New apc research reveals the gap between an app that works and an experience users actually value.
There’s an obvious way to know your mobile app has a problem. It crashes. Customers complain. Ratings drop. Support calls go up. But what about an app that works?
People can log in. They can complete the task. Nothing appears to be broken. From inside the organization, everything may look perfectly fine. That doesn’t necessarily mean users think the experience is good.
ath Power Consulting (apc) recently conducted its Best-in-Class Mobile App Study to better understand what separates an average mobile experience from one people genuinely value. We asked users what their favorite apps get right, what causes them to leave, what builds or damages trust, and how today’s mobile experiences measure up to their idea of best in class.
The findings gave us plenty to think about. In this first look at the research, one theme stood out: there is a much bigger gap between “it works” and “this is a great experience” than many organizations may realize.
Most Mobile Apps Are Fine. That’s the Problem.
When users rated today’s mobile apps against their idea of best in class, the average score was just 3.24 out of 5. Nearly 67% rated today’s apps a 3 or lower, and only 4% said apps today are exactly what they consider best in class.
That doesn’t mean most apps are terrible. In fact, it suggests something more interesting: most are simply adequate. And adequate is a tricky place to be.
An app can be good enough that users don’t complain, but frustrating enough that they never particularly like using it. It can complete the transaction while still making the customer work harder than necessary. No one opens an app hoping for a character-building experience.
For organizations investing heavily in digital channels, the good news is that standing out doesn’t necessarily require a futuristic redesign or another dozen features. Some of the things users care about most are remarkably basic.
Why Mobile App Speed and Reliability Matter More Than You May Think
One of the clearest findings involved performance. When users described what caused them to abandon an app, 36% of mentions involved slow loading and another 23% involved crashes or freezes. Combined, roughly 59% of app-abandonment mentions were related to performance issues.
We also found that 63% reported experiencing screen-load times longer than five seconds.
Five seconds may not sound dramatic when it appears in a performance dashboard. It feels very different when you’re trying to transfer money, submit an application, schedule an appointment, check an order, or squeeze a task into the three minutes before your next meeting. That’s why speed and stability shouldn’t be treated solely as technology metrics. They are experience metrics.
A beautifully designed app that keeps users waiting or freezes at the wrong moment is still delivering a poor experience. The customer doesn’t care which internal team owns the problem. They just know the app didn’t work the way they expected it to.
More Features Aren’t Necessarily the Answer
Another finding was especially interesting. When users described what their favorite apps get right, ease, simplicity, and intuitiveness were mentioned more often than speed.
That runs counter to one of the natural instincts organizations have when trying to improve a digital product: What should we add?
Users may be asking a different question: Why does this need to be so complicated?
Do they really need another screen? Is the language obvious to someone who doesn’t work for your organization? Can they find what they need without hunting through a menu? Does the app remember information they already provided? Is the next step clear?
The best mobile experiences often feel simple because someone has done a great deal of work behind the scenes to make them that way. Sometimes innovation is less about adding something new and more about removing the thing that makes users sigh.
The Mobile UX Problems You’ve Stopped Seeing
There’s another challenge that makes mobile friction particularly hard to diagnose: the people who design and manage an app know too much about it. Your internal team knows where everything is. They understand the terminology. They know which button comes next and why the process works the way it does. Your users don’t.
Analytics can tell you where someone abandoned a process, which features they use, how much time they spent on a screen, or how frequently they returned. Those metrics matter, but they often can’t tell you why.
Was the wording confusing? Did the user expect something to happen that didn’t? Were they unsure whether their information had been saved? Did they overlook a button that seemed obvious to the design team? Did a five-step process feel like three steps too many?
Those questions require a different kind of listening.
Through UX research, usability testing, focus groups, surveys, and mystery shop research, organizations can observe how real people navigate an experience and uncover friction that internal teams may no longer notice.
Often the biggest opportunities aren’t dramatic redesigns. They are small moments that have become invisible internally but remain very visible to the people using the app.
So, Is Your App Actually Good?
That’s a harder question to answer than, “Does it work?”
Our research suggests there is still considerable space between functional and best in class. Organizations that close that gap may not be the ones adding the most features. They may simply be the ones doing a better job of understanding what their users actually need. And this was only one part of what we uncovered.
Our research also raised some bigger questions about trust, how expectations travel from one digital experience to another, and whether organizations are even comparing their apps against the right competition. We’ll dig into those findings in our next post, including one insight that may change how you think about who your mobile experience is really competing against.
In the meantime, there’s a more immediate question worth asking: What would your own users say about your app?
If you want to understand where people are struggling, what feels harder than it should, or which improvements would genuinely make a difference, apc can help. Our mobile UX and experience research is designed to identify what’s working, what isn’t, and where the greatest opportunities may be hiding.
