Throwing Money at Mobile

The only reason I clicked through on this post was to see what data were used to support the obvious claim that UX matters to users.

UX a ‘critical’ concern for mobile, enterprises say | ZDNet

What I found was a strange mix of statistics. On the one hand:

Sixty-four percent of the approximately 200 survey respondents said their companies are planning new business-to-employee apps. Why? Customer engagement, brand value and better customer service.

Forty-eight percent of respondents said they plan to increase budgets for multi-platform development tools over the next 12 months.

Makes sense, mobile is critical, etc. But then I saw the ROI answers. Only 27.7% perceived better than average ROI from their mobile apps, and this gem:

Interestingly, more than 21 percent of respondents reported disappointing ROI from mobile apps; six percent of respondents simply said it was a “huge failure.”

Couple things are off here, first “perceived” ROI is odd. Did they ask the consumers or producers of these enterprise mobile apps? My guess is the former, given the rather bland assessment of mostly average ROI.

The biggest huh moment is that investment in mobile continues to rise despite only average return on said investment. Usually that’s a recipe for disaster.

I guess the conclusion here is that better UX would drive ROI up, but there are no data presented to support that. Generally speaking, this makes sense, but I wonder given the disparity between perceived ROI and rising investment.

Even if UX improved, would that matter if these apps aren’t meeting real use cases? A poorly-designed app with janky UX can still meet a critical use case and produce good ROI.

Maybe I missed something.

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