Catering to the Multi-Experience Generation
Apps are an integral part of our lives today – if you are on a personal or work device, you are most likely using a bunch of apps on it. From productivity apps that help us keep track of our to-do lists at work to video streaming apps to keep us company on long commutes, we have a wide array of applications to choose from. In fact, there are at least 1,840,000 apps available globally on the Apple App store alone.
The issue? With more apps at our disposal and a finite amount of space on our devices, users are applying greater discretion on the apps that they download AND use over an extended period. After all, businesses do not want to put in so many hours creating an app that gets quickly discarded by their target user.
A key differentiator for users when choosing apps is the availability of multi-experience.
Multi-experience is essentially delivering consistent visual, auditory, and tactile experience to users – regardless of the device, location, or time that they are accessing said app. With the advent of multiple touchpoints, such as smart assistant devices or smart watches, it becomes a necessity to factor in multi-experience that always ensures personalized and frictionless experience to users.
A simple example of this would be online video streaming services. The user could be viewing an episode of their favorite Netflix television series on their smartphone on their long commute back home and as soon as they get home and switch to Netflix on their smart television, they can continue watching the episode exactly from where they left off on their smartphone.
While we all love this seamless transition between devices, multiple touchpoints do provide threat actors with more avenues to launch attacks on your system. As such, it is important for enterprises to factor in these vulnerabilities to create a robust security framework that can keep threats at bay. In fact, according to F5’s Curve of Convenience study, seven in 10 users surveyed in Singapore alone would drop an application if data security were to be compromised – emphasizing the gravity of having good security postures in place.
The importance of multi-experience is further evidenced by a study featured in Harvard Business Review where 73 percent of consumers surveyed in the USA utilized multiple channels during their shopping journey – across online and offline mediums.
In my recent interaction with Allan Tan from FutureCIO, I outlined the key areas that businesses ought to be focusing on in order to achieve multi-experience across their app portfolio:
- Having a strong network and application infrastructure to support and deliver apps to users to provide uninterrupted service despite influx in traffic or addition of new features that would increase the load on the infrastructure.
- Adapting the user interface according to the device the app is being deployed on so that users have a seamless experience across multiple form factors.
- Implementing a robust security framework to minimize vulnerabilities that could lead to hackers breaching into your system.
You can head on over to F5’s whitepaper on optimizing app experience for end users as well as the article to glean deeper insights on how you can achieve multi-experience across apps.
Please do share any tips and tricks or even issues you might have encountered in delivering multi-experience apps to your consumer base by dropping a comment