By leveraging cutting-edge technologies and user-centric design principles, businesses can create compelling mobile experiences that drive customer loyalty and growth.
The mobile revolution
Shaping customer behavior and business strategy
Mobile computing has transformed how we do business as increasing numbers of consumers embrace mobile apps. Our new research demonstrates just how ingrained smartphone use is in consumers’ daily lives: “A total of 96% of respondents say they own a smartphone, up from 94% last year. Mobile phones are now the preferred device for browsing shopping websites, making online purchases, online searches, banking, and playing games. As customers turn to their smartphones to complete their daily tasks, organizations are shifting resources to mobile apps and mobile-optimized web experiences.
The challenge comes when determining which features to prioritize for mobile optimization and how to leverage a device’s unique advantages to reach customers. Not every digital experience needs to be translated to mobile, and simply replicating web functionality can lead to a suboptimal user experience and misallocated resources.
Organizations should assess the value and tightly define the scope of a mobile experience before investing. Here are four key areas to consider when defining the value, strategy, and scope of a mobile experience:
1. Personalization: Tailor the app experience to individual user preferences to increase satisfaction and loyalty.
2. Content: Ensure the app's content is relevant, engaging, and easily accessible.
3. Notifications: Use notifications strategically to enhance user engagement.
4. Multimodal innovations: Leverage emerging technologies to stay ahead of changing customer preferences.
Adhering to these leading practices allows organizations to develop mobile experiences that drive engagement, loyalty, and long-term success. In an era of ever-evolving mobile technology, a strategic, user-centric approach to app development is essential for staying competitive and relevant.
Personalization
Beyond the basics
Highlight: "69% of customers are more likely to purchase from a brand that personalizes experiences."
Customers expect personalized mobile experiences, and they reward brands that provide them. 69% of customers say they are more likely to purchase from a brand that personalizes experiences, and 68% say it increases their brand satisfaction significantly. As customer expectations grow, organizations should ask how personalization can go beyond content recommendations or marketing notifications and become a holistic part of the experience. How can organizations move to a completely personalized customer experience that is adaptive and dynamic based on behavior, preferences, and context?
Effective personalization means using data to create detailed profiles on micro-segments of users and creating a mobile interface flexible enough to adapt to these segments. Once a user’s interests are identified, mobile experiences should strive to deliver real-time and relevant information. Working with the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA), we used a tech leader’s live activity feature to provide real-time game scores along with bite-sized league news updates. This allowed users to have a quick snapshot of information on their lock screen without having to navigate to the app.
Organizations that get personalization right are often rewarded with customers who buy more, more often, and remain loyal over time. Organizations with a high personalization maturity were 71% more likely to report improved customer loyalty and 67% more likely to report increased purchase frequency than brands with a low personalization maturity. High personalization maturity brands were 48% more likely to exceed their 2023 revenue goals.
Until recently, mobile user interfaces were designed to be consistent and predictable, offering the same experience to every user, every time, to optimize discoverability and navigability. Today, leading mobile experiences understand that customers reward personalization. On a mobile screen where screen real estate is at a premium, adapting the interface to the customer's context, behavior, and preferences can help ensure that space is consistently helpful and relevant to users.
Content strategy
Tailored for mobile
Highlight: “Short-form content thrives on mobile platforms where users seek quick, easy-to-consume information.”
Successful mobile content strategy hinges on understanding user behaviors and preferences. This knowledge helps organizations decide which content is best suited for mobile versus other platforms.
Creating engaging, tailored content for each channel is essential. Short-form content thrives on mobile platforms, where users seek quick, easy-to-consume information. Interactive elements like quizzes and polls boost engagement and capture valuable data. For the WNBA, we delivered short-form video content to keep fans engaged with league news, updates, and live events, even from afar.
Long-form content remains valuable in mobile experiences for delivering comprehensive information like educational materials, research, or tutorials. This content builds authority, educates audiences, and engages readers with compelling narratives.
Effective content strategy should prioritize activities users prefer on smartphones, such as social media, messaging, navigation, e-commerce, and entertainment. For example, 94% of smartphone users prefer their devices for browsing, shopping, and banking. Users increasingly rely on their phones for complex tasks such as health care management, and this trend is only expected to grow.
By tailoring content strategies to mobile’s strengths, organizations ensure a seamless user experience, whether for quick updates or detailed information. Understanding user preferences and optimizing content for mobile creates a more engaging and user-friendly experience.
Elevating user engagement through strategic notifications
An effective notification strategy boosts user engagement and satisfaction. Organizations use in-app messaging, push notifications, live activities, and more to communicate with users and drive actions. Users expect timely, relevant, and personalized notifications that enhance their mobile experience.
Delivering the right content at the right frequency is crucial to avoid overwhelming users. Personalization based on user preferences and behaviors is the key to effective notifications. This includes integrating engaging media, maintaining clarity, and optimizing timing.
Effective mobile notifications move away from mass communication strategies in favor of a more personal touch that incorporates user preferences and data to create tailored messaging. Done well, mobile notifications can forge a powerful communication channel with customers.
Embracing multimodal innovation
Highlight: “45% of customers use voice features on their smartphones.”
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies effectively integrate voice, image, and text data in apps today. Voice assistants handle simple tasks like searching for information, playing music, and placing phone calls. As these assistants evolve, users will likely expect voice interaction across all mobile experiences.
AI integration offers promising advancements for multimodal interactions on mobile devices but also introduces challenges:
The demand for Generative AI (GenAI) tools is growing, with $2B invested by venture capital in 2022 alone, and significant investments by tech leaders. The market for Generative AI could reach $200B by 2032.
Integrating multimodal features into mobile experiences can reduce cloud costs, enhance privacy, and offer better personalization. Voice and image inputs lower the barrier to technology use, expanding market reach and aligning with global accessibility standards. Multimodal AI can also automate tasks like customer service inquiries.
These advancements impact various industries: Travel apps are rethinking the trip-booking experience with voice and GenAI, and commercial banks are considering voice technology as a first layer of customer service. This shift extends beyond mobile apps to web services and enabling technologies.
The growing compute and power demands of server-side large language models (LLMs) present challenges in cost and scale. Hybrid and on-device AI offers a solution by allowing apps to intelligently switch between expensive server-based and significantly less expensive on-device models.
Leading the mobile revolution
Transforming challenges into opportunities
A strategic, user-centric approach to mobile app development is essential as we navigate the evolving landscape of mobile technology. Integrating personalized interfaces, relevant content, effective notifications, and multimodal capabilities can create seamless, engaging experiences for today’s mobile-first consumers. However, organizations should first ensure they are addressing a real customer problem and deeply understand their users.
Prioritizing these elements helps organizations stay competitive, strengthen user connections, enhance loyalty, and drive business growth. By focusing on users' specific needs and preferences and leveraging the latest technological advancements, businesses can create mobile experiences that are not only functional but truly transformative.
We are at the forefront of this mobile revolution, providing insights and strategies to empower businesses to excel in a digital-first world. We invite you to engage with our team of specialists to refine your mobile strategy, harness the full potential of your mobile applications, and turn these challenges into opportunities for innovation and growth. Let us help you lead the way in creating exceptional mobile experiences that drive success.
Choosing the right technology stack is crucial for mobile app development. Here’s a quick guide to help you make an informed decision:
Native apps: Built for iOS or Android, native apps offer the best performance and full access to device features, which is ideal for high-performance needs. However, they require separate codebases, which increases development time and costs.
Hybrid apps: Hybrid apps share most of the code across Android and iOS, allowing development in a single language and easier maintenance. However, they can suffer from slower performance and have limitations in supporting all native features.
Webviews: Webviews integrate mobile-optimized websites within a native app, offering a quick solution for non-critical features. However, overuse can lead to a slower user experience.
Our POV: The best approach is to choose technology based on the feature set, balancing performance and efficiency. Native development is crucial for key features like navigation and the main screen, where control is vital. Blending native with hybrid solutions can work well for other features, but hybrid and webviews should be used selectively to avoid compromising app quality.
About the authors
Tim Juravich is a principal at Deloitte Digital and co-leads our Product Innovation practice. Tim and his team bring industry-leading design, product management, and experience engineering capabilities to our clients to launch digital experiences that move people and spark growth in web, mobile, and emerging technologies.
Courtney Sherman is a principal at Deloitte Digital and co-leads our Product Innovation practice. As an expert in human-centered design, she develops solutions that cross over the physical and digital environments, including innovation strategy, customer experience strategy, concept development, and innovation capability building.
Patrick Parfrey is a senior manager at Deloitte Digital, in our Digital Product and Innovation practice. Patrick leads product teams to define, design, deliver, and operate digital products for clients across industries.
Nathan Hale leads Deloitte Digital’s Mobile Engineering practice, working with clients to help them understand mobile technology and the business benefits that it can unlock. He works to bring best-in-class engineering to build mobile experiences that drive outstanding business results.
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