Skip to main content

From Online Service to Mobile App

Service companies use branches, phone, kiosks and web as direct channels to customers. In recent years service companies added a new channel - the smart phone application. Smart phones differ from PCs in screen size, ease of typing and input, connection speed and use context. Keeping these changes in mind, mobile apps shouldn’t be a replica of their online counterparts. One difference is that the mobile app has to be leaner. Another difference is that mobile apps should have unique features, such as location based features, taking advantage of mobile capabilities.

As a case study, I compared the online website and mobile app of Citibank’s card services. As shown below the mobile app has fewer pages (17 vs. 84) and has fewer levels (4 deep vs. 6 deep).

Companies rushed to create iPhone and android apps often not doing it “right”. Mobile operation system defragmentation and rapid market changes make doing it right all the more challenging. That may be the reason why Citibank’s iPhone app got a poor ranking of 2.5 out of 5. Surely in coming years the industry will mature and mobile apps will improve.

Figures (top to bottom): Citibank Credit Card Online Service (Prepared with PowerMapper), Citibank Credit Card Mobile App, Van diagram comparison of features



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AA Problem

AA stands for Attention Allocation not Alcoholic Anonymous. Sorry for the deceiving eye catcher. PTT presentation is work I did in 2005 in the purely abstract edges of Operation Research. I uploaded a PPT presentation. The presentation is lighter and more colorful than the actual article. Warning you have to be a bit of a geek to press the link above. For the super geeks I put a link to the full article. It’s called “Attention Allocation to Partially Observable Heterogeneous Customers – with Imperfect Treatment”, Catchy? Full AA Problem article
Post a Comment
Read more

Digital Life - Art of Display

TNS, a market research firm, conducted an extensive research on the use of mobile, internet applications and social media around the world. What's really cool about it, more than the findings themselves, is the way the findings are presented. Sometimes, visualization is what matters most. http://discoverdigitallife.com/
1 comment
Read more

SDM from up on the bridge

I am taking the first spring semester as a long distance student in MIT's System Design and Managment (SDM) program. The long distance option, which I am grateful for, poses some challenges. A month into the semester, I am still trying to improve the interaction with the classroom, faculty and fellow students and maintain a balance between school and work. Setting up a work station I am using my home office (/living room /dining room/ guest sofa) from which I connect to the ‘bridge’. I find it useful to work with two screens. One displays the class, the mike controls and my video (I want to see how I appear to people looking at me from the classroom). The other displays the presentation slides and notebook (OneNote). The webcam is positioned above the main screen and when I look at the other screen, I am not facing the webcam. Class participation The video and sound quality are good. Material is always available before hand on the web. So keeping up with the studies is eas...
3 comments
Read more