Success should be measured by the experience of app users

MOBILE APPS ARE SET TOREVOLUTIONISE BUSINESS

USER EXPERIENCEDEFINES QUALITY

HOW TO BUILD AN APP AND STAY ON BUDGET

APPS ARE CHANGING MOBILE MARKETING

Apps personalise ad campaigns, making marketing more effectiveApps are transforming the way we live – and how we work

There are ways of getting valuefor money from the best apps

03 04 06 08

THE APP ECONOMY27 / 04 / 2016INDEPENDENT PUBLICATION BY #0373raconteur.net

Enterprise apps used in the workplace are set to ex-plode over the next few years when smartphones

replace the desktop computer as the ultimate office management tool.

While businesses have on average five to ten apps at present, this is expected to increase to more than a hundred in a few years.

From apps to manage simple tasks such as e-mail, calendars and contacts to more complex areas such as sales support, in-ternal communications and pro-ductivity, there will be an app for everything.

With the launch of 5G expected in 2020 and the arrival of the inter-net of things controlled via smart-phones, business processes will be revolutionised in a few short years.

This raises a host of questions. Are business leaders ready for the changes in corporate culture that “mobilisation” will trigger? Once every employee is working via mo-bile apps, they will no longer need to be tied to their desks and will be free to roam wherever they are needed. Should workers download apps on to their own devices or only use those provided by the com-pany? With crucial company data accessed from the cloud, how can systems be made secure?

And who will supervise the mo-bile transformation? There is cur-rently a struggle between chief in-formation officers (CIOs) and chief marketers for control over mobile budgets, and the marketers seem to be winning. Gartner predicts mar-

keters will spend more next year on digital investment than CIOs.

Some businesses are slow in adapting to mobile’s workplace revolution. Research by enterprise mobility specialist Kony shows 54 per cent of UK organisations built no apps between 2012 and 2014. According to Gartner, the average number of apps deployed on the most popular business platform, iOS, is 6.3. A quarter of organisa-tions have built no apps for iPhones, while nearly a third have created none for Android phones.

Creating a so-phisticated app strategy is a huge challenge for businesses. But this will become crucial to attract staff, especially twenty-something millennials, says Ross Sleight, chief strategy officer at mobile consultan-cy Somo.

“The millennials think, ‘If I can do this with Uber, why can’t I do it with my sales data?’” he says. “This is how they run their lives; they do all these things on mobile. If busi-nesses don’t get that because they haven’t provided the right environ-ment, it’s a big problem.”

Mobile transformation is be-coming easier, with mobile de-vice management systems avail-able that carry out the hard work, such as providing all the right levels of security and access. And when an employee leaves the company, their enterprise apps

are automatically erased from their phones.

“Those types of mobile device management systems have now come of age and we are in a posi-tion where you can have an in-ternal mobile app store,” says Mr Sleight. “You could have hundreds of apps, with ten applicable to a specific role, all provisioned by the internal app store. Some of those apps are custom built, some are off the shelf or customised.”

Mobile technolo-gy is moving on to a second wave, ac-cording to Oracle’s director of mobil-ity for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Martin Cookson. The first wave was driven by market-ing, but many of the early apps were little more than a web page or a piece of data wrapped in an app.

S e c o n d - w a v e apps are sophisticated and blend different data sources in real time, such as customer, sales and hu-man resources data. They also in-tegrate with internet sources such as Google Maps. With so many apps being used by an enterprise, there is a danger that an organi-sation can become fragmented, so there must be co-ordinated oversight of mobile strategy, says Mr Cookson.

The second-wave apps use new hybrid technologies such as Javas-cript and the cloud, while APIs (ap-plication program interfaces) and

micro-services, which allow devel-opers to work with different apps, are also crucial. “Enterprises want to take charge of their own mobile strategy, to in-source mobile app development and to be in charge of their mobile app life cycle,” he says.

He predicts that enterprise apps will become increasingly special-ised, and points to a distinction made by research firm Ovum be-tween “hero apps” and “soldier apps”. The hero apps are used fre-quently by many employees. They could include communication apps such as WhatsApp or Slack. The sol-dier apps are very specific and are used to solve particular problems. There will be many of these and this is an area where businesses need to focus their firepower, as they will provide solutions across the organisation.

Computing giant Salesforce offers customer relationship management technology and a variety of other solutions for busi-nesses via mobile apps. EMEA assistant vice president for app cloud Adam Spearing gives the example of Coca-Cola, which uses Salesforce mobile apps across its supply chain.

Coca-Cola’s workforce travel all over Europe visiting clients and suppliers. The schedule of appoint-ments is available through the mobile app and, as they arrive for a meeting, they can look at the cli-ent’s previous ordering history and any issues they have raised. “There is full transparency of what’s going on,” says Mr Spearing.

DISTRIBUTED IN

DAVID BENADYSpecialist writer on marketing, advertising and media, he contributes to national newspapers and business publications.

DANNY BRADBURYFreelance technology writer, he contributes to the Financial Times and The Guardian on topics ranging from computer networks to cultural issues.

STEVE RANGERUK editor of TechRepublic, part of CBS Interactive, he has also worked for Computing magazine.

GIDEON SPANIERHead of media at advertising magazine Campaign and Broadcasting Press Guild chairman, he writes about business for the London Evening Standard and The Times.EMMA WOOLLACOTT

Specialist technology writer, she covers commercial, legal and regulatory issues, contributing to Forbes and the New Statesman.

RACONTEUR

PUBLISHING MANAGER

Phillipus Putter

DIGITAL CONTENT MANAGER

Sarah Allidina

HEAD OF PRODUCTION

Natalia Rosek

DESIGN

Samuele MottaGrant ChapmanKellie Jerrard

PRODUCTION EDITOR

Benjamin Chiou

MANAGING EDITOR

Peter Archer

BUSINESS CULTURE FINANCE HEALTHCARE LIFESTYLE SUSTAINABILITY TECHNOLOGY INFOGRAPHICS http://raconteur.net/app-economy

CONTRIBUTORS

Although this publication is funded through advertising and sponsorship, all editorial is without bias and sponsored features are clearly labelled. For an upcoming schedule, partnership in-quiries or feedback, please call +44 (0)20 8616 7400 or e-mail info@raconteur.netRaconteur is a leading publisher of special-interest content and research. Its publications and articles cover a wide range of topics, including business, finance, sustainability, health-care, lifestyle and technology. Raconteur special reports are published exclusively in The Times and The Sunday Times as well as online at raconteur.netThe information contained in this publication has been ob-tained from sources the Proprietors believe to be correct. However, no legal liability can be accepted for any errors. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior consent of the Publisher. © Raconteur Media

Mobile apps are set torevolutionise business

Mobile apps have changed the way we shop, travel, eat and entertain ourselves – now

they are transforming the way we work

OVERVIEWDAVID BENADY

Share this article online via Raconteur.net

Shut

ters

tock

With the launch of 5G expected in

2020 and the arrival of the internet of things controlled via smartphones,

business processes will be revolutionised in a few short years

THE APP ECONOMY

RACONTEUR raconteur.net 03THE APP ECONOMY27 / 04 / 2016

Enterprise apps used in the workplace are set to ex-plode over the next few years when smartphones

replace the desktop computer as the ultimate office management tool.

While businesses have on average five to ten apps at present, this is expected to increase to more than a hundred in a few years.

From apps to manage simple tasks such as e-mail, calendars and contacts to more complex areas such as sales support, in-ternal communications and pro-ductivity, there will be an app for everything.

With the launch of 5G expected in 2020 and the arrival of the inter-net of things controlled via smart-phones, business processes will be revolutionised in a few short years.

This raises a host of questions. Are business leaders ready for the changes in corporate culture that “mobilisation” will trigger? Once every employee is working via mo-bile apps, they will no longer need to be tied to their desks and will be free to roam wherever they are needed. Should workers download apps on to their own devices or only use those provided by the com-pany? With crucial company data accessed from the cloud, how can systems be made secure?

And who will supervise the mo-bile transformation? There is cur-rently a struggle between chief in-formation officers (CIOs) and chief marketers for control over mobile budgets, and the marketers seem to be winning. Gartner predicts mar-

keters will spend more next year on digital investment than CIOs.

Some businesses are slow in adapting to mobile’s workplace revolution. Research by enterprise mobility specialist Kony shows 54 per cent of UK organisations built no apps between 2012 and 2014. According to Gartner, the average number of apps deployed on the most popular business platform, iOS, is 6.3. A quarter of organisa-tions have built no apps for iPhones, while nearly a third have created none for Android phones.

Creating a so-phisticated app strategy is a huge challenge for businesses. But this will become crucial to attract staff, especially twenty-something millennials, says Ross Sleight, chief strategy officer at mobile consultan-cy Somo.

“The millennials think, ‘If I can do this with Uber, why can’t I do it with my sales data?’” he says. “This is how they run their lives; they do all these things on mobile. If busi-nesses don’t get that because they haven’t provided the right environ-ment, it’s a big problem.”

Mobile transformation is be-coming easier, with mobile de-vice management systems avail-able that carry out the hard work, such as providing all the right levels of security and access. And when an employee leaves the company, their enterprise apps

are automatically erased from their phones.

“Those types of mobile device management systems have now come of age and we are in a posi-tion where you can have an in-ternal mobile app store,” says Mr Sleight. “You could have hundreds of apps, with ten applicable to a specific role, all provisioned by the internal app store. Some of those apps are custom built, some are off the shelf or customised.”

Mobile technolo-gy is moving on to a second wave, ac-cording to Oracle’s director of mobil-ity for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Martin Cookson. The first wave was driven by market-ing, but many of the early apps were little more than a web page or a piece of data wrapped in an app.

S e c o n d - w a v e apps are sophisticated and blend different data sources in real time, such as customer, sales and hu-man resources data. They also in-tegrate with internet sources such as Google Maps. With so many apps being used by an enterprise, there is a danger that an organi-sation can become fragmented, so there must be co-ordinated oversight of mobile strategy, says Mr Cookson.

The second-wave apps use new hybrid technologies such as Javas-cript and the cloud, while APIs (ap-plication program interfaces) and

micro-services, which allow devel-opers to work with different apps, are also crucial. “Enterprises want to take charge of their own mobile strategy, to in-source mobile app development and to be in charge of their mobile app life cycle,” he says.

He predicts that enterprise apps will become increasingly special-ised, and points to a distinction made by research firm Ovum be-tween “hero apps” and “soldier apps”. The hero apps are used fre-quently by many employees. They could include communication apps such as WhatsApp or Slack. The sol-dier apps are very specific and are used to solve particular problems. There will be many of these and this is an area where businesses need to focus their firepower, as they will provide solutions across the organisation.

Computing giant Salesforce offers customer relationship management technology and a variety of other solutions for busi-nesses via mobile apps. EMEA assistant vice president for app cloud Adam Spearing gives the example of Coca-Cola, which uses Salesforce mobile apps across its supply chain.

Coca-Cola’s workforce travel all over Europe visiting clients and suppliers. The schedule of appoint-ments is available through the mobile app and, as they arrive for a meeting, they can look at the cli-ent’s previous ordering history and any issues they have raised. “There is full transparency of what’s going on,” says Mr Spearing.

DISTRIBUTED IN

DAVID BENADYSpecialist writer on marketing, advertising and media, he contributes to national newspapers and business publications.

DANNY BRADBURYFreelance technology writer, he contributes to the Financial Times and The Guardian on topics ranging from computer networks to cultural issues.

STEVE RANGERUK editor of TechRepublic, part of CBS Interactive, he has also worked for Computing magazine.

GIDEON SPANIERHead of media at advertising magazine Campaign and Broadcasting Press Guild chairman, he writes about business for the London Evening Standard and The Times.EMMA WOOLLACOTT

Specialist technology writer, she covers commercial, legal and regulatory issues, contributing to Forbes and the New Statesman.

RACONTEUR

PUBLISHING MANAGER

Phillipus Putter

DIGITAL CONTENT MANAGER

Sarah Allidina

HEAD OF PRODUCTION

Natalia Rosek

DESIGN

Samuele MottaGrant ChapmanKellie Jerrard

PRODUCTION EDITOR

Benjamin Chiou

MANAGING EDITOR

Peter Archer

BUSINESS CULTURE FINANCE HEALTHCARE LIFESTYLE SUSTAINABILITY TECHNOLOGY INFOGRAPHICS http://raconteur.net/app-economy

CONTRIBUTORS

Although this publication is funded through advertising and sponsorship, all editorial is without bias and sponsored features are clearly labelled. For an upcoming schedule, partnership in-quiries or feedback, please call +44 (0)20 8616 7400 or e-mail info@raconteur.netRaconteur is a leading publisher of special-interest content and research. Its publications and articles cover a wide range of topics, including business, finance, sustainability, health-care, lifestyle and technology. Raconteur special reports are published exclusively in The Times and The Sunday Times as well as online at raconteur.netThe information contained in this publication has been ob-tained from sources the Proprietors believe to be correct. However, no legal liability can be accepted for any errors. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior consent of the Publisher. © Raconteur Media

Mobile apps are set torevolutionise business

Mobile apps have changed the way we shop, travel, eat and entertain ourselves – now

they are transforming the way we work

OVERVIEWDAVID BENADY

Share this article online via Raconteur.net

Shut

ters

tock

With the launch of 5G expected in

2020 and the arrival of the internet of things controlled via smartphones,

business processes will be revolutionised in a few short years

THE APP ECONOMY

RACONTEUR raconteur.net 03THE APP ECONOMY27 / 04 / 2016

RACONTEUR raconteur.net 2XXXXxx xx xxxx

Digital properties are the gateway to a company’s brand and business. In fact, mobile apps,

websites – desktop and mobile – and connected devices are the primary way many consumers interact with companies in today’s digital economy.

At a minimum, digital properties need to work as intended before they can deliver real customer value. That’s because, in the current digital landscape, the cost of switching brands is lower than ever; some would say switching costs no longer exist.

Think about the following scenario: an e-commerce shopping cart crashes while a consumer is checking out. Well, for that user, it’s goodbye retailer X and hello retailer Y, in just a matter of seconds.

Add to this new reality the fact that digital users are more vocal than ever, with app stores and social media channels readily available to heap praise or share displeasure, and the importance of high-quality digital experiences is also higher than ever.

The bottom line: digital properties must work everywhere, on every device, the first time and every time. Anything less and even the biggest global brands risk losing out to the competition.

However, providing great digital experiences is harder than ever. Companies move faster, with frequent new versions, application updates and new features. Ever-increasing fragmentation, of devices, operating systems, carriers, locations and more, create a moving target that makes it difficult to ensure web and mobile apps are delivering a great experience every time for every user.

CROWDTESTING IN THE REAL WORLDGreat digital experiences begin with understanding users’ expectations and perceptions – and their definition of quality

With all of this to account for, how can companies ensure quality? Traditional approaches to software testing slow down the pace of innovation and quick-fix automation solutions lack return on investment. The result is often an app or website that lags behind the business cycle or drives users away with a sub-par experience.

The fact is today’s app economy requires a new, holistic approach that’s designed for modern digital. It requires testing solutions that match a company’s user base in terms of locations, devices, and software and use cases across their portfolio of digital properties. Modern sites and apps need real-world testing from solution providers that are everywhere users live, work and play.

Applause, for example, works with companies ranging from burgeoning startups to the world’s biggest brands, including Google, Amazon and more, to test apps and digital properties in the wild with a community of more than 200,000 vetted quality assurance professionals from 200 countries and territories around the world. Applause can test any web or mobile application at any time and in any country.

In fact, as you read this, an Applause customer has 300 recurring testers from 20 different countries reporting bugs on their web application. That entire test project will take less than one day, so there is no delay in the development or launch schedule, and that customer will run another test cycle tomorrow to test the company’s latest build. A different customer has 20 testers all across London, checking to make sure an Android payment application is working at local shops and major retailers.

News UK is one company in a highly competitive market that realized they needed a crowd testing solution to complement their in-house testing and ensure their apps worked as well in the hands of users as they did in the test lab. By crowd testing their apps with real people all across the UK and Europe, they are consistently delivering high-quality digital experiences and readers keep coming back for more.

And it is not just the users who benefit from this approach. News UK was able to shorten their total testing time for mobile applications, while launching with greater confidence. Regression tests, which may have taken their internal testers 25 days to complete, can now be done in two days.

In today’s digital economy, users determine quality, and they live in the real world. Understand their point of view, listen to them and you can launch great digital experiences that grow your customers’ loyalty – and your company’s top line.

Matt Johnston is the chief marketing and strategy officer for Applause. For more information, visit www.applause.com

COMMERCIAL FEATURE

Modern sites and apps need real-world testing from solution providers that are everywhere users live, work and play

200k+

2m+

professional testers in 200+ countries and territories

bugs and quality issues found in the wild

Source:utest.com

Source:Applause platform

By Matt Johnston

It’s the app users who define top qualityHow to measure the success of an app and fine-tune software are crucial for businesses operating in a highly competitive space, but user experience must be top of the list

Sometimes an app just comes from nowhere to take the world by storm. It’s a par-ticular phenomenon when

it comes to games – Angry Birds springs to mind – and with the dozens of messaging apps that have been adopted in turn by the world’s teens.

In some cases, particularly in the case of games, these viral apps are very simple, and are developed quickly and almost by accident. The 2013 mobile game Flappy Bird, for example, was created in three days flat by Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen, but within a year became the most downloaded free game in the iOS App Store.

But while this may be an inspiring story for amateur developers, it’s not how things generally work in the real world. Most apps, unfortunate-ly, sink without trace and few make any real money.

“There are so many applications that are free and that will never directly generate revenue,” says Ken Dulaney, Gartner vice presi-

dent and distinguished analyst. “Gartner is forecasting that, by 2017, 94.5 per cent of downloads will be for free apps.

“Furthermore, of paid applica-tions, about 90 per cent are down-loaded less than 500 times per day and make less than $1,250 a day. This is only going to get worse in the future when there will be even greater competition, especially in successful markets.”

However, for many organisa-tions, making a direct profit isn’t really the point.

“Our analysis shows most mobile applications are not generating prof-its and that many mobile apps are not designed to generate revenue, but rather are used to build brand recognition and product awareness or are just for fun,” says Mr Dulaney.

Measuring the success of an app, therefore, is no longer just a question

of counting the number of down-loads or even using basic metrics such as average revenue per user. It means evaluating the far more in-tangible quality of user engagement to try and discover what wins users’ hearts, and what doesn’t.

Such analysis, of course, needs to be handled very differently from standard software testing. While aspects of an app such as security, speed and design can most efficient-ly be evaluated in a lab environ-ment, this is of limited value when testing user experience.

It’s easy enough to identify glaring problems – a slow-to-load interface or over-busy screen, perhaps. How-ever, it’s harder to establish which of these issues, if any, are likely to make people abandon the app mid-session or put them off using it altogether; and many issues can eas-ily slip through the net.

“Companies can no longer view their digital quality in a vacuum. They must approach it from a us-

“The testers’ feedback has cer-tainly helped us to develop better applications,” says Jane Lisink-er-Korobov, director of quality, es-calations and IT desktop support at Trulia. “We’ve also had good feedback from real estate profes-sionals and architects in the Ap-plause community, which has been most helpful.”

There is a wide array of metrics that can be used to evaluate how much users enjoy using an app, how easy they find it to navigate and how likely they are to carry on.

“We find that some of the best en-gagement metrics are sessions per user within a given amount of time, the average session length per user and the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users to determine how well you’re turning infrequent relationships with users into fre-quent, long-term ones,” says Josh

USER EXPERIENCEEMMA WOOLLACOTT

Todd, chief marketing officer of an-alytics firm Localytics.

Examining the length of sessions for different types of users, such as those who go on to make purchas-es and those who do not, can allow a developer to optimise specific screens to encourage the users to spend more time in the app.

Similarly, the basic retention rate shows whether users are coming back for more or abandoning the app after one or two uses. But exam-ining the drop-off rates for specific screens within an app can, far more valuably, reveal the likely reason behind these patterns.

By observing what actions users are taking on each screen, it’s pos-sible to see which parts of an app’s screens are being ignored and at which points users are liable to abandon the app.

If they are frequently getting stuck or experiencing problems at one particular stage, then some-thing needs to change. By optimis-ing any problematic screens and retesting with users, it’s possible to improve engagement and, ulti-mately, funnel users down the de-sired route.

Developers will have their own priorities when it comes to the metrics they use to define the suc-cess of an app, depending on the app’s particular function. A retail-er, for instance, is likely to be most interested in the conversion rate for purchases, while a health infor-mation service might be more con-cerned with the number of visitors signing up for further alerts.

When games developer Certain Affinity launched Age of Booty: Tac-tics, for example, its primary aims were to maximise user retention and make the game as viral as pos-sible. Using Google Analytics, the company looked at average screen time and the flow of user actions, and was able to discover that many

COMMERCIAL FEATURE

For some companies, an app isn’t simply part of the business model – it’s actually what makes the business. Such companies are springing up rapidly, as they can often have very low entry costs.

One example is Hungryhouse, part of Delivery Hero, which allows people to order takeaways from dozens of local restaurants through a single mobile app. Here, usability is more or less the only aspect of the business that matters, making user analytics of paramount importance.

Like so many enterprises, Hungryhouse was concerned about its rate of customer churn, which it defined as customers who had not completed a food order in 30 consecutive days.

By scanning Hungryhouse’s users’ historical data and

calculating the churn rate for each group of users that performed each event at various times, Localytics was able to extract a wealth of useful data.

Customers who successfully checked out at least once in their first 14 days with the app were 16 per cent less likely to churn, for example, and those who tapped a restaurant at least three times in their first three days were 13 per cent less likely to churn. The results have helped the company tweak its app

“For some time, we’ve been wondering what key factors lead to churn besides the obvious,” says Delivery Hero marketing executive Erik Kubik. “Being able to see and fully understand these factors lets us plan effective campaigns without leaning on our business intelligence team to crunch numbers.”

CASE STUDY: HUNGRYHOUSE

er-centric perspective, and test their sites and apps in the wild to ensure they work as intended in the hands of users,” says Matt Johnston, chief marketing and strategy officer at Applause, which maintains a community of 70,000 software testers.

“Providing a seamless, flawless digital experience for customers, be it on mobile, via web or in-store, is what strong companies are focused on. And that integrated customer experience cannot be tested, meas-ured or optimised from a lab.”

US real estate agency Trulia says Applause testing has helped it halve the development time for new features of its app, and that the im-proved functionality, usability and quality of its mobile applications have brought in 10 to 15 per cent more customers. It’s also cut the cost of testing compared with in-house, with IDC estimating a sav-ing of almost $400,000 (£280,000) a year over five years.

users were struggling with the first version’s over-complex menus.

“It enabled us to quickly identify areas of needed improvement which would have otherwise limited our potential success once in the mar-ket,” says Patrick Bergman, Certain Affinity’s business development manager.

It’s important to understand that people tend to use mobile apps very differently from web applications, so usability can mean something very different too. According to re-search from Lo-calytics, mobile users are regular-ly active across a range of apps, launching them on average 15 times a day and consistently using an aver-age of 18 apps a month.

They tend to “snack” on these apps, logging short sessions with several apps in one day, particularly accessing social media apps, weath-er apps, gaming apps and sports apps this way. And they’re fickle, abandoning apps as soon as they perceive them to have lost value or become boring.

The research revealed that 25 per cent of apps are only used once and 58 per cent will churn in the first 30 days of using an app. Three

quarters will leave within the first three months.

The way to keep users’ atten-tion, according to the analysis, is through increasing personalisa-tion, with apps aware of users’ ac-tivity across all channels, online and in-store, as well as on the app itself. This, plus regular two-way interaction, creates a long-term re-

lationship that re-duces churn.

“User experience encompasses all interactions that someone has with a brand. On mobile, those might be via push notifications or in-app messag-ing. When think-ing about what matters most, it is important to view iterations across a

user’s life,” says Mr Todd. “The most successful apps

think about the downstream en-gagement impact of their efforts, long after a specific interaction occurs. This broader focus ad-dresses the unintended conse-quences, like user churn, of an interaction and ensures that the app experience is working the way it is intended to.”

The way to keep users’ attention is

through increasing personalisation, with apps aware of users’

activity across all channels

Share this article online via Raconteur.net

TYPICAL CUSTOMER RETENTION WITH MOBILE APPS

Source: Apptentive 2015

One month after download

Six months after download

One year after download

40%

35%

30%

25%

20%

15%

10%

5%

0%

Measuring the success of an app means evaluating

the intangible quality of user

engagement to try and discover what wins users’ hearts, and what doesn’t

Source: Localytics

5.7minson average

spent by mobile users on each individual app

session

NUMBER OF TIMES PEOPLE TRY NEW APPS BEFORE STOPPING

Source: Localytics 2015

56%

3-5

9%

6-10

9%

10+

20%

2

6%

1

4.5AVERAGE

THE APP ECONOMY raconteur.net04 RACONTEUR RACONTEUR raconteur.net 05THE APP ECONOMY27 / 04 / 2016 27 / 04 / 2016

Get

ty Im

ages

RACONTEUR raconteur.net 2XXXXxx xx xxxx

Digital properties are the gateway to a company’s brand and business. In fact, mobile apps,

websites – desktop and mobile – and connected devices are the primary way many consumers interact with companies in today’s digital economy.

At a minimum, digital properties need to work as intended before they can deliver real customer value. That’s because, in the current digital landscape, the cost of switching brands is lower than ever; some would say switching costs no longer exist.

Think about the following scenario: an e-commerce shopping cart crashes while a consumer is checking out. Well, for that user, it’s goodbye retailer X and hello retailer Y, in just a matter of seconds.

Add to this new reality the fact that digital users are more vocal than ever, with app stores and social media channels readily available to heap praise or share displeasure, and the importance of high-quality digital experiences is also higher than ever.

The bottom line: digital properties must work everywhere, on every device, the first time and every time. Anything less and even the biggest global brands risk losing out to the competition.

However, providing great digital experiences is harder than ever. Companies move faster, with frequent new versions, application updates and new features. Ever-increasing fragmentation, of devices, operating systems, carriers, locations and more, create a moving target that makes it difficult to ensure web and mobile apps are delivering a great experience every time for every user.

CROWDTESTING IN THE REAL WORLDGreat digital experiences begin with understanding users’ expectations and perceptions – and their definition of quality

With all of this to account for, how can companies ensure quality? Traditional approaches to software testing slow down the pace of innovation and quick-fix automation solutions lack return on investment. The result is often an app or website that lags behind the business cycle or drives users away with a sub-par experience.

The fact is today’s app economy requires a new, holistic approach that’s designed for modern digital. It requires testing solutions that match a company’s user base in terms of locations, devices, and software and use cases across their portfolio of digital properties. Modern sites and apps need real-world testing from solution providers that are everywhere users live, work and play.

Applause, for example, works with companies ranging from burgeoning startups to the world’s biggest brands, including Google, Amazon and more, to test apps and digital properties in the wild with a community of more than 200,000 vetted quality assurance professionals from 200 countries and territories around the world. Applause can test any web or mobile application at any time and in any country.

In fact, as you read this, an Applause customer has 300 recurring testers from 20 different countries reporting bugs on their web application. That entire test project will take less than one day, so there is no delay in the development or launch schedule, and that customer will run another test cycle tomorrow to test the company’s latest build. A different customer has 20 testers all across London, checking to make sure an Android payment application is working at local shops and major retailers.

News UK is one company in a highly competitive market that realized they needed a crowd testing solution to complement their in-house testing and ensure their apps worked as well in the hands of users as they did in the test lab. By crowd testing their apps with real people all across the UK and Europe, they are consistently delivering high-quality digital experiences and readers keep coming back for more.

And it is not just the users who benefit from this approach. News UK was able to shorten their total testing time for mobile applications, while launching with greater confidence. Regression tests, which may have taken their internal testers 25 days to complete, can now be done in two days.

In today’s digital economy, users determine quality, and they live in the real world. Understand their point of view, listen to them and you can launch great digital experiences that grow your customers’ loyalty – and your company’s top line.

Matt Johnston is the chief marketing and strategy officer for Applause. For more information, visit www.applause.com

COMMERCIAL FEATURE

Modern sites and apps need real-world testing from solution providers that are everywhere users live, work and play

200k+

2m+

professional testers in 200+ countries and territories

bugs and quality issues found in the wild

Source:utest.com

Source:Applause platform

By Matt Johnston

It’s the app users who define top qualityHow to measure the success of an app and fine-tune software are crucial for businesses operating in a highly competitive space, but user experience must be top of the list

Sometimes an app just comes from nowhere to take the world by storm. It’s a par-ticular phenomenon when

it comes to games – Angry Birds springs to mind – and with the dozens of messaging apps that have been adopted in turn by the world’s teens.

In some cases, particularly in the case of games, these viral apps are very simple, and are developed quickly and almost by accident. The 2013 mobile game Flappy Bird, for example, was created in three days flat by Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen, but within a year became the most downloaded free game in the iOS App Store.

But while this may be an inspiring story for amateur developers, it’s not how things generally work in the real world. Most apps, unfortunate-ly, sink without trace and few make any real money.

“There are so many applications that are free and that will never directly generate revenue,” says Ken Dulaney, Gartner vice presi-

dent and distinguished analyst. “Gartner is forecasting that, by 2017, 94.5 per cent of downloads will be for free apps.

“Furthermore, of paid applica-tions, about 90 per cent are down-loaded less than 500 times per day and make less than $1,250 a day. This is only going to get worse in the future when there will be even greater competition, especially in successful markets.”

However, for many organisa-tions, making a direct profit isn’t really the point.

“Our analysis shows most mobile applications are not generating prof-its and that many mobile apps are not designed to generate revenue, but rather are used to build brand recognition and product awareness or are just for fun,” says Mr Dulaney.

Measuring the success of an app, therefore, is no longer just a question

of counting the number of down-loads or even using basic metrics such as average revenue per user. It means evaluating the far more in-tangible quality of user engagement to try and discover what wins users’ hearts, and what doesn’t.

Such analysis, of course, needs to be handled very differently from standard software testing. While aspects of an app such as security, speed and design can most efficient-ly be evaluated in a lab environ-ment, this is of limited value when testing user experience.

It’s easy enough to identify glaring problems – a slow-to-load interface or over-busy screen, perhaps. How-ever, it’s harder to establish which of these issues, if any, are likely to make people abandon the app mid-session or put them off using it altogether; and many issues can eas-ily slip through the net.

“Companies can no longer view their digital quality in a vacuum. They must approach it from a us-

“The testers’ feedback has cer-tainly helped us to develop better applications,” says Jane Lisink-er-Korobov, director of quality, es-calations and IT desktop support at Trulia. “We’ve also had good feedback from real estate profes-sionals and architects in the Ap-plause community, which has been most helpful.”

There is a wide array of metrics that can be used to evaluate how much users enjoy using an app, how easy they find it to navigate and how likely they are to carry on.

“We find that some of the best en-gagement metrics are sessions per user within a given amount of time, the average session length per user and the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users to determine how well you’re turning infrequent relationships with users into fre-quent, long-term ones,” says Josh

USER EXPERIENCEEMMA WOOLLACOTT

Todd, chief marketing officer of an-alytics firm Localytics.

Examining the length of sessions for different types of users, such as those who go on to make purchas-es and those who do not, can allow a developer to optimise specific screens to encourage the users to spend more time in the app.

Similarly, the basic retention rate shows whether users are coming back for more or abandoning the app after one or two uses. But exam-ining the drop-off rates for specific screens within an app can, far more valuably, reveal the likely reason behind these patterns.

By observing what actions users are taking on each screen, it’s pos-sible to see which parts of an app’s screens are being ignored and at which points users are liable to abandon the app.

If they are frequently getting stuck or experiencing problems at one particular stage, then some-thing needs to change. By optimis-ing any problematic screens and retesting with users, it’s possible to improve engagement and, ulti-mately, funnel users down the de-sired route.

Developers will have their own priorities when it comes to the metrics they use to define the suc-cess of an app, depending on the app’s particular function. A retail-er, for instance, is likely to be most interested in the conversion rate for purchases, while a health infor-mation service might be more con-cerned with the number of visitors signing up for further alerts.

When games developer Certain Affinity launched Age of Booty: Tac-tics, for example, its primary aims were to maximise user retention and make the game as viral as pos-sible. Using Google Analytics, the company looked at average screen time and the flow of user actions, and was able to discover that many

COMMERCIAL FEATURE

For some companies, an app isn’t simply part of the business model – it’s actually what makes the business. Such companies are springing up rapidly, as they can often have very low entry costs.

One example is Hungryhouse, part of Delivery Hero, which allows people to order takeaways from dozens of local restaurants through a single mobile app. Here, usability is more or less the only aspect of the business that matters, making user analytics of paramount importance.

Like so many enterprises, Hungryhouse was concerned about its rate of customer churn, which it defined as customers who had not completed a food order in 30 consecutive days.

By scanning Hungryhouse’s users’ historical data and

calculating the churn rate for each group of users that performed each event at various times, Localytics was able to extract a wealth of useful data.

Customers who successfully checked out at least once in their first 14 days with the app were 16 per cent less likely to churn, for example, and those who tapped a restaurant at least three times in their first three days were 13 per cent less likely to churn. The results have helped the company tweak its app

“For some time, we’ve been wondering what key factors lead to churn besides the obvious,” says Delivery Hero marketing executive Erik Kubik. “Being able to see and fully understand these factors lets us plan effective campaigns without leaning on our business intelligence team to crunch numbers.”

CASE STUDY: HUNGRYHOUSE

er-centric perspective, and test their sites and apps in the wild to ensure they work as intended in the hands of users,” says Matt Johnston, chief marketing and strategy officer at Applause, which maintains a community of 70,000 software testers.

“Providing a seamless, flawless digital experience for customers, be it on mobile, via web or in-store, is what strong companies are focused on. And that integrated customer experience cannot be tested, meas-ured or optimised from a lab.”

US real estate agency Trulia says Applause testing has helped it halve the development time for new features of its app, and that the im-proved functionality, usability and quality of its mobile applications have brought in 10 to 15 per cent more customers. It’s also cut the cost of testing compared with in-house, with IDC estimating a sav-ing of almost $400,000 (£280,000) a year over five years.

users were struggling with the first version’s over-complex menus.

“It enabled us to quickly identify areas of needed improvement which would have otherwise limited our potential success once in the mar-ket,” says Patrick Bergman, Certain Affinity’s business development manager.

It’s important to understand that people tend to use mobile apps very differently from web applications, so usability can mean something very different too. According to re-search from Lo-calytics, mobile users are regular-ly active across a range of apps, launching them on average 15 times a day and consistently using an aver-age of 18 apps a month.

They tend to “snack” on these apps, logging short sessions with several apps in one day, particularly accessing social media apps, weath-er apps, gaming apps and sports apps this way. And they’re fickle, abandoning apps as soon as they perceive them to have lost value or become boring.

The research revealed that 25 per cent of apps are only used once and 58 per cent will churn in the first 30 days of using an app. Three

quarters will leave within the first three months.

The way to keep users’ atten-tion, according to the analysis, is through increasing personalisa-tion, with apps aware of users’ ac-tivity across all channels, online and in-store, as well as on the app itself. This, plus regular two-way interaction, creates a long-term re-

lationship that re-duces churn.

“User experience encompasses all interactions that someone has with a brand. On mobile, those might be via push notifications or in-app messag-ing. When think-ing about what matters most, it is important to view iterations across a

user’s life,” says Mr Todd. “The most successful apps

think about the downstream en-gagement impact of their efforts, long after a specific interaction occurs. This broader focus ad-dresses the unintended conse-quences, like user churn, of an interaction and ensures that the app experience is working the way it is intended to.”

The way to keep users’ attention is

through increasing personalisation, with apps aware of users’

activity across all channels

Share this article online via Raconteur.net

TYPICAL CUSTOMER RETENTION WITH MOBILE APPS

Source: Apptentive 2015

One month after download

Six months after download

One year after download

40%

35%

30%

25%

20%

15%

10%

5%

0%

Measuring the success of an app means evaluating

the intangible quality of user

engagement to try and discover what wins users’ hearts, and what doesn’t

Source: Localytics

5.7minson average

spent by mobile users on each individual app

session

NUMBER OF TIMES PEOPLE TRY NEW APPS BEFORE STOPPING

Source: Localytics 2015

56%

3-5

9%

6-10

9%

10+

20%

2

6%

1

4.5AVERAGE

THE APP ECONOMY raconteur.net04 RACONTEUR RACONTEUR raconteur.net 05THE APP ECONOMY27 / 04 / 2016 27 / 04 / 2016

Get

ty Im

ages

Applications changing the face of online mobile marketingApps enable advertisers to zero in on target groups and personalise marketing, making ad campaigns more effective with greater return on investment

ADVERTISINGGIDEON SPANIER

Mobile apps have trans-formed online advertis-ing. Companies know much more about their

users and can serve them with more relevant and timely messages.

Apps are rich in personal data be-cause mobile users download them and often have to log in personal details, allowing much greater op-portunities to track and target them than on a web browser.

As Daniel Joseph, strategy di-rector and co-founder of The App Business, which helps organisations such as the Met Office and News UK to develop their app strategy, says: “The more an app knows about the user and the more of this it can pass back to ad networks, the more pre-cisely advertisers can target their ads and the more effective they’re likely to be.”

Ultimately, it means a brand can produce an ad that is personalised for a particular user on a particular device. This trend has been dubbed addressable adver-tising because the message, the time of day, the loca-tion and so on can all be tailored or addressed to that user in a trusted “walled garden” environment, so long as the user has given permis-sion, or their personal data is used on an anonymised basis.

The impact goes beyond advertis-ing. The intuitive nature of in-app payments makes it easier for compa-nies to drive purchases because cus-tomers’ bank details are often stored in the app after their first purchase.

The department store chain John Lewis is a good example of how mo-bile and the app, in particular, is no longer just a communications channel, but a sales tool. Some 21 per cent of its online customers now order via smartphone and 31 per cent order via tablet. Domino’s Pizza says its app is its most impor-tant sales channel, driving almost 50 per cent of all sales – a huge shift in just a few years.

Indeed, for some mobile-first com-panies, such as Uber and Snapchat, the app is their core business, blur-ring the line completely between the marketing for the app and the utility of the service.

The revolutionary impact of apps on advertising can be traced back to Apple’s launch of the iPhone in 2007 and App Store a year later.

Libby Robinson, Europe, Middle East and Africa managing direc-tor of the advertising agency M&C Saatchi Mobile, says: “Smartphones know everything about their owners and they are rarely more than a few feet apart at any time. Therefore, the ability for a mobile app to provide personalisation is unrivalled by any digital platform.”

The challenge for companies is to keep pace with the fast-chang-ing app economy. Ms Robinson warns: “The in-app ecosystem is intrinsically more complicated than desktop.”

Part of the reason for the complex-ity is that there are thousands of handsets with varying screen sizes and different mobile operating sys-tems, so there is not an easy, one-size-fits-all solution.

Then there is the lack of cookies, the tiny, tracking devices that are used on web browsers. That has

meant brands and advertisers have had to create alter-native identifiers, such as user log-ins to track and ana-lyse campaigns, says Ms Robinson.

Brands have multiple opportu-nities to use apps for advertising: first, to target us-ers in a third-par-ty app; second, to build their own app; and third, to integrate their own app with oth-

er third-party apps.Mr Joseph says brands have to

think differently about how they create ads in apps because, in some cases, consumers have reached sat-uration point and are rebelling, even though he plays down the threat of ad-blocking.

“In most apps, advertising is inte-grated in the same way as it is on the web,” he explains, referring to the traditional banner or pop-up ads. “This is simply a generic, one-size-fits-all approach that can – and fre-quently does – detrimentally affect the user experience on mobile. So it should be no surprise that the ad-vertising returns are low when this approach is taken.”

The growth area is native adver-tising where the ad is integrated into the app – for example, in a us-er’s Facebook feed – and that “pre-sents the opportunity to enhance or complement, not detract from, the user experience”, according to Mr Joseph.

Ms Robinson says: “A native app experience allows greater function-ality as it is integrated with the oper-ating system of the phone and it also allows for the correct tracking.”

user experience. This could mean low ratings, low app installs and negative brand perception. Apps that perform the best usually serve one purpose well.

“A well-designed and maintained app experience can be a powerful customer relationship management tool that allows constant re-engage-ment with a loyal customer base.”

Domino’s claims so many custom-ers have installed its app that the success has allowed the company to switch some of its ad spending from online to conventional media, such as its sponsorship of Channel 4 TV soap Hollyoaks to keep brand awareness high – a reflection, per-haps, that the small screen on a smartphone has creative limita-tions for advertising.

It is not easy to get an app no-ticed, even with advertising. “Creating branded destinations for audiences, especially on mo-bile, is becoming increasingly difficult particularly on mobile where the app store discovery ex-perience is broken,” says Emily Forbes, founder of Seenit, a video curation app company that works with many media and financial services clients.

She points out that the average user has 100 apps on their phone

at any one time and is likely to use only 20 regularly. “The answer for brands is to create compelling and interesting content to live inside the most used of the 20 apps, such as Snapchat or YouTube. Then you immediately have the widest possi-ble distribution at the lowest cost. Take your content to the audience; don’t make the audience come to you. To get ‘mobile’ you don’t need to create an app, you need to create an engaging mobile web experi-ence,” says Ms Forbes.

The app experience is increasing-ly moving beyond mobile to other forms of media, such as TV.

Sky’s latest internet-connected set-top box, Sky Q, feels more like an app – or, more accurately, a col-lection of apps – as the user experi-ence is designed to be intuitive, with other services such as YouTube and Facebook integrated into a menu of TV viewing options.

As apps become the primary way that we access and navigate the digital ecosystem, the opportuni-ties for advertisers to target specific audiences across different devices and platforms will only increase.

Interestingly, many retail brands are using their advertising, both online and offline, to encourage installations of their own app be-cause they want as much first-par-ty data as possible and it can in-crease sales.

In the case of John Lewis, driving users to its smartphone app was “five times more efficient than driv-ing them to the mobile site”, says Ms Robinson.

Just Eat, the online food delivery company, says its app has improved customer retention and frequency, as well as attracting new consumers, and this is why some of its most re-cent advertising makes no mention of its website.

Consumers’ expectations have risen sharply in a short space of time because of the popularity of smartphones, increasing the pres-sure on brands to create a better app experience.

“Establishing a role for their app is the most important thing that businesses need to understand,” says Ms Robinson. “While an app can drive return on investment, increase high-quality users and improve the overall brand percep-tion, unless the user has been con-sidered at every stage of the pro-cess, this can result in a confusing

Share this article online via Raconteur.net

A well-designed and maintained app experience can be a powerful customer

relationship management tool

that allows constant re-engagement

with a loyal customer base

FASTEST-GROWING APP CATEGORIES IN 2015 BASED ON INMOBI’S NETWORK BY NUMBER OF DOWNLOADSTRAVEL +1718%

M-COMMERCE +400%GAMING +26%

Source: InMobi

MOBILE APP REVENUE COMPOSITION (%)* SURVEY OF APP PUBLISHERS

INDIA

UK

US

CANADA

BRAZIL

FRANCE

SOUTH KOREA

GERMANY

RUSSIA

JAPAN

*In-app ads across all app stores; app store revenue across iOS and Google Play app stores only

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100

App store In-app advertising

Source: App Annie 2015

MOST ENGAGING MOBILE AD FORMATS ENGAGEMENT IS MEASURED BY CLICK-THROUGH RATES, INDEXED AGAINST THE GLOBAL AVERAGE WITH 100 AS THE BASE

MOST ENGAGING DAY AND TIME FOR MOBILE USERS, BY SECTOR ENGAGEMENT IS MEASURED BY CLICK-THROUGH RATES

MOST ENGAGING CONTENT ON MOBILE ENGAGEMENT IS MEASURED BY CLICK-THROUGH RATES, INDEXED AGAINST THE GLOBAL AVERAGE WITH 100 AS THE BASE

VIDEO ADS

NATIVE ADS

RICH MEDIAADS

BANNERS

603

195

160

101

11 AM 8 PM 10 PM 11 AM 9 PM

RETAIL FINANCE AUTOMOTIVE TECHNOLOGY FOOD & DRINK

HEALTH & FITNESS ENTERTAINMENT GAMING

FOOD &DRINK

SOCIAL NETWORKING

148 136 135 131 113

Source: InMobi

TOP 5 VERTICALS FOR ADVERTISERS FOR MOBILE AD SPENDING

MOST ENGAGING, MEASURED BY CLICK-THROUGH RATE

Source: InMobi 2014

1234

Entertainment

Consumer packaged goods

5

Telecoms

Automotive

Finance

1234

Travel

Social media

5

Retail

Consumer packaged goods

Technology

PLANS TO USE IN-APP AD FORMATS SURVEY OF APP PUBLISHERS

Less No change More

Source: App Annie 2014

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

INTERSTITIAL VIDEO ADS

INTERSTITIAL NON-VIDEO ADS

NATIVE ADS

INCENTIVISED ADS

PRE/MID/POST-ROLL VIDEO

BANNER ADS

IN-APP AD SPENDING WORLDWIDE ($BN)

Source: eMarketer 2014

2013 2014 2015 2016

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

IN-APP AD REVENUE SET TO SURPASS PC AND MOBILE ADS BY 2018 SURVEY OF APP PUBLISHERS

0

25

50

75

100

125

PC online search ads

PC online display ads

Other PC ads

Mobile display ads

Mobile search ads

Mobile in-app ads

2014 2018

1.0x

1.0x1.1x

2.6x3.3x

3.2x

Source: App Annie 2015

THE APP ECONOMY raconteur.net06 RACONTEUR RACONTEUR raconteur.net 07THE APP ECONOMY27 / 04 / 2016 27 / 04 / 2016

Applications changing the face of online mobile marketingApps enable advertisers to zero in on target groups and personalise marketing, making ad campaigns more effective with greater return on investment

ADVERTISINGGIDEON SPANIER

Mobile apps have trans-formed online advertis-ing. Companies know much more about their

users and can serve them with more relevant and timely messages.

Apps are rich in personal data be-cause mobile users download them and often have to log in personal details, allowing much greater op-portunities to track and target them than on a web browser.

As Daniel Joseph, strategy di-rector and co-founder of The App Business, which helps organisations such as the Met Office and News UK to develop their app strategy, says: “The more an app knows about the user and the more of this it can pass back to ad networks, the more pre-cisely advertisers can target their ads and the more effective they’re likely to be.”

Ultimately, it means a brand can produce an ad that is personalised for a particular user on a particular device. This trend has been dubbed addressable adver-tising because the message, the time of day, the loca-tion and so on can all be tailored or addressed to that user in a trusted “walled garden” environment, so long as the user has given permis-sion, or their personal data is used on an anonymised basis.

The impact goes beyond advertis-ing. The intuitive nature of in-app payments makes it easier for compa-nies to drive purchases because cus-tomers’ bank details are often stored in the app after their first purchase.

The department store chain John Lewis is a good example of how mo-bile and the app, in particular, is no longer just a communications channel, but a sales tool. Some 21 per cent of its online customers now order via smartphone and 31 per cent order via tablet. Domino’s Pizza says its app is its most impor-tant sales channel, driving almost 50 per cent of all sales – a huge shift in just a few years.

Indeed, for some mobile-first com-panies, such as Uber and Snapchat, the app is their core business, blur-ring the line completely between the marketing for the app and the utility of the service.

The revolutionary impact of apps on advertising can be traced back to Apple’s launch of the iPhone in 2007 and App Store a year later.

Libby Robinson, Europe, Middle East and Africa managing direc-tor of the advertising agency M&C Saatchi Mobile, says: “Smartphones know everything about their owners and they are rarely more than a few feet apart at any time. Therefore, the ability for a mobile app to provide personalisation is unrivalled by any digital platform.”

The challenge for companies is to keep pace with the fast-chang-ing app economy. Ms Robinson warns: “The in-app ecosystem is intrinsically more complicated than desktop.”

Part of the reason for the complex-ity is that there are thousands of handsets with varying screen sizes and different mobile operating sys-tems, so there is not an easy, one-size-fits-all solution.

Then there is the lack of cookies, the tiny, tracking devices that are used on web browsers. That has

meant brands and advertisers have had to create alter-native identifiers, such as user log-ins to track and ana-lyse campaigns, says Ms Robinson.

Brands have multiple opportu-nities to use apps for advertising: first, to target us-ers in a third-par-ty app; second, to build their own app; and third, to integrate their own app with oth-

er third-party apps.Mr Joseph says brands have to

think differently about how they create ads in apps because, in some cases, consumers have reached sat-uration point and are rebelling, even though he plays down the threat of ad-blocking.

“In most apps, advertising is inte-grated in the same way as it is on the web,” he explains, referring to the traditional banner or pop-up ads. “This is simply a generic, one-size-fits-all approach that can – and fre-quently does – detrimentally affect the user experience on mobile. So it should be no surprise that the ad-vertising returns are low when this approach is taken.”

The growth area is native adver-tising where the ad is integrated into the app – for example, in a us-er’s Facebook feed – and that “pre-sents the opportunity to enhance or complement, not detract from, the user experience”, according to Mr Joseph.

Ms Robinson says: “A native app experience allows greater function-ality as it is integrated with the oper-ating system of the phone and it also allows for the correct tracking.”

user experience. This could mean low ratings, low app installs and negative brand perception. Apps that perform the best usually serve one purpose well.

“A well-designed and maintained app experience can be a powerful customer relationship management tool that allows constant re-engage-ment with a loyal customer base.”

Domino’s claims so many custom-ers have installed its app that the success has allowed the company to switch some of its ad spending from online to conventional media, such as its sponsorship of Channel 4 TV soap Hollyoaks to keep brand awareness high – a reflection, per-haps, that the small screen on a smartphone has creative limita-tions for advertising.

It is not easy to get an app no-ticed, even with advertising. “Creating branded destinations for audiences, especially on mo-bile, is becoming increasingly difficult particularly on mobile where the app store discovery ex-perience is broken,” says Emily Forbes, founder of Seenit, a video curation app company that works with many media and financial services clients.

She points out that the average user has 100 apps on their phone

at any one time and is likely to use only 20 regularly. “The answer for brands is to create compelling and interesting content to live inside the most used of the 20 apps, such as Snapchat or YouTube. Then you immediately have the widest possi-ble distribution at the lowest cost. Take your content to the audience; don’t make the audience come to you. To get ‘mobile’ you don’t need to create an app, you need to create an engaging mobile web experi-ence,” says Ms Forbes.

The app experience is increasing-ly moving beyond mobile to other forms of media, such as TV.

Sky’s latest internet-connected set-top box, Sky Q, feels more like an app – or, more accurately, a col-lection of apps – as the user experi-ence is designed to be intuitive, with other services such as YouTube and Facebook integrated into a menu of TV viewing options.

As apps become the primary way that we access and navigate the digital ecosystem, the opportuni-ties for advertisers to target specific audiences across different devices and platforms will only increase.

Interestingly, many retail brands are using their advertising, both online and offline, to encourage installations of their own app be-cause they want as much first-par-ty data as possible and it can in-crease sales.

In the case of John Lewis, driving users to its smartphone app was “five times more efficient than driv-ing them to the mobile site”, says Ms Robinson.

Just Eat, the online food delivery company, says its app has improved customer retention and frequency, as well as attracting new consumers, and this is why some of its most re-cent advertising makes no mention of its website.

Consumers’ expectations have risen sharply in a short space of time because of the popularity of smartphones, increasing the pres-sure on brands to create a better app experience.

“Establishing a role for their app is the most important thing that businesses need to understand,” says Ms Robinson. “While an app can drive return on investment, increase high-quality users and improve the overall brand percep-tion, unless the user has been con-sidered at every stage of the pro-cess, this can result in a confusing

Share this article online via Raconteur.net

A well-designed and maintained app experience can be a powerful customer

relationship management tool

that allows constant re-engagement

with a loyal customer base

FASTEST-GROWING APP CATEGORIES IN 2015 BASED ON INMOBI’S NETWORK BY NUMBER OF DOWNLOADSTRAVEL +1718%

M-COMMERCE +400%GAMING +26%

Source: InMobi

MOBILE APP REVENUE COMPOSITION (%)* SURVEY OF APP PUBLISHERS

INDIA

UK

US

CANADA

BRAZIL

FRANCE

SOUTH KOREA

GERMANY

RUSSIA

JAPAN

*In-app ads across all app stores; app store revenue across iOS and Google Play app stores only

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100

App store In-app advertising

Source: App Annie 2015

MOST ENGAGING MOBILE AD FORMATS ENGAGEMENT IS MEASURED BY CLICK-THROUGH RATES, INDEXED AGAINST THE GLOBAL AVERAGE WITH 100 AS THE BASE

MOST ENGAGING DAY AND TIME FOR MOBILE USERS, BY SECTOR ENGAGEMENT IS MEASURED BY CLICK-THROUGH RATES

MOST ENGAGING CONTENT ON MOBILE ENGAGEMENT IS MEASURED BY CLICK-THROUGH RATES, INDEXED AGAINST THE GLOBAL AVERAGE WITH 100 AS THE BASE

VIDEO ADS

NATIVE ADS

RICH MEDIAADS

BANNERS

603

195

160

101

11 AM 8 PM 10 PM 11 AM 9 PM

RETAIL FINANCE AUTOMOTIVE TECHNOLOGY FOOD & DRINK

HEALTH & FITNESS ENTERTAINMENT GAMING

FOOD &DRINK

SOCIAL NETWORKING

148 136 135 131 113

Source: InMobi

TOP 5 VERTICALS FOR ADVERTISERS FOR MOBILE AD SPENDING

MOST ENGAGING, MEASURED BY CLICK-THROUGH RATE

Source: InMobi 2014

1234

Entertainment

Consumer packaged goods

5

Telecoms

Automotive

Finance

1234

Travel

Social media

5

Retail

Consumer packaged goods

Technology

PLANS TO USE IN-APP AD FORMATS SURVEY OF APP PUBLISHERS

Less No change More

Source: App Annie 2014

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

INTERSTITIAL VIDEO ADS

INTERSTITIAL NON-VIDEO ADS

NATIVE ADS

INCENTIVISED ADS

PRE/MID/POST-ROLL VIDEO

BANNER ADS

IN-APP AD SPENDING WORLDWIDE ($BN)

Source: eMarketer 2014

2013 2014 2015 2016

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

IN-APP AD REVENUE SET TO SURPASS PC AND MOBILE ADS BY 2018 SURVEY OF APP PUBLISHERS

0

25

50

75

100

125

PC online search ads

PC online display ads

Other PC ads

Mobile display ads

Mobile search ads

Mobile in-app ads

2014 2018

1.0x

1.0x1.1x

2.6x3.3x

3.2x

Source: App Annie 2015

THE APP ECONOMY raconteur.net06 RACONTEUR RACONTEUR raconteur.net 07THE APP ECONOMY27 / 04 / 2016 27 / 04 / 2016

How to bui ld an app and stay on budget Building an app may not be straightforward, but there are ways of getting the most for your money from well-designed software

BUILDING AN APPSTEVE RANGER

When Apple’s App Store went live in the summer of 2008 it kick-started a technol-

ogy revolution that is still underway. The combination of powerful

smartphones and the ability to write apps for them, anything from games to business processes, has made en-trepreneurs rich, given many strug-gling companies a boost by attract-ing new customers and helped drive efficiencies across several industries.

There are now more than three million apps available across An-droid and Apple’s operating sys-tem. Apple calculates that, since 2008, its App Store has generated almost $40 billion for developers, and created 2.6 million jobs across the United States and Europe.

And there’s little sign that the app economy is slowing down. The global mobile app market is project-ed to expand by 24 per cent to reach $51 billion in gross revenue across all app stores this year and hit $101 billion globally.

So apps are lucrative, but that doesn’t mean success will come easily as there are plenty of costly pitfalls for the unwary.

“We estimate there are about 40,000 new apps launched every month, so it is a crowded mar-ket and around two-thirds of all apps have only ever been down-loaded a handful of times – we call those zombie apps,” says Jaede Tan, territory director in Northern Europe and the Middle East at app analytics company App Annie.

The first step is to be clear why you want to build an app at all and to ensure that your reasoning is sound. There are plenty of bad rea-sons to build an app. Often some-one, perhaps the chief executive, decides that a company must have an app, which forces people fur-ther down in the organisation to scramble around and find a reason for it. This will always lead to a bad outcome.

It’s much better to start with a clearly defined goal, a fundamen-tal business model and an under-standing of who the app is being built for. “You have to focus on the role,” says Dan Bailey, IBM UK’s mobile business director. “The one thing that’s massively differ-ent with mobile is this task-based function.

“What mobile gives you is a deeper level of context of where the person is and what the person is doing.”

Inploi is a London-based technology startup building a jobs marketplace for the hospitality industry. People looking for work in restaurants, bars, cafés and hotels can sign up via the soon-to-be-launched app, while employers with positions to fill list their needs, and the app matches jobs to suitable candidates.

It has taken around six months to build the app with a core team of three and some additional help.

“We’ve learnt a lot along the way,” says Inploi co-founder Matthew de la Hey. “We’ve had to learn about the different languages and frameworks.”

He says it is important to get somebody on board with a firm

technical background to be involved with technical decisions and conversations, such as whether to build a hybrid app or to go with separate “native” apps for Android and Apple’s iOS. “It’s about finding the right people to bring together in a team,” he says.

It’s also important to be agile and flexible when working on building an app, says Alex Hanson-Smith, Inploi co-founder.

“In terms of the design, we’ve been through multiple iterations before we arrived at a product that was ready for market. Prototyping tools have enabled us to test our design on a wide range of audiences – feedback is imperative to crafting a good user experience,” he says.

“I think it’s a mistake to go into anything like this with too firm an idea of what you want because that can blinker you to things that you ought to change, which you might not do if you are too stubborn about it.”

CASE STUDY: INPLOI

Shut

ters

tock

HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO BUILD AN APP? BASED ON A SURVEY OF iOS, ANDROID AND HTML5 DEVELOPERS, IT TAKES ROUGHLY 18 WEEKS TO BUILD VERSION ONE OF A NATIVE APP

Source: Kinvey

The goal may be to generate rev-enue from the app itself, for ex-ample through consumers paying for it, or to improve customer loy-alty through a free app, perhaps a game, which will also help a company understand more about their users. Or the goal may be to cut costs by building an app which streamlines a complex compa-ny process. All these are entirely valid, but completely different, app projects.

It’s also vital to validate these ideas with some research. If you were hoping to sell your app on an app store you might be disap-pointed to realise that over the last few years there has been a trend towards “free-mium” apps that are free to use, but allow users to pay to upgrade for a better expe-rience. Look at what other com-panies in your sector have done with apps, un-derstand their motivations, and also what they have got right and wrong.

“Do your research, take the data and crunch it, and see what’s out there before because it is expensive to develop an app, and you don’t want to waste time and money on trial and error,” says App Annie’s Mr Tan.

Of course, if you are building an internal app, then your company’s

Share this article online via Raconteur.net

choice of handsets will be the most significant factor. Smartphones pack huge amounts of potential into a huge package and it’s often hard to work out which features to use. Does your app need access to the GPS feature or some other sen-sor? This can make for a richer app, but drive up cost and complexity.

The next big stage is to start on the design of the user experience – what the user of the app will see and do. How do they log in? Do they swipe up or down?

Getting the flow of the app right is remarkably hard. Designs will often take many prototypes to per-fect and rapid app prototyping tools exist for precise-ly this purpose. Depending on the complexity of the app, this stage can take weeks or even months to get right.

It’s vital to get as much input from everyone involved

with the project as possible at this stage, and even more important to involve people who can bring fresh eyes to the design and who can of-ten spot huge errors that you will be too close to the project to spot. Experts agree that this is the most critical stage of the project. Getting things wrong here can lead to very costly mistakes down the line when coding the app begins.

“If you don’t start with a clear understanding of what the user

experience should be and what the design of your app should look like, then it doesn’t matter what kind of developers you pull in, you’ll end up with a bad app. Stud-

ies show that the user experience is one of the most important fac-tors to get right,” says Burley Ka-wasaki, a senior vice president at enterprise app development com-pany Kony.

About 70 per cent of the defects that crop up when you are building a mobile app are related to incorrect user experience design, he says.

Once the design and user expe-rience is settled it is actually time to code the app. Timescales and costs can vary wildly depending on the scale and quality of the app, and who is doing the work. For the flagship consumer app of a large company, costs can easily run into hundreds of thousands of pounds and even into the millions. For a small-scale app for a company to use internally, the costs can be much more modest, perhaps tens of thousands.

Often the best thing to do at this stage is to aim first for the mini-mum viable product, the most basic version of your app that will work well enough, and then add the rest of the functionality as fast as possible. This allows for more testing with real customers, al-lowing your development team to tweak the code as they go along in response to feedback. “Think

big, start small and act fast,” says IBM’s Mr Bailey.

But building the app is potentially only one part of the cost. If an app needs to connect into your other enterprise systems, such as stock management or invoicing systems, then there could be a hefty bill for integration as well.

“It’s not just the cost of the la-bour to build what sits on the phone; studies show that the back-end integration is often around 70 per cent of the effort and cost,” says Mr Kawasaki.

And even once you’ve finished, apps are not static. Many organi-sations update their app every few weeks with bigger updates once or twice a year. And operating systems are regularly upgraded which could break how your app works, so pencil in the cost of ongoing maintenance and development.

That’s not the end, either, so get ready to start learning again. As momentum starts to build around wearable devices, such as smart-watches and virtual reality head-sets, you might have to start think-ing about a new class of apps soon.

It’s much better to start with a clearly defined

goal, a fundamental business model and an understanding of who the app is

being built for

Source: App Annie

40knew apps

are launched every month

DATA STORAGEThe building block of any

native app’s back-end

USER MANAGEMENTCreating user accounts, managing authentication

and security

SERVER-SIDE LOGICHow a developer

truly customises the user experience

VERSIONINGMaking version two

live without breaking version one

12 DAYS

WIREFRAMINGBlueprint for

user interface and experience

8 DAYS

UI POLISHFinalising the user interface, making the app stand out

from the crowd

10 DAYS

RACONTEUR raconteur.net 2XXXXxx xx xxxx

COMMERCIAL FEATURE

An “unethical, immoral, mendacious coven of techie wannabes” is a pretty catchy

insult. It’s what the chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau recently called the creators of ad-blocking software.

In his keynote address at the annual leadership meeting this year, the IAB boss went on to say ad-blocking is “stealing from publishers, subverting freedom of the press, operating a business model predicated on censorship of content and ultimately forcing consumers to pay more money for less”. Phew!

Ad-blockers, if you don’t know, are browser add-ons which cut off all advertising before the consumer sees it. Banner ads, YouTube video ads and even Google AdWords are all gone. Hundreds of millions of consumers use them.

A lot of online advertising has become very intrusive. You may be half way through a gripping article when – kaboom – up pops an ad which the readers must close in order to continue.

Consumers and techies have become so fed up with such intrusive adverts that they’ve created new technologies that essentially shut this model down entirely. And who can blame them? If advertisers are not respecting the consumer, then it’s only understandable that consumers would take action to block them out.

There is, however, one environment in which consumers actually welcome advertising – mobile games. Adverts within mobile games are not intrusive; in fact they add to the player’s in-game experience and can be far more effective than traditional adverts.

ADVERTISING IN GAMES IS A POWERPLAYAd-blocking software is killing traditional ads – here’s the solution

In-game advertising allows brands to target consumers with messages during natural breaks and pauses during the game. For example, once the consumer completes a level of the game successfully, there is a lull while they wait for the next level to load. During this time, a targeted advert appears. None of this mid-article pop-up nonsense.

And here’s the crucial bit. The consumer is offered a native in-game reward for interacting with the advert. In gratitude for their time, they are given virtual currency that can be used directly in the game they are playing.

The premise is simple: if people give their valuable attention to an advertiser, the advertiser should give them something valuable in return. Put plainly, if you want to win consumers over, you must offer them something of value that adds to their experience and does not interrupt it.

In-game adverts are incredibly versatile. Consumers can be asked to download an app, trial a product or watch a video in return for in-game rewards. The triple-win approach ensures each

party – consumers, developers, and brands – all want to participate.

Mobile gaming is the future of advertising while consumers are addicted to their smartphones. According to Nielsen, a fifth of all time on phones in the UK is spent playing games, up 3.7 times in two years.

And everyone’s at it. When consumers play games, their minds are relaxed and receptive – it is the perfect time to communicate.

Tapjoy is the pioneer in this space. We offer brands access to reach more than 520 million global consumers within the mobile games that consumers love and we drive on average over ten million ad engagements every day.

Our approach guarantees access to a large, receptive audience. Whether you want to drive awareness, promote an app or engage consumers with a rich media ad, it is all possible.

Ad-blockers don’t figure in mobile games. And our approach means consumers want to see the message. Our data on engagement proves the power of the model.

Sephora, LEGO and Google are just some of the brands using Tapjoy’s approach to reach receptive consumers.

The old method of delivering ads was inconvenient, imposing and one-directional. Consumers were right to block those ads.

The in-game, rewards-based way benefits all parties. And it is far more effective, with measurable, trackable metrics. It’s a transformation long overdue.

To find out more visit Tapjoy.com

DIGITAL MARKET OUTLOOK: MOBILE GAMESUSER BY AGE GROUP IN MILLIONS (UK)

2020

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

Source: Statista 2015

16-2425-3435-4445-5555+

21.3

total users (M)

20.1

18.9

17.8

16.8

14.5

14.6

0.8

0.9

1.1

1.2

1.4

1.6

1.8

2.1

2.0

2.4

2.5

2.7

2.8

2.9

3.6

3.5

4.0

4.3

4.5

4.7

4.9

6.6

6.2

5.8

5.5

5.2

4.4

4.5

4.8

4.6

4.4

4.2

4.0

3.5

3.5

When consumers play games, their minds are relaxed and receptive – it is the perfect time to communicate

13 DAYS 13 DAYS

12 DAYSDATA INTEGRATIONAllowing users to access information from/publish

to third-party sources

13 DAYS

PUSHMaintaining engagement with users continuously

6 DAYS

SYNCHRONISATIONEnabling offline usage

and resolve data conflicts

8 DAYS

CACHINGStoring data locally to speed load time

6 DAYS

UI DESIGNPixel perfect mock-ups of user interface (UI)

10 DAYS

DEVELOPMENTTranslating mock-ups

into functioning user-interface code

12 DAYS

CORE REQUIREMENT

USER-FACING

ENGAGEMENT DRIVER

REVENUE OPPORTUNITY

BACK-END

FRONT-END

START

18

WEEKS

THE APP ECONOMY raconteur.net08 RACONTEUR RACONTEUR raconteur.net 09THE APP ECONOMY27 / 04 / 2016 27 / 04 / 2016

COMMERCIAL FEATURE

How to bui ld an app and stay on budget Building an app may not be straightforward, but there are ways of getting the most for your money from well-designed software

BUILDING AN APPSTEVE RANGER

When Apple’s App Store went live in the summer of 2008 it kick-started a technol-

ogy revolution that is still underway. The combination of powerful

smartphones and the ability to write apps for them, anything from games to business processes, has made en-trepreneurs rich, given many strug-gling companies a boost by attract-ing new customers and helped drive efficiencies across several industries.

There are now more than three million apps available across An-droid and Apple’s operating sys-tem. Apple calculates that, since 2008, its App Store has generated almost $40 billion for developers, and created 2.6 million jobs across the United States and Europe.

And there’s little sign that the app economy is slowing down. The global mobile app market is project-ed to expand by 24 per cent to reach $51 billion in gross revenue across all app stores this year and hit $101 billion globally.

So apps are lucrative, but that doesn’t mean success will come easily as there are plenty of costly pitfalls for the unwary.

“We estimate there are about 40,000 new apps launched every month, so it is a crowded mar-ket and around two-thirds of all apps have only ever been down-loaded a handful of times – we call those zombie apps,” says Jaede Tan, territory director in Northern Europe and the Middle East at app analytics company App Annie.

The first step is to be clear why you want to build an app at all and to ensure that your reasoning is sound. There are plenty of bad rea-sons to build an app. Often some-one, perhaps the chief executive, decides that a company must have an app, which forces people fur-ther down in the organisation to scramble around and find a reason for it. This will always lead to a bad outcome.

It’s much better to start with a clearly defined goal, a fundamen-tal business model and an under-standing of who the app is being built for. “You have to focus on the role,” says Dan Bailey, IBM UK’s mobile business director. “The one thing that’s massively differ-ent with mobile is this task-based function.

“What mobile gives you is a deeper level of context of where the person is and what the person is doing.”

Inploi is a London-based technology startup building a jobs marketplace for the hospitality industry. People looking for work in restaurants, bars, cafés and hotels can sign up via the soon-to-be-launched app, while employers with positions to fill list their needs, and the app matches jobs to suitable candidates.

It has taken around six months to build the app with a core team of three and some additional help.

“We’ve learnt a lot along the way,” says Inploi co-founder Matthew de la Hey. “We’ve had to learn about the different languages and frameworks.”

He says it is important to get somebody on board with a firm

technical background to be involved with technical decisions and conversations, such as whether to build a hybrid app or to go with separate “native” apps for Android and Apple’s iOS. “It’s about finding the right people to bring together in a team,” he says.

It’s also important to be agile and flexible when working on building an app, says Alex Hanson-Smith, Inploi co-founder.

“In terms of the design, we’ve been through multiple iterations before we arrived at a product that was ready for market. Prototyping tools have enabled us to test our design on a wide range of audiences – feedback is imperative to crafting a good user experience,” he says.

“I think it’s a mistake to go into anything like this with too firm an idea of what you want because that can blinker you to things that you ought to change, which you might not do if you are too stubborn about it.”

CASE STUDY: INPLOI

Shut

ters

tock

HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO BUILD AN APP? BASED ON A SURVEY OF iOS, ANDROID AND HTML5 DEVELOPERS, IT TAKES ROUGHLY 18 WEEKS TO BUILD VERSION ONE OF A NATIVE APP

Source: Kinvey

The goal may be to generate rev-enue from the app itself, for ex-ample through consumers paying for it, or to improve customer loy-alty through a free app, perhaps a game, which will also help a company understand more about their users. Or the goal may be to cut costs by building an app which streamlines a complex compa-ny process. All these are entirely valid, but completely different, app projects.

It’s also vital to validate these ideas with some research. If you were hoping to sell your app on an app store you might be disap-pointed to realise that over the last few years there has been a trend towards “free-mium” apps that are free to use, but allow users to pay to upgrade for a better expe-rience. Look at what other com-panies in your sector have done with apps, un-derstand their motivations, and also what they have got right and wrong.

“Do your research, take the data and crunch it, and see what’s out there before because it is expensive to develop an app, and you don’t want to waste time and money on trial and error,” says App Annie’s Mr Tan.

Of course, if you are building an internal app, then your company’s

Share this article online via Raconteur.net

choice of handsets will be the most significant factor. Smartphones pack huge amounts of potential into a huge package and it’s often hard to work out which features to use. Does your app need access to the GPS feature or some other sen-sor? This can make for a richer app, but drive up cost and complexity.

The next big stage is to start on the design of the user experience – what the user of the app will see and do. How do they log in? Do they swipe up or down?

Getting the flow of the app right is remarkably hard. Designs will often take many prototypes to per-fect and rapid app prototyping tools exist for precise-ly this purpose. Depending on the complexity of the app, this stage can take weeks or even months to get right.

It’s vital to get as much input from everyone involved

with the project as possible at this stage, and even more important to involve people who can bring fresh eyes to the design and who can of-ten spot huge errors that you will be too close to the project to spot. Experts agree that this is the most critical stage of the project. Getting things wrong here can lead to very costly mistakes down the line when coding the app begins.

“If you don’t start with a clear understanding of what the user

experience should be and what the design of your app should look like, then it doesn’t matter what kind of developers you pull in, you’ll end up with a bad app. Stud-

ies show that the user experience is one of the most important fac-tors to get right,” says Burley Ka-wasaki, a senior vice president at enterprise app development com-pany Kony.

About 70 per cent of the defects that crop up when you are building a mobile app are related to incorrect user experience design, he says.

Once the design and user expe-rience is settled it is actually time to code the app. Timescales and costs can vary wildly depending on the scale and quality of the app, and who is doing the work. For the flagship consumer app of a large company, costs can easily run into hundreds of thousands of pounds and even into the millions. For a small-scale app for a company to use internally, the costs can be much more modest, perhaps tens of thousands.

Often the best thing to do at this stage is to aim first for the mini-mum viable product, the most basic version of your app that will work well enough, and then add the rest of the functionality as fast as possible. This allows for more testing with real customers, al-lowing your development team to tweak the code as they go along in response to feedback. “Think

big, start small and act fast,” says IBM’s Mr Bailey.

But building the app is potentially only one part of the cost. If an app needs to connect into your other enterprise systems, such as stock management or invoicing systems, then there could be a hefty bill for integration as well.

“It’s not just the cost of the la-bour to build what sits on the phone; studies show that the back-end integration is often around 70 per cent of the effort and cost,” says Mr Kawasaki.

And even once you’ve finished, apps are not static. Many organi-sations update their app every few weeks with bigger updates once or twice a year. And operating systems are regularly upgraded which could break how your app works, so pencil in the cost of ongoing maintenance and development.

That’s not the end, either, so get ready to start learning again. As momentum starts to build around wearable devices, such as smart-watches and virtual reality head-sets, you might have to start think-ing about a new class of apps soon.

It’s much better to start with a clearly defined

goal, a fundamental business model and an understanding of who the app is

being built for

Source: App Annie

40knew apps

are launched every month

DATA STORAGEThe building block of any

native app’s back-end

USER MANAGEMENTCreating user accounts, managing authentication

and security

SERVER-SIDE LOGICHow a developer

truly customises the user experience

VERSIONINGMaking version two

live without breaking version one

12 DAYS

WIREFRAMINGBlueprint for

user interface and experience

8 DAYS

UI POLISHFinalising the user interface, making the app stand out

from the crowd

10 DAYS

RACONTEUR raconteur.net 2XXXXxx xx xxxx

COMMERCIAL FEATURE

An “unethical, immoral, mendacious coven of techie wannabes” is a pretty catchy

insult. It’s what the chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau recently called the creators of ad-blocking software.

In his keynote address at the annual leadership meeting this year, the IAB boss went on to say ad-blocking is “stealing from publishers, subverting freedom of the press, operating a business model predicated on censorship of content and ultimately forcing consumers to pay more money for less”. Phew!

Ad-blockers, if you don’t know, are browser add-ons which cut off all advertising before the consumer sees it. Banner ads, YouTube video ads and even Google AdWords are all gone. Hundreds of millions of consumers use them.

A lot of online advertising has become very intrusive. You may be half way through a gripping article when – kaboom – up pops an ad which the readers must close in order to continue.

Consumers and techies have become so fed up with such intrusive adverts that they’ve created new technologies that essentially shut this model down entirely. And who can blame them? If advertisers are not respecting the consumer, then it’s only understandable that consumers would take action to block them out.

There is, however, one environment in which consumers actually welcome advertising – mobile games. Adverts within mobile games are not intrusive; in fact they add to the player’s in-game experience and can be far more effective than traditional adverts.

ADVERTISING IN GAMES IS A POWERPLAYAd-blocking software is killing traditional ads – here’s the solution

In-game advertising allows brands to target consumers with messages during natural breaks and pauses during the game. For example, once the consumer completes a level of the game successfully, there is a lull while they wait for the next level to load. During this time, a targeted advert appears. None of this mid-article pop-up nonsense.

And here’s the crucial bit. The consumer is offered a native in-game reward for interacting with the advert. In gratitude for their time, they are given virtual currency that can be used directly in the game they are playing.

The premise is simple: if people give their valuable attention to an advertiser, the advertiser should give them something valuable in return. Put plainly, if you want to win consumers over, you must offer them something of value that adds to their experience and does not interrupt it.

In-game adverts are incredibly versatile. Consumers can be asked to download an app, trial a product or watch a video in return for in-game rewards. The triple-win approach ensures each

party – consumers, developers, and brands – all want to participate.

Mobile gaming is the future of advertising while consumers are addicted to their smartphones. According to Nielsen, a fifth of all time on phones in the UK is spent playing games, up 3.7 times in two years.

And everyone’s at it. When consumers play games, their minds are relaxed and receptive – it is the perfect time to communicate.

Tapjoy is the pioneer in this space. We offer brands access to reach more than 520 million global consumers within the mobile games that consumers love and we drive on average over ten million ad engagements every day.

Our approach guarantees access to a large, receptive audience. Whether you want to drive awareness, promote an app or engage consumers with a rich media ad, it is all possible.

Ad-blockers don’t figure in mobile games. And our approach means consumers want to see the message. Our data on engagement proves the power of the model.

Sephora, LEGO and Google are just some of the brands using Tapjoy’s approach to reach receptive consumers.

The old method of delivering ads was inconvenient, imposing and one-directional. Consumers were right to block those ads.

The in-game, rewards-based way benefits all parties. And it is far more effective, with measurable, trackable metrics. It’s a transformation long overdue.

To find out more visit Tapjoy.com

DIGITAL MARKET OUTLOOK: MOBILE GAMESUSER BY AGE GROUP IN MILLIONS (UK)

2020

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

Source: Statista 2015

16-2425-3435-4445-5555+

21.3

total users (M)

20.1

18.9

17.8

16.8

14.5

14.6

0.8

0.9

1.1

1.2

1.4

1.6

1.8

2.1

2.0

2.4

2.5

2.7

2.8

2.9

3.6

3.5

4.0

4.3

4.5

4.7

4.9

6.6

6.2

5.8

5.5

5.2

4.4

4.5

4.8

4.6

4.4

4.2

4.0

3.5

3.5

When consumers play games, their minds are relaxed and receptive – it is the perfect time to communicate

13 DAYS 13 DAYS

12 DAYSDATA INTEGRATIONAllowing users to access information from/publish

to third-party sources

13 DAYS

PUSHMaintaining engagement with users continuously

6 DAYS

SYNCHRONISATIONEnabling offline usage

and resolve data conflicts

8 DAYS

CACHINGStoring data locally to speed load time

6 DAYS

UI DESIGNPixel perfect mock-ups of user interface (UI)

10 DAYS

DEVELOPMENTTranslating mock-ups

into functioning user-interface code

12 DAYS

CORE REQUIREMENT

USER-FACING

ENGAGEMENT DRIVER

REVENUE OPPORTUNITY

BACK-END

FRONT-END

START

18

WEEKS

THE APP ECONOMY raconteur.net08 RACONTEUR RACONTEUR raconteur.net 09THE APP ECONOMY27 / 04 / 2016 27 / 04 / 2016

COMMERCIAL FEATURE

Mobile apps oil the wheels of enterpriseSmartphones and tablets could do more for your company than simply deliver e-mails on the road and serve up pretty calendars as enterprise mobile apps evolve into useful business tools

ENTERPRISE APPSDANNY BRADBURY

In the past, mobility in business focused mainly on general of-fice productivity apps. At best, that offers marginal gains; at

worst, it can amplify inefficiencies. Being copied in on pointless

e-mails via your mobile phone doesn’t make you more productive, says Michael Hobbs, UK mobility lead at Accenture UK and Ireland, it just gives you more annoying e-mails to wade through on the road.

“They tend to magnify the ‘reply all’ phenomenon unless they’re used for specific purposes,” he says of mobile enterprise apps.

But as these apps evolve, they are digitising paper-based work, ena-bling staff to get more important things done wherever they are. For example, retail staff are visiting farmers to inspect the quality of fresh food and stream-line their supply chains. Property management com-panies are dis-patching janitors to fix problems in record time, docu-ment the work with photos and then no-tify tenants via text messages.

So how can you dream up a mobile app that makes sense for your business? Juan Pab-lo Luchetti, consultancy director at enterprise mobile app consultancy Mubaloo, works with clients to de-termine their business objectives, such as processing invoices more quickly or reducing service times.

“We look at what roles impact that and which of those roles are highly mobile,” he says. The company will consult with key personnel, and find out how enterprise mobile apps may be able to transform what they do and help them meet their business goals.

What kinds of things might these apps do? They sit along a continuum of complexity, according to Chris Marsh, a principal analyst in enter-prise mobility at technology analyst company 451 Research. Simpler en-terprise mobile apps cover func-tions common to many companies, such as inventory management or customer relationship manage-ment. These can be purchased off the shelf, will have some configura-tion capability and will typically be linked to some kind of back-end da-tabase provided by the vendor.

As apps become more sophisticat-ed, they may exchange more detailed information with multiple back-end applications, needing more custom development, says Mr Marsh.

“You’re giving tools for businesses to create their own user interface at the front and giving them more flexibility to decide what they pull from those back-end systems into their apps,” he says. “It happens on a much more customised basis.”

If you have these ambitions, be sure your IT department can sup-port them, warns Caroline Van Den Burgh, vice president, Europe Mid-dle East and Africa, at DMI, which builds mobile software systems for enterprise customers.

One of the dangers is having older, back-end software that isn’t ready to connect with the kind of mobile apps customers want to build for users. She says: “The limitation is often the IT structure.

“We think that the promise of mobile really is to make the busi-ness process much more contex-tual through things like location and presence awareness,” says Mr Marsh. An enterprise mobile app

that knows where you are and per-haps what you’re doing can send you tasks appropriate for your context, for example.

Devices and apps will reach new heights of sophisti-cation as wearables enter the scene, ac-cording to Accen-ture’s Mr Hobbs. “Wearable devic-

es have a clear potential to disrupt every industry, including oil and gas, healthcare, media, retail, public ser-vices, warehouse, agriculture, con-struction and automotive,” he says.

He splits wearables into two catego-ries: generalist devices, such as smart-watches that are currently popular in the consumer market; and specialist devices, such as glasses with heads-up displays, including the enterprise ver-sion of Google’s Project Glass.

“The biggest case for those is spe-cific and it stacks up where it assists someone in performing a business

An enterprise mobile app that knows

where you are and perhaps what you’re doing can send you

tasks appropriate for your context

FIVE FUNCTIONS

05 WAREHOUSELarge warehouses are ideal depart-ments for task scheduling. Smart-phones or wearables could track workers’ whereabouts, sending them to different aisles and giving them different jobs. Bonus points include “smart” shelves using con-nected sensors to tell the enterprise app which aisles need stocking next.

04 FINANCE

Sending invoices is a critical business function, but relies on billing data from employees. Field service engineers could use their mobile data to log in-formation about completed jobs. The finance department could then use that data to gen-erate invoices and send them before the engineer has even returned to the office.

03 MARKETING

A mobile app could analyse notes in real time during a marketing meeting, using key-words to work out what con-cepts are being discussed. It could immediately search the company’s analytics systems to return appropriate data in visual form, giving the market-ing department additional in-telligence.

02 SALES

Field sales staff can use mobile apps to reference up-to-date product data and create propos-als on the fly. They can then pres-ent the custom proposal to the customer to be signed and action the order instantly before they re-turn to the office, speeding up the delivery process.

01 HUMAN RESOURCESA company relying on shift-based staff might

find it difficult to track attendance and find absentee cover quickly. An enterprise app could enable work-ers to report in sick using their smartphone. It could then contact other workers automatically, asking them to cover the shift and allowing them to accept electronically, automatically adjusting their payroll.

process more efficiently,” he says. Examples include using the glasses to help airline engineers to assemble components more efficiently.

The company is also working with vendors to create scaled-down wear-able devices with limited functions to support specific business process-es. “We can get the wristwatch down to sub-$100 and give productivity benefits to the cleaning and mainte-nance of hotels,” he says.

A cleaner could wear a low-func-tionality band that knew their loca-tion and relayed simple messages, like “Drink spilled in lobby – please fix”. “It’s more convenient than somebody carrying around a smart-phone,” says Mr Hobbs.

However, companies face a long journey to build enterprise mobile apps even half that sophisticated. The first step along the road is get-ting business managers on board and ensuring the money is there to get enterprise app projects beyond the pilot phase, says Ms Van Den Burgh. This means finding a way to measure the success of a mobile pro-ject early on.

“We try to create clarity that can be taken to a senior manager. We show metrics that can be used to measure the project going forward,” she says. The metrics depend on the app con-cerned. It could involve measuring the number of visits a field service en-gineer makes in a day or gauging how long a product takes to move from the warehouse to the retail shelf.

So, what are your critical tools on that journey? They are a de-cent roadmap, the right technical infrastructure and a sense every-one in the organisation is walking in lockstep.

NEW MOBILE APP TYPES PLANNED OVER THE NEXT TWO YEARSSURVEY OF GLOBAL IT PROFESSIONALS

Source: Kony 2015

Share this article online via Raconteur.net

Shut

ters

tock

Customer relationship management (CRM) - salesCRM – marketingCustomer-facing website or applicationGeneral productivity apps

CRM – service/support

Field service apps

Supply chain apps

Partner apps

Task-based employee apps

Vertical-specific industry apps

54%

49%

47%

44%

43%

41%

39%

38%

38%

38%

THE APP ECONOMY raconteur.net10 RACONTEUR27 / 04 / 2016

Mobile apps oil the wheels of enterpriseSmartphones and tablets could do more for your company than simply deliver e-mails on the road and serve up pretty calendars as enterprise mobile apps evolve into useful business tools

ENTERPRISE APPSDANNY BRADBURY

In the past, mobility in business focused mainly on general of-fice productivity apps. At best, that offers marginal gains; at

worst, it can amplify inefficiencies. Being copied in on pointless

e-mails via your mobile phone doesn’t make you more productive, says Michael Hobbs, UK mobility lead at Accenture UK and Ireland, it just gives you more annoying e-mails to wade through on the road.

“They tend to magnify the ‘reply all’ phenomenon unless they’re used for specific purposes,” he says of mobile enterprise apps.

But as these apps evolve, they are digitising paper-based work, ena-bling staff to get more important things done wherever they are. For example, retail staff are visiting farmers to inspect the quality of fresh food and stream-line their supply chains. Property management com-panies are dis-patching janitors to fix problems in record time, docu-ment the work with photos and then no-tify tenants via text messages.

So how can you dream up a mobile app that makes sense for your business? Juan Pab-lo Luchetti, consultancy director at enterprise mobile app consultancy Mubaloo, works with clients to de-termine their business objectives, such as processing invoices more quickly or reducing service times.

“We look at what roles impact that and which of those roles are highly mobile,” he says. The company will consult with key personnel, and find out how enterprise mobile apps may be able to transform what they do and help them meet their business goals.

What kinds of things might these apps do? They sit along a continuum of complexity, according to Chris Marsh, a principal analyst in enter-prise mobility at technology analyst company 451 Research. Simpler en-terprise mobile apps cover func-tions common to many companies, such as inventory management or customer relationship manage-ment. These can be purchased off the shelf, will have some configura-tion capability and will typically be linked to some kind of back-end da-tabase provided by the vendor.

As apps become more sophisticat-ed, they may exchange more detailed information with multiple back-end applications, needing more custom development, says Mr Marsh.

“You’re giving tools for businesses to create their own user interface at the front and giving them more flexibility to decide what they pull from those back-end systems into their apps,” he says. “It happens on a much more customised basis.”

If you have these ambitions, be sure your IT department can sup-port them, warns Caroline Van Den Burgh, vice president, Europe Mid-dle East and Africa, at DMI, which builds mobile software systems for enterprise customers.

One of the dangers is having older, back-end software that isn’t ready to connect with the kind of mobile apps customers want to build for users. She says: “The limitation is often the IT structure.

“We think that the promise of mobile really is to make the busi-ness process much more contex-tual through things like location and presence awareness,” says Mr Marsh. An enterprise mobile app

that knows where you are and per-haps what you’re doing can send you tasks appropriate for your context, for example.

Devices and apps will reach new heights of sophisti-cation as wearables enter the scene, ac-cording to Accen-ture’s Mr Hobbs. “Wearable devic-

es have a clear potential to disrupt every industry, including oil and gas, healthcare, media, retail, public ser-vices, warehouse, agriculture, con-struction and automotive,” he says.

He splits wearables into two catego-ries: generalist devices, such as smart-watches that are currently popular in the consumer market; and specialist devices, such as glasses with heads-up displays, including the enterprise ver-sion of Google’s Project Glass.

“The biggest case for those is spe-cific and it stacks up where it assists someone in performing a business

An enterprise mobile app that knows

where you are and perhaps what you’re doing can send you

tasks appropriate for your context

FIVE FUNCTIONS

05 WAREHOUSELarge warehouses are ideal depart-ments for task scheduling. Smart-phones or wearables could track workers’ whereabouts, sending them to different aisles and giving them different jobs. Bonus points include “smart” shelves using con-nected sensors to tell the enterprise app which aisles need stocking next.

04 FINANCE

Sending invoices is a critical business function, but relies on billing data from employees. Field service engineers could use their mobile data to log in-formation about completed jobs. The finance department could then use that data to gen-erate invoices and send them before the engineer has even returned to the office.

03 MARKETING

A mobile app could analyse notes in real time during a marketing meeting, using key-words to work out what con-cepts are being discussed. It could immediately search the company’s analytics systems to return appropriate data in visual form, giving the market-ing department additional in-telligence.

02 SALES

Field sales staff can use mobile apps to reference up-to-date product data and create propos-als on the fly. They can then pres-ent the custom proposal to the customer to be signed and action the order instantly before they re-turn to the office, speeding up the delivery process.

01 HUMAN RESOURCESA company relying on shift-based staff might

find it difficult to track attendance and find absentee cover quickly. An enterprise app could enable work-ers to report in sick using their smartphone. It could then contact other workers automatically, asking them to cover the shift and allowing them to accept electronically, automatically adjusting their payroll.

process more efficiently,” he says. Examples include using the glasses to help airline engineers to assemble components more efficiently.

The company is also working with vendors to create scaled-down wear-able devices with limited functions to support specific business process-es. “We can get the wristwatch down to sub-$100 and give productivity benefits to the cleaning and mainte-nance of hotels,” he says.

A cleaner could wear a low-func-tionality band that knew their loca-tion and relayed simple messages, like “Drink spilled in lobby – please fix”. “It’s more convenient than somebody carrying around a smart-phone,” says Mr Hobbs.

However, companies face a long journey to build enterprise mobile apps even half that sophisticated. The first step along the road is get-ting business managers on board and ensuring the money is there to get enterprise app projects beyond the pilot phase, says Ms Van Den Burgh. This means finding a way to measure the success of a mobile pro-ject early on.

“We try to create clarity that can be taken to a senior manager. We show metrics that can be used to measure the project going forward,” she says. The metrics depend on the app con-cerned. It could involve measuring the number of visits a field service en-gineer makes in a day or gauging how long a product takes to move from the warehouse to the retail shelf.

So, what are your critical tools on that journey? They are a de-cent roadmap, the right technical infrastructure and a sense every-one in the organisation is walking in lockstep.

NEW MOBILE APP TYPES PLANNED OVER THE NEXT TWO YEARSSURVEY OF GLOBAL IT PROFESSIONALS

Source: Kony 2015

Share this article online via Raconteur.net

Shut

ters

tock

Customer relationship management (CRM) - salesCRM – marketingCustomer-facing website or applicationGeneral productivity apps

CRM – service/support

Field service apps

Supply chain apps

Partner apps

Task-based employee apps

Vertical-specific industry apps

54%

49%

47%

44%

43%

41%

39%

38%

38%

38%

THE APP ECONOMY raconteur.net10 RACONTEUR27 / 04 / 2016

THE APP ECONOMY raconteur.net12 RACONTEUR27 / 04 / 2016