9 min read
In recent years, the significance of mobile-first user experience has been increasing dramatically, turning mobile apps design and user-friendly interface into one of the crucial points to a successful business.
For the photo product industry, a good mobile app also holds great importance, as more and more customers nowadays use their phones to customize and order the wanted products.
The following article presents numerous benefits of a mobile-first user experience and provides a few helpful directions into making a website more mobile- and user-friendly. It also explores consumer expectations from ecommerce in terms of mobile experience, so your photo product business can keep thriving and drawing more attention.
Generally, there are two major valid approaches when it comes to delivering an outstanding mobile experience:
- Using responsive photo product editors on the web. It requires small effort upon implementation, but may not match your existing customer journey
- Integrating mobile first editors into your existing mobile app. This one involves more programming effort using an SDK but provides the possibility to build the perfect customer journey for your shoppers and get you more conversions, Increase your turnover and secure fewer abandonments.
Contents
- What is Good Mobile Design, and Why is it Important?
- What are the Consumers’ Expectations from Mobile Photo-Commerce?
- How are Software Development Kits Beneficial for Your Business Mobile App?
What is Good Mobile Design, and Why is it Important to your Photo Business?
The digital transformation has brought the entire world online, including companies and consumers. This implies that more than half of the world's population has access to the internet, with a staggering 93 percent using mobile devices to do it.
It takes more than good-looking software to be considered a top-tier design. Human-centered design is critical for application performance, business goals, and mass distribution.
Mobile commerce now accounts for 30% of all online shopping and based on the research that Coupofy.com has conducted, it is expanding 300% faster than conventional e-commerce. In-app purchases, subscriptions, and premium applications have cost mobile customers an estimated $83.5 billion in 2019. That number puts a strong emphasis on how much money a well-designed mobile app can make. However, if the app's design is poor, it will rapidly be forgotten, wasting both time and money.
In recent trends, mobile app development has taken a new direction. To expand their business, it is vital also for photo product businesses to have an efficient application. It's simple to create a mobile app, but there are a few requirements that need to be met in order for it to be successful.
- Menus Should be Brief & To-The-Point
Users on mobile devices don't have the patience to go through a big list of alternatives to discover what they're looking for. Rearrange your menu to employ the fewest possible elements while maintaining usability. For instance, here our editors can play out the big advantage as the product variant can be altered later, so the customer service journey is shorter and therefore less likely to be interrupted.
- Introduction Before Commitment
Sites that demand registration in advance to visit the site irritated study participants, particularly when the brand was unknown. While consumer information is crucial to your business, requesting it too soon may result in fewer registrations and decreased interest. When your customer wants to create a photo product, do not disturb his creative flow with a forced login. Let him design first, and login later.
- Make The Journey Cross-Platform
Users routinely require that tasks be completed on other devices. They could, for example, want to see their photo book on a larger screen. Alternatively, they may become preoccupied and need to continue later. For instance, a customer might be on the way back home from work and decide to customize an album for a birthday gift during the train ride to save some time. Later on, they come back home and finish the already started customization process on their pc desktop. This would encourage the sales process by saving customers time by allowing them to email links to themselves from within the site and continue to work on their photo products by a later point.
Generally, 90% of all photos are stored on mobile devices, so curation might work on the mobile device, especially for multi-image products and the design part can be done later on the desktop. In a case like this, user satisfaction will be quite high.
- Seamless Scrolling
One of the most upsetting situations is when a customer has to wait for the page to load. The loading speed has a major impact on the user experience and SEO ranking of a website. Slower load times will definitely lead to dissatisfaction because people do not have the time (or are unwilling) to wait. As a result, it's vital to remove any unneeded items that may cause your page to load slowly. It would also be beneficial to reduce the size of the multimedia items, employ lazy loading, and use the HTTPS protocol to make your website load quicker.
- Keep it Clean and Simple
Advertisements, pop-ups, excessive graphics and video, and other distracting components are not appropriate for mobile design. A good mobile-first design is straightforward: you only show your consumers what they came to see. For instance, on the desktop version, you can have ads included, however, the mobile look should exclude those. Even though it might look like a good marketing strategy, it appears to be quite disturbing to the customer. In many cases, it would lead to page abandonment before even reaching product customization.
A simple design concentrates the user's attention on the important material. After all, it was hard enough to get him into your online store, so don't block his way to his personalized photo product now.
What are the Consumers’ Expectations from Mobile Photo-Commerce?
Photo product businesses must pay close attention to what mobile consumers value and expect from a brand as they migrate from their desktops to mobile devices. The most challenging task for every e-commerce company is to stand out from the crowd with a visually attractive, dynamic app that draws and keeps customers at all stages. This being said, there are a few quite essential features customers watch out for.
- Product Feedback - The Big Player
According to a study conducted by the Nielsen 44% of Mobile Shoppers want to be able to read product reviews before purchasing a product. They need to be confident enough that what they see is what they get, and therefore reach out to the product reviews section to seek other customers’ experience with the company.
- Intuitive & Simple Design
Based on the less-is-more-concept, it is important to keep the mobile webpage or mobile app clear and simple. The text should be big enough to be comfortably read on the smaller screen of mobile devices. The design must assist users in swiftly and efficiently creating a personalized product without requiring them to spend too much time navigating through it. It should be easy to navigate and present your business and product in the best possible light. Responsive design is the most effective way to deliver an immersive experience on any screen size and resolution.
For a better mobile experience, consumers will quickly replace one brand with another so providing a comprehensive mobile experience is immensely valuable for photo businesses. Consumers expect this from every brand, and if one fails to meet their expectations, they will simply look for another. According to Google data, 64% of smartphone users expect a site to load in 4 seconds or less, 40% of customers have switched to a competitor for a better mobile experience, and 1 in 4 shoppers leave their carts if the navigation is too complicated.
How are Photo Commerce Software Development Kits Beneficial for Your Mobile App?
If you want to add photo product editors to your existing mobile app, using a Photo Commerce SDK is the right choice. The term SDK refers to a software development kit. The SDK, sometimes known as a devkit, is a collection of software development tools for a certain platform, incorporating building blocks, debuggers, and, in some cases, a framework or group of code libraries, including a set of operating system-specific functions (OS). Sound complicated? If you are not into tech, keep reading to learn how this can benefit your photo business.
The software development kits have multiple advantages such as faster integration and the option to incorporate core functionality in an easy and risk-free way, but still, they give the freedom to design the CX as needed for the target customer group. It is important to highlight that apps always have to address ideally the target segments and their requirements. In the following section you can get a detailed insight into the benefits of the SDKs:
- Fast Integration
The integration procedure is considerably sped up by using a mobile SDK. It makes the connection with your existing tech stack much easier, and also your devkit will assist in speeding up the integration process. On top of this, it allows developers to get information quickly, which will always come in handy in the case of technical issues.
- Bringing risks to The Minimum with Efficient Brand Control
You have more control over the specifics of your user interface that appear in other apps that use your SDK with your SDK. This enables you to control not only how your app interacts with other apps, but also how it appears. All the while, the most vital functions are protected from tampering, which could jeopardize the user experience. SDK delivers effective browser services, allowing you to provide better services.
- Increased Exposure
If your product is valuable and the SDK that comes with it allows for a lot of connectivity, you'll enhance the odds that other tools will want to interface with it, giving your brand additional exposure. It is available to everyone for free and supports the creation of outstanding Android and iOS applications. Android and iOS SDK are open-source platforms that enable developers to share valuable and worthy innovations with a bigger audience.
- Cost-effective Development & Faster Deployment
A lot of this pre-built functionality would have to be created from scratch if there wasn't an SDK. SDKs not only speed up the development of new tools but to also reduce the amount of time for everyone involved because everything is already constructed. The only thing that needs to be done is to make new features compliant with the present system. All of the following help you stick to a pre-determined budget during development and after deployment.
- Watch out for SDK Support
SDKs are pre-loaded with information in the code already written and support documentation. However, as SDKs abstract a lot of complexity from their users, typically they also need some support. Whenever you purchase a SDK make sure that you have either support from the vendor or from the community in case of Open Source topics.
No matter how far you want to develop the functionality of your photo product business, it is always important to focus on the mobile-first design. Designing and prototyping your websites and applications for mobile devices first ensures that your consumers have a consistent experience across all devices. Neglecting the mobile-first approach might be an eventual cause for user dissatisfaction, hence why you should always watch out for a neat, simple, and comfortable design even on the small screens of mobile devices.
