Commentary

App Happy: Mobile Is 'Personal', But Do We Really Know What That Means Yet?

moblog11-3Why do people continue to download and consume apps with such devotion? Well, the short answer is because it is fun. That is the less than startling but still revealing conclusion of Nielsen’s latest Mobile Apps Playbook: 53% of mobile owners and 59% of tablet owners app users say the main reason they are downloading apps is to pursue entertainment or leisure activity.

We are like kids in candy stores. In fact, apps seem to fill a void as much as they do anything else in our lives. Seventy percent of smartphone users and 65% of tablet users say they are engaging in the apps when alone, 68%/63% when they are bored or looking to “kill time,” and 61%/48% when waiting for someone to show up or something to start. Curiously, only 33% of smartphone users and 29% of tablet users cite using apps in order to improve or help what they are doing at the moment.  

So apps are filling spaces, both in our day and in our heads, and they may be less task-driven than the Web. Clearly, games naturally map well against that situational reality, and that is why they remain the defining medium of the mobile platform. It is a challenge knowing how other forms of content target those elective moments. And it may be important to recognize that they are elective moments. App makers need to target a mindset -- “moments” that are defined less by need than by want.

Perhaps this is why interface is so critical to app retention and recidivism. I have always believed that we have a pocket of our memory that registers Web sites and apps that are clunky to manage, that have slow load times, or overlong video ads. I have always suspected (and wished someone would prove) that there is a frustration factor that impacts whether, when and how much we engage a publisher, but it is reflected in negatives that are hard to measure. How much less do I and others click the video stories on CNN because I know they seem to have no problem slapping :30s in front of too many two-minute news clips? How much am I avoiding certain social apps because I know they are running audio-on autoplay video, which can be embarrassing to use in public spaces?

Who is measuring whether an app is somehow pleasurable to use so that it appeals to these killing time moments? I know it impacts my decisions about which apps to load and which not to load at any given moment. While the average smartphone owner has 42 apps on their phone at any given time, Nielsen says, 87% of us use fewer than 10 on a given day, and the majority (55%) use fewer than 5. That represents a lot of apps not being used. And it suggests that people erect app buddies in much the same way that some of us construct circles of friends, making the ring small and trusted.

One of the downsides in my mind of the great mobile migration from desktop to mobile is the presumption that Web behaviors and models are simply transferring to devices. Advertisers risk treating the post-PC universe in the same way they did the Web by throwing the same unwelcome and poorly performing display ad models at this platform that they used to ruin the online experience. The need to amortize investment across platforms and standardize creative, operations, and metrics makes it too easy to miss the unique and revolutionary qualities of the mobile medium.

Many publishers also seem to think that devices are just a smaller Web and presume people are bringing the same mindsets and motives to accessing their content here as they did to a desktop that was defined foremost as a productivity device. Responsive design too often seems to them a solution to mobile migration, but I am not sure it is targeting the right problem -- a shift in users’ relationship to the medium itself.

Which is really just to say, yet again, that we continue to pay lip service to how “personal” a medium mobile is without fully understanding yet exactly what “personal” means when it is applied to media and all the subtle ways it impacts how, what and why we engage content and experiences on phones.  

 

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