Have you ever played the ‘would you rather’ game? In case you haven't, this conversational game poses a dilemma in the form of a question beginning with "would you rather", usually followed by 2 equally horrible choices.
A year ago, Tappable turned this game into research and asked 500 males and females aged 18-34 what would they rather sacrifice to keep their smartphone. It turned out that 1 out of 10 people would cut off a finger rather than parting with their phone. 23% were even considering living without one of their precious senses, with the sense of smell being the popular choice among the five.
This digital addiction which, by the way, has an official terminology called “nomophobia”*, puts enormous pressure on businesses that struggle to keep up with the exponentially growing expectations of their users.
| At Hitit, 2019 has been a year laser-focused on B2C solutions and user experience. As part of the restructuring that started in 2018, we have created a new team under the marketing department dedicated to state of the art UX/UI design and mobile development. By collaborating with some of the industry’s best UX/UI professionals, we have managed to take our design approach to the next level, as well as enlarging the list of B2C services we support our partners with. Over this last year, we have added custom mobile, internet booking engine, kiosk, and website design services to the list, continuing the ‘one-stop-shop’ philosophy of Hitit. | Our flexibility in user experience comes not only from the talent we work with, but also from a newly rebuilt middleware that powers our B2C solutions. This year our new team has already launched 3 bespoke airline mobile apps. Kam Air Mobile was the first one to be launched with the new middleware and new customized design. This was shortly followed by Nouvelair, which has shown very significant growth in downloads and sales rates in comparison with the older app that was previously built by the airline itself. PIA’s app also saw a similar upsurge after switching over to Hitit’s design and demonstrated an immediate Play Store rating increase from 3.1 to 4.3 stars in just two months. |
Mehdi MEZGHANI, the CIO at Nouvelair, shared his thoughts on the development process: "Thanks to a great cooperation with Hitit, we were able to successfully launch the update of our mobile app on Android and iOS. Designed by professional UX teams, this new version exceeded our expectations as it multiplied by 10.3 the turnover share achieved through this channel, tripled the number of downloads and improved its average rating. This franc success, born from the understanding of the needs expressed by Nouvelair and the professionalism of the team in charge of the development up this new App, was boosted by jointly agreed promotional actions.
We will continue together to improve and perfect our App in order to allow our customers to have additional features and more user-friendly ergonomics.
With 6 more apps in production coming up in early 2020, our offering is like a living organism that keeps improving and growing with our addition of new functionalities to help our partners keep ahead of ever-changing user expectations and demands.
*Nomophobia: fear or worry at the idea of being without your mobile phone or unable to use it (Cambridge dictionary).