Over the years many businesses have asked me whether they should build a Mobile App or a Mobile Responsive Website.
The question doesn’t surprise me. The growth of mobile as a means of accessing the internet has been one of the most fundamental changes to the digital landscape over the last decade.
However, when we ask the question of App vs Responsive Site, what we’re really asking is “how can we best capture the opportunity of mobile?”
It’s common for us to think about Apps and Responsive Sites as alternative answers to this question. But in truth these options aren’t always substitutes.
There are several characteristics of Apps that, in my opinion, can’t be replicated by Responsive Sites. And when done right these characteristics will allow Apps to have superior engagement with customers.
In this post we take a look at these characteristics and the subtle connections Apps have with our perception of ourselves.
1. Our Phone is Our Identity
We know phones are different than desktop computers. But why do we associate our phone with our identity?
Even though our phone performs many of the same activities as a computer (eg. browsing the web, reading emails), it also allows us to speak with our friends and family and manage our contacts. It also literally connects us with all the things we love – we visually see photos of our friends, we speak with them by voice, we receive tactile sensation when it buzzes in our palm with new messages.
Because of this, our phone has a higher sense of connection and less physical separation (ie. its often in our pocket, as opposed to on the desk in front of us) than a desktop computer. These are just some of the reasons why we connect our phones so closely with ourselves.
2. Mobile Apps are Part of This Identity
We perceive Apps to be inherently connected with our phone, and therefore our identity.
It seems like a simple distinction, but it’s a fundamental one.
Whether its App Store or Google Play, there’s a record of what Apps we’ve brought, what is installed on our device, even which Apps we like (based on our ratings).
When we purchase a new phone, it’s an almost instant process to update the phone with all the Apps we’ve purchases over time.
This triple connection (between our phone, apps and our identity), blurs the lines separating ourselves from our Apps.
This may be the reason why, when we use Apps we love every day, we feel even more connected to them. When we use Apps we don’t like (or worse, that are updated and shift from being loved to not liked), we reject them from our identity. Sometimes we feel so enraged we tells others about our dissatisfaction. This is why Apps foster such vocal communities of interest through feedback on Google Play and App Store.
3. The Same Does Not Apply for Mobile Browsers and Responsive Sites
Browsing a website on a phone is a very different experience from using an App.
As soon as we open a browser, we realise we are connecting with a service that is ‘somewhere out there’. Even if we perceive the Browser to be part of the phone’s ecosystem, we reject that it is connected to us (like an App), because we know it’s fetching something ‘out there’.
And compared with the perfect interactions we often have with great Apps, many of the interactions we have when using a web browser reinforce that it is connecting with something separate from us. The ‘address’ panel in the browser tells us we have to go somewhere else for the latest news. The ‘loading bar’ tells us the phone has to retrieve something that is away from us. When we see a full page website squeezed to our mobile screen, the experience feels completely impersonal.
Of course, Mobile Apps connect to services just like Responsive Sites, but for some reason we aren’t reminded of this. In fact, we don’t even think about it in the same way we think about websites.
These are some of the subtle psychological differences between using Mobile Apps and Responsive Sites.
Using a Mobile Browser is like renting a car….we’re driving it, but we know it’s not really ours. In contrast, the psychology of using an App is like owning a car that has been customised for us.
We can also think of this in another way – Apps put ‘the world in the palm of ours hands’ (conveying ownership and control) whereas Browsers put ‘the world at our fingertips’ (conveying access, that is separate from us).
A Closing Note on Mobile Apps vs Responsive Sites
When reading the latest articles from industry press, the differences mentioned above are not often discussed. What is readily available are the incredible stats about the growth of Apps compared to Responsive Websites. I’m suggesting that some of the characteristics of Apps that are discussed above are at the heart of this trend.
The interactivity we’ve seen through native Apps (fluid screen design, four digit pins, native use of the camera), accentuate these characteristics. And developments like fingerprint logins (eg. Apple Touch Id) will further magnify the connection between our phone and our identity.
This is not to say Apps are a substitute for Responsive Sites. To have a comprehensive mobile strategy, many industries and their customers are well serviced by having both a compelling App strategy and Responsive Site (take Linked In as an example). When Apps are done well as part of such a strategy, very often they will have far greater engagement with customers, because they are so closely connected with the perceptions we have of our phone and identity.
