Recently, we featured three guest speakers with high-level user experience design expertise: Evidation’s General Manager of the Consumer Business Meg Dryer, Sam’s Club VP Head of Product & Research Martin Granström and Fetch’s CMO Birk Cooper. While their products and services are different, the companies share a reverence for experience design. Following are their key insights on designing effective and customer-centric mobile app experiences. 

User-Centric Design: The Heart of Memorable Apps
The foundation of every successful app is user-centric experience design. Why? It anticipates and drives customer activation, engagement and retention. 

Take inspiration from Fetch, America’s leading rewards app, which provides customers with rewards from 650 brand partners. Its large volume of offerings could initially overwhelm new users, so Fetch intelligently introduces brands to users over time through personalization. In addition, Fetch incorporates fun features, such as gaming and a leaderboard, to quite literally make earning rewards fun and encourage frequent use. 

Evidation, a pioneer in health engagement and rewards, leveraged customer feedback during an app rebrand. This process improved the overall UX and prevented a stylistic faux pas. When evaluating new brand colors, a customer revealed that purple symbolically represented death in their culture. Being a health-focused company, Evidation swiftly removed the color from their palette. This scenario underscores the importance of centering users in all design aspects, from functional to aesthetic. 

Innovative Features for Customer Retention
Customer engagement and retention are essential to brand loyalty. Companies achieve this by proactively identifying user pain points and integrating solutions within apps. After noticing a pattern of dips in user engagement, Evidation designed features to combat “off moments.” They began offering customers the option to switch the app’s focus to a higher priority goal.  For example, customers can shift monitoring from exercise to sleep. Additionally, by connecting to a wearable device, users are rewarded points for actions they do every day, such as walking. Through design strategies that proactively anticipate app disengagement, Evidation retains users long-term.

Infusing Brand DNA through Experimentation
The design and functionality of mobile apps do more than just engage users — they mirror your brand’s heart and soul. Customers want app-enabled conveniences and streamlined services, but you only get one chance to make a first impression. 

Brands forge stronger bonds with users by integrating their mission and values into the app design. A brilliant approach is through creative experimentation. For example, Evidation, engages a community of advisors for beta testing before introducing design changes to all users. This process demonstrates their commitment to trust and transparency and aids in continually upgrading app experiences.

Fetch ingeniously integrates their ethos into design. Their mantra? Make it fun for customers to earn rewards through simple activities like scanning receipts. By consistently iterating ways to embed their brand identity into app experiences, they can retain 74% of new users after month two. 

Retail giant Sam’s Club combines physical and digital design elements for cohesive member experiences. Experimentation in their unique design studio, Clubhouse, helps develop innovative solutions to address member needs across journeys spanning the mobile app, website, and physical stores. By dedicating space and resources to building cohesive experiences, both employees and customers benefit. Customers seamlessly experience the brand, whether it’s through the mobile app, store or gas pump. Associates obtain consumer-grade digital and physical tools that equip them to increase customer satisfaction. 

Elevating App Experiences 
Creating a mobile app that delivers on brand values, addresses customers needs innovatively and offers an ongoing value exchange to become indispensable is key. Take a moment and check out our Masters of MAX podcast for more tips and insights on elevating the app experience, boosting customer engagement and building brand loyalty. Also, the next time you open a favorite app, take a moment to revel in the experiences and functionality that keep you coming back for more. 

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The importance, pressures and value creation opportunities surrounding mobile app experience command marketing and technology leaders’ attention. We think about, research and advise brands around the world everyday on how to capture more customer value from mobile apps for themselves, and often share that knowledge more widely through our blog. Of everything published in 2023, the most-viewed blog posts focused on three overarching topics:

• Empowering a company’s entire team to create and optimize app experiences
• Better activating and engaging app customers
• Innovating native mobile experiences that improve customers’ lives 

Empowering Everyone to Create and Optimize Experiences

The ability of brands to engage with customers and optimize experiences depends on the tools they have at their disposal. Airship, a long-time innovator in the mobile app space, introduced a number of enhancements over the last year offering significant improvements in brands’ abilities to engage customers inside and outside the app: 

Airship’s no-code native Experience Editor allows marketers and product owners to create, deploy and adapt high-value app experiences like onboarding, feature adoption and opt-in flows, while developers are freed up to focus on new, market-differentiating features. 

Our recent experimentation enhancements allow brands to evaluate and continually improve all aspects of the mobile customer journey. From cross-channel messages and no-code native app experiences, to the app UX and features themselves, centralize all of your  experiments to more easily manage, analyze and optimize approaches prior to rolling out the best to a broader audience.

The integration of generative AI within the Airship platform enables marketers and product owners to easily create, atomize and test content variations across marketing campaigns and the app lifecycle. The goal — more quickly zero-in on winning combinations. 

Activating and Engaging Customers

To create sustained relationships with customers, brands have to convey their value, keep customers’ attention and create interactions that are meaningful enough to lead to loyalty. In four blogs, we zeroed in on these issues through the lenses of activation, personalization, Engagement Scores and gamification: 

From app store listings to first use, brands must clearly convey the value their apps offer and educate customers on how to best take advantage of those features for their own unique needs. Activation best practices help mitigate premature dropoff and expand respectful collection of customer preferences for tailored, personalized approaches. Data on customer location, ideal timing for messages, loyalty status, behaviors, content of interest and more are the building blocks of personalization. 

Following activation, you’ll want to influence customers’ habitual app use. Engagement Scores are a great way to monitor progress as they reflect how many monthly active users return on a daily basis. 

While it’s important to have a way of measuring success, it’s even more crucial to develop tactics to incentivize frequent app usage. By encouraging behavior that elicits excitement, offers a challenge and delivers rewards, apps can retain more users. Brands can embrace gamification across the mobile app lifecycle with quizzes for product selection, progress bars to encourage winning streaks, points-based reward programs and more. Using these techniques to help customers feel valued and understood will not only enhance mobile app experiences, but customer loyalty. 

Innovate to Improve Customers’ Lives

Apps that seamlessly integrate into users’ daily routines become indispensable. Taking inspiration from diverse use cases and tailoring your app’s features to be integrated into customers’ lifestyles can significantly enhance its value. 

For example, 81% of consumers plan to use apps on smartphones and wearable devices to improve their health and well-being in the U.S., UK and France. Where it makes sense, companies can incorporate wellness features into their apps, such as connecting users to their friends and family or limiting distracting interruptions. 

A great solution is Live Activities, which delivers real-time updates on lock screens without the repeated audible interruption and clutter of multiple notifications. Fans of March Madness saw Live Activities update more than 100 times per basketball game. From developing news stories to rideshares, restaurant reservations, deliveries, sporting events and more, Live Activities (or Airship’s support for Live Updates on Android), can improve the experience and digital well-being of users across all types of apps. 

Mobile wallet is another example of a native mobile experience with broad applications to deliver seamless customer experiences. While it’s often associated with retail coupons and loyalty cards, mobile wallet is becoming a mainstay benefit for airline travelers, concertgoers, diners, gym-goers and movie theater attendees because of the ease of storing credentials and receiving updates or reminders, as well as being easily embedded within digital channels or in-store signage for broad distribution. 

Follow the lead of your peers and check out the linked blogs if you haven’t had a chance already. And let us know if there are particular topics you would like us to explore. 

Top 10 Airship blog posts of 2023 based on page views:

1. Generative AI Will Reduce Mobile App Content Bottlenecks 
2. Activate Your Activation Processes 
3. What is Gamification? 
4. 3 Ways To Score High On App Engagement 
5. Live Activities Score Big for the NCAA Basketball Tournament 
6. 7 Building Blocks of Mobile Experience Personalization 
7. Life Gets Better with Mobile Apps, Literally 
8. It’s Time for Marketers to Advance Their Use of Mobile Wallets 
9. Introducing Experiment Anywhere from Airship 
10. 14 Years Later, Another First 

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