invest

wisely, we need to understand the relative impact of push to other features and strategies. What if another feature is far more useful to users in the long term? Perhaps it is significantly cheaper to test and develop. Without further testing, you risk leaving money on the table. We suggest testing two to four features that compete for resources. Once changes are made, you may want to get more granular with that particular feature, or test something new. Win or lose, every test should be considered a new opportunity to learn.

In many of our recent experiences, we’ve found that investments in mobile app analytics and optimization have not kept pace with the growth of the medium. Often, feature development is based on subjective opinion or anecdotal evidence. By using behavior data to drive retention strategy, there are ample opportunities to remain “sticky” in today’s high-churn app marketplace. If you would like to hear more about how our analytics team can increase return on your app investments, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Bradford Dillon Senior Technical Architect, POSSIBLE Mobile Denver

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the iPhone’s launch, but next year marks an even more important 10th anniversary—the launch of the App Store. With the App Store came the app economy and the steady evolution of the app ecosystem. In the last decade we’ve seen every kind of app imaginable, and more. The iOS App Store and Google Play Store each contain over two million apps. With that volume and time, one would think no stone could be unturned, technically speaking. Every problem has been encountered, and every reliable solution has been found. The golden architecture exists. So what is it? Well, it depends. From a technology perspective, an app is the sum of the problems it has to solve. Just as no two apps have the same problem set to solve for, no two problems necessarily have the exact same solution. Developers need to solve the problem at hand, not shoehorn solutions into problems that don’t quite fit. That said, a software problem is more than the technological challenge. Time-to-market, cost, flexibility, and roadmaps all have to be factored in when solving problems, and all of them have an effect on an app’s overall architecture. While that’s true, there are some common problem spaces that have to be considered when starting to think through the execution of a mobile product, and best practices to go with them.

THE TRUTH Apps are made of data. In modern apps, that data can come from several places, typically the user or the cloud. It’s important to decide at the beginning of the product development process where “The Truth” comes from, and how it will be handled. At a minimum, a good architecture will answer these questions: • If users give your app their data, does that data stay on their device, or go to a server in the cloud? • If it goes to the cloud, how will the app handle conflicts? • When does data in the cloud become invalid? • How frequently should the app check for the latest data?

No two products will have the same answers to these questions, but every product needs to have well-considered answers due to the intimacy and immediacy of the mobile user experience.

THE WAITING GAME A key ingredient of the mobile user context is being onthe-go. It may not be the way we intend our apps to be used, but users frequently need to get in, get what they need, and get out. The worst user experience in that scenario is an app that causes them to wait unnecessarily. Naturally, it should be the goal to make every aspect of your app as fast as possible, but there are a few key touchpoints that should be optimized using the whole system architecture to support: • The Launch Sequence. Every app has a set of tasks that need to be completed before the user can access its features. Typical examples include downloading app configuration files, fetching assets, and synchronizing user data. Determining the bare minimum that is necessary to get the app off the ground and then optimizing the hell out of this process is critical to making the app launch snappy. • Networking and Processing. As data is shuffled to and from the server, the user is sometimes forced to just wait. A good app-supporting server architecture should have flexibility to ensure response times are low, payloads are small, and data is available on-demand. A content management system that was built to support a website is not going to be sufficient for mobile out of the box—it’s going to need some work. • Monitor and Measure. Each app will have a unique set of bottlenecks. By outfitting the app with networking and process analytics, a developer can identify those bottlenecks in production and then formulate a plan for refactoring the architecture to eliminate inefficiencies.

THE FAILURE CASE One of the most common anti-patterns in software development is ignoring error cases. Things are going to fail, and users are going to find themselves in error states—there’s no way around it. Ensuring that failure is planned for and accounted for in your architecture is critical to the user’s success. Server redundancy, failover plans, data backups, and app resilience should all be considered and planned for from the start of product development.

THE FUTURE IS NOW Flexibility is one of the most difficult things to plan for, but also the most important for a new product to take into account. Technology changes and evolves steadily, as do product and user needs (and it’s unlikely all of these will magically align). Building an architecture that supports easily replacing and upgrading components is a challenge worth spending time and energy on. This means building loose couplings and respecting modern design patterns for separating concerns in the app implementation. Server-side, this means designing around microservices with elasticity in mind. The smaller and more self-contained your modules are, the easier they will be to maintain or replace as the need arises.

Whether your app is an App Store veteran or just an itch you haven’t started to scratch yet, taking the time to plan for and build the right architecture will help your mobile product and your users succeed.

Having a product architecture that keeps data, time, failure, and the future in the forefront will prepare your app for the next 10 years of the mobile ecosystem.

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POSSIBLE is a WPP Digital agency

pov@possible.com possible.com