IDG Contributor Network: Mobile apps: Publish first, test never
When a user-experience company recently tested mobile apps from pharmacy chain Rite Aid and restaurant chain Applebee's, both apps greatly frustrated focus-group users.
The Applebee's app, for example, didn’t update pricing when quantity was changed, forced users to enter name and location multiple times, and forced some users to repeatedly trestart their orders. (Here's a video excerpt.) With the Rite Aid app, the problem was that it served little purpose other than to dump users to the Rite Aid mobile site.
The point here is not to focus on the shortcomings of a pair of retail mobile apps. It is to ask how such fundamental usability flaws could be published from a $4.6 billion restaurant chain and a $26.5 billion pharmacy chain. From the perspective of Michael Mace, VP of mobile for the company that performed this testing (a company called User Testing), the problems discovered were not surprising. What is surprising is that more such holes are not routinely discovered.
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