Most people tend to focus on different devices, browsers, operating systems, and carriers when it comes to mobile performance. There are all critical factors, but they’re all based on a single perspective – that of the developer. The less-discussed perspective is that of the end-user, but it is the most important since the users are the reasons why apps are developed in the first place.
Thus, it’s essential to build apps by considering what users care about. In this article, we will analyze both front-end and back-end metrics, which are essential if your mobile app will succeed.
User experience often determines whether an app will succeed or fail. It’s important to know by what standards users evaluate an app so you can build to match their expectations. These include:
Users place a premium on speed. The expected time for an app to load is around 2-3 seconds, and apps that fail to meet this criterion experience low conversion and retention rates. There’s a strong possibility that users will uninstall slow apps, which means your products and services may lag. To improve app response time, here are a few things you can do:
- Minimize the number of unique objects on the page, so your app makes fewer requests
- Have fewer URL redirects
- Remove heavy components like Flash
- Reduce cookies size
Good response time is great, but it must be complemented by good screen rendering. Users expect your app to provide a consistent experience across all devices. Content, images, and animations must be well rendered in different screen sizes and operating environments. To do this, ask questions such as:
- How does the mobile app appear on the mobile screen
- Are font sizes consistent
- Is the text readable or needs to be zoomed in or out
- Are the images scaled correctly to appear appropriately on mobile devices such as mobile browsers?
As much as you can, ensure that your mobile app runs flawlessly, so there’s no disruption in access and use of your products and services. App crashes can be frustrating for users, so it should be the last problem your mobile app encounters. It is probably the worst front-end performance failure.
Mobile apps that consume resources such as CPU, memory, and battery affect the overall experience of users, which is why they often use the app less frequently or even uninstall it. You want to ensure that your mobile app doesn’t need many resources to function smoothly.
The front end plays a key role in the success of a mobile app, but so does the back end. It also influences user experience and accounts for its UI/UX. These metrics include:
How fast your server responds determines how fast your app will be perceived. Many factors contribute to slow server response time, including lack of resources, overworked and overloaded servers, memory leaks, etc.
This metric measures the time a user requests a particular data to when it appears on the end user’s screen. The higher the TTFB, the longer the response time and the slower the app will be.
The more requests your application makes, the more likely your app will slow down or crash. The idea here is to reduce the number of HTTP requests to avoid long response time or app crash issues.
DNS lookups consume plenty of time on mobile networks, so it is recommended to reduce the number if you want to boost your app performance. Similarly, mobile and wireless networks have less bandwidth, more latency, more packet loss, and more jitter, which is why it is important to manage connections to the back-end with appropriate bandwidth and latency.
Front-end and back-end metrics are two sides of a coin, which must be given proper attention to optimize your mobile app performance. Using the guide above, you can get to work now to improve the areas where your app is failing so you can have a robust, scalable, and responsive mobile app.