Spotlight on Mobile UX: How Do App Users vs. Engineers Think About Building Highly Performant Apps?

Mobile has overwhelmingly become the technology we rely on every day to help us navigate through work, school, travel, and most other parts of life. Not only do we rely on it heavily, but we expect it to work for us when we need it – and to work well.

The problem is, sometimes mobile apps don’t work as well as we need them to in the moment. Who isn’t familiar with the incredibly frustrating experience of an app that seems to buffer infinitely? Or, worse, one that crashes right when you need it?

We wanted to explore the full scope of the problem when it comes to mobile app performance, which is crucial for mobile engineers to build better experiences for end users. So, what does a “better experience” look like?

Well, to find out, we polled about 900 app users in the U.S. to understand their frustrations with the apps they know and love today.

We also talked to nearly 80 mobile engineers from our own community of users to get a sense of their perspectives – what are the main challenges in building for mobile today? What are the biggest opportunities for mobile tomorrow?

Here are some of the best highlights from this research:

App Users Have Extremely High-Performance Demands, Yet Consistently Deal With a Spectrum of Frustrations

People have incredibly high expectations for speed and performance when it comes to what their phones can do. It’s just the way we’ve been conditioned in a tech environment where instant gratification has become the norm.

Through our research, we found that about 1 in 5 app users expect key app flows to be done in under 5 seconds – this means things like logging into an account or checking out your shopping purchase.

The large majority of people would actually just give up if a task like that was taking over 30 seconds to do.

Now, while expectations are very high, the reality of how apps perform doesn’t always satisfy. Two-thirds of app users we polled said they experience some type of performance issue at least weekly, and nearly half of people experience issues daily.

These include things like crashes, slow app startup, slow loading of images and videos, and unresponsive interface elements.

What’s more, there are consequences to poor performance – mobile engineers and product teams know this well. App users are very willing to delete an app off their phone entirely due to repeated poor experiences; about 60% would do this if their app crashed a few times.

There’s a Misalignment Between Engineers and End Users When It Comes to Issue Prioritization

Mobile engineers are very in-tune with the need to ensure their apps are performant, and a lot of money and time is spent on the broad industry of application monitoring.

However, we found a few interesting points where priorities around what exactly constitutes a “good” vs. “bad” experience weren’t totally aligned between users and engineers.

For more severe issues like crashes, both app users and engineers agree that these are the most frustrating and critical-to-address problems. However, for apps that have a slow startup time, opinions diverged.

The slow startup was found to be on the lower frustration end for users vs. other performance issues we asked about, like unresponsive buttons or forms. However, slow startup is a big priority for engineers to fix.

But fixing unresponsive buttons or frozen screens, which were a big point of frustration for users, ranked lower in the minds of engineers.

This is an interesting disconnect that likely has to do with engineers’ pressure to adhere to certain industry standards. In the mobile industry, maintaining an app startup time of 2 seconds or less is considered best practice.

But if users are a bit more tolerant of startup lag, might they be better served by shifting the focus to other performance frustrations?

Monitoring App Performance Is Seen as a Top Priority, Both Now and in the Future

Balancing user demands and ever-changing technical requirements means that many things can, and often do, go wrong with mobile. For these reasons, monitoring has become crucial to the delivery of high-quality, performant app experiences.

Our research largely validates this industry observation.

We found that, among engineers, they named monitoring performance as one of the top challenges they face as part of the development process, both now and in the near future.

When we asked what were the biggest concerns with allowing poor performance to persist, engineers mentioned some pretty serious things - loss of brand reputation was one of the biggest threats.

Aside from monitoring performance, there are some interesting shifts in what engineers see as key challenges today vs. what they anticipate for the next five years.

A major reason for this is the growing complexity of mobile technology and IT infrastructure, especially as the microservices model becomes the engineering standard.

Engineers recognize this as something to contend with. While only 15% of participants from our survey named building for complex IT infrastructure a key challenge for them today, 28% said it would be a concern in the next five years.

Additionally, maintaining data privacy and security & authentication are both, unsurprisingly, expected to be bigger challenges going forward.

If you found this insightful, check out the full State of Mobile Experience report. It takes a deeper look into these findings, plus explores industry performance benchmarks and even other future trends in mobile technology. Best of all, it’s free to download here.