User Experience in Mobile Commerce

Why is it important?

With the growing number of mobile operators and mobile applications in the market, the most important way of gaining customers is to ensure a ‘WOW’ user experience. A good user experience has the maximum potential of ensuring repeat business with the customer.

What do users want?

It ultimately boils down to user experience as we have seen previously. But how does one make sense of a user experience!! What are the chief expectations of users in a mobile application? I’ll try to list down some overlooked factors and also justify them to the best of my ability and knowledge.

Easy to use – This is by far the most important factor that engages users and encourages them to do a repeat business. An easy to use application renders control to the user and respects his/her preference. An application that doesn’t render control will result in frustration and users will constantly look for work around which may include switching.

Simple Interface – A company that aspires to become a leader in the M-Commerce domain would ideally want its users to learn using its application quickly and even more so become addicted to it. In such a case, the learning curve should be very short i.e. people should be able to adapt to the application and system intuitively. While designing an interface, focus must be on areas like design, functionality and navigation.

Personalization – Users want content that is relevant to their needs and requirements. The extent of personalization allowed in an application goes a long way in determining satisfaction reported by the users. Typical features that can be personalized in an application are sound notifications for special events/messages, suggestions that reflect past preferences, offline content for viewing etc.

Synchronization – Most user work on various devices at the same time e.g. the user may access the same application/website from their desktop and mobile. However, there should be common database which is reflected across all the platforms. Past preferences and decisions should reflect across all the platforms. This also works towards customizing the experience for the users.

Progress on the academic project

After gathering customer insights in the first week, we headed to develop on those insights. Brainstorming was the prime method of idea generation and the group sat down together to discuss the idea and the road ahead. Major specifications of the plan were finalized and the functionalities frozen. The brief approach followed in week second is discussed below.

Specifics about functionalities – The team discussed in detail the functionalities that are desired from the application. We conducted a market research to know the user requirements and what are the expectations from such an application. The insights gathered are immense and gave us a lot of fresh perspective on the design aspects.

Screen design – the screen design was finalized and careful thought was given to each and every screen and its functionality. The primary philosophy was to keep the UI as simple as possible and attain the functionality with minimum number of clicks.

Verification – The UI design was shown to a lot of potential users of the application and their insights were understood. This was meant as a feedback mechanism for the application and acted as a collaborative approach for development.