Mobile applications have become essential tools for leading day to day life, due to this fact one miscalculation or misjudgment can be the cause of heavy losses and a leaky consumer bucket. When in the process of giving consumers an experience that drive engagement and retention business are better off understanding some key concepts as to why is mobile performance important? How is mobile different? And most importantly, how can I adapt in this rapidly changing market?
Well, looking at some statistics from mobile commerce, about 66% of shoppers abandon their transactions and 50% of those abandoned transactions are due to poor performance. It is said that a one second delay in services results in 7% drop in conversions and that can translate into millions of dollars’ worth of business lost.
In addition the expectations of mobile users are essentially the same as those of traditional websites, the users does not expect the response time or the experience to be any worse just because they are on their smartphone.
Picture this, if the game or any virtual experience you offer is faulty, or the testing strategy employed by the Mobile Game Development Company does not cater to the changing demands of the consumer, retaining people and building reputation becomes an uphill task. So here are some testing aspects you have to consider when you want optimize products without losing your most loyal consumers.
User and Load Assessment:
As the user now a days has multiple options it becomes important to understand how the consumer is accessing your system. The real assessment of the user and load profile is the testing key to get the user load distribution right. User load assessment or otherwise think from the consumer’s point of view has always been a huge factor in deriving the maximum value out of application performance testing.
Know the user or the factors that affect User Experience are valuable inputs to test the product against. They along with the test environment will determine the value you get from the results. Traditional testing factors didn’t involve testing the product from a mobile perspective and the reasons for that might have been the client time for example associated with total response time was assumed to be negligible as the consumer mostly accessed the service through a broadband.
But nowadays there are a lot of factors to control like availability of network, the kind of network available and having different variations of the product performing their best possible using the amount of resource or internet speed available in the region. This is the reason it is important to have a testing method ready that works on testing the application while including the current user preferences in mind.
Testing Against Mobile Network:
The biggest challenge application testing teams face is the mobile network itself. The impact of network conditions on mobile app performance is great enough to have its own discussion. So many factors add to the variability of mobile network like Wi-Fi vs. carrier network, type of mobile network and the quality of the connection. Even the best 4G LTE network would not mean anything if you are in a tunnel, but why is this so important?
Even a small percentage of mobile users can have a large impact on performance, slower connection speeds, poor network quality, will result in longer connection times. This will consume more server side resources that their desktop counter parts.
In extreme cases an extra 10% of mobile users could exhaust all available mobile connections and if network conditions are ignored while testing can have a huge impact on performance. This is probably the most ignored aspect of app testing strategy and frankly speaking testing strategies built on considering no network impacts at all in this day and age is like slow death for a brilliant digital service or a product.
Use Cloud Testing:
In scenarios where we have large volumes of currency from thousands to hundreds of thousands, typically a cloud based solution is used like Google Cloud. This allows organizations to very efficiently generate required load as well as exercise the same infrastructure your users do.
In addition a cloud base solution also allows you to put virtual users into various geographic locations around the world. While testing this will generate a large percentage of load using cloud based virtual users, this way one can observe and test user experience on real devices while the system is under load.
This helps test teams get real time information that help a business become more responsive and help tackle performance issues more effectively.
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