My colleague, Kerry Bodine recently posted about the lack of big brands with mobile apps available in the Apple App Store and offered several suggestions for how brands can create end-to-end value for their customers by supporting them through their mobile devices. Forrester VP Julie Ask takes this concept even farther in her research outlining how various industries can create mobile value propositions to support existing channels, extend other channels, or create unique mobile experiences. But of course creating the right mobile service is just part of the battle. Customer experience professionals are tasked to ensure that those experiences are useful, usable, and enjoyable. How do we do that? 

  • Invest in understanding how your customers behave with their mobile devices. Surveys and focus groups aren't sufficient when trying to design an experience. While they might let you prioritize features or fixes, they don't get you an actual understanding of how your customers use their mobile devices, when and where they use them, and how you might offer value through the device. This doesn't need to be really expensive. The design team at britishairways.com (ba.com) occasionally visits its frequent-flier lounge with mock-ups and prototypes and tests design concepts with its most valuable customers.
  • Test the experience from your customers' point of view. Most teams design an experience and use analytics and surveys to help them evaluate the quality of that experience. But there are other low-cost mechanisms that can help identify possible experience breakdowns before they happen. Forrester recently updated our Mobile Website User Experience Review and launched a 1.0 version of our Application User Experience Review methodology. Both are heuristic or expert evaluation methodologies that allow teams to test either mobile-optimized websites or mobile (or tablet) apps from the point of view of their customers.

If you're interested in putting all of this together to create effective mobile experiences by combining the right strategy with effective design tactics, join Julie Ask and myself in Cambridge next week on Thursday, April 21st, at our workshop appropriately titled: Creating Effective Mobile Experiences.