The motivation to customize products comes from the fact that people like to modify things they bought according to their taste. It gives them a sense of ownership that is related to people’s psychology. Put simply: people like things more when they clearly say “it’s mine”.
If you have your own app for your customers, you probably took great care to create a look and feel that follows your CI guidelines. After all, people should know that the app belongs to your business. Now, should you allow your customers to modify your app?
Obviously, this has the risk that the app looks nothing like your CI. We had this experience in the past with a customer. The brandbook of the company had defined blue as main color. So we designed a blue app and the CEO of the company was happy. But during a meeting a member of the board simply asked why the main color isn’t pink. She said she liked pink more and prefers it over the “cold blue”. Coincidently she had customized her mobile with a pink cover and had a pink pen (obviusly, pink was her favorite color). We then had a vivid discussion about CI and the impact of allowing uses to customize the look of the app. In the end, the CEO made the decision to go with blue without the customization ability.
This episode made us think about the open mindness you as a business should have when it comes to support customization. We think that you should give your customers as much freedom as possible for customizations. If you as a business don’t give enough room for people to customize your app, people won’t like it as much as an app that they co-designed. Of course, customers might use the CI color of your competition, but that’s a risk you have to take.
For building a highly customizeable app, the Progressive Web App technology stack offers the needed flexibility to create mobile apps for businesses that support the customization of apps. Our qonnect platform provides a framework for customizations of the color, font, icons, content filters, navigation structure, etc. Your customers can change your app according to their tastes while keeping the overall functionality of the app.
Links
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/customization-personalization/
