Welcome to Fueled's Mobile App Development Glossary. At Fueled, we are well aware that tech can be heavy on the jargon, shorthand, and acronyms.
In an effort to stay as transparent as possible, we've put together a glossary of terms and abbreviations that we use and we know are frequently used in the startup and mobile app development ecosystem. In keeping with Fueled's dedication to staying agile, this page will be frequently updated to reflect the evolving nature of the startup tech scene.
Definition: Agile Development is a framework and mindset that focuses on an approach to delivering software development with iteration. It allows flexibility for requirements and solutions to evolve.
Example: Fueled follows an agile development approach by shipping functional bits of an app as soon as they are ready, getting feedback from the market, and later using that feedback to improve upon the app.
Practical Application: Embracing agile development allows app development agencies to deal with constant change. It allows them to succeed in an environment that is volatile and ambiguous. Providing value that is iterative will result in great returns, low marginal costs, and satisfaction for the customer.
Definition: The Anchoring Bias is a cognitive bias that influences a person to rely on the first piece of information offered when making decisions and judgments. Basically, one will start with some anchor, and adjust in the direction that is thought to be appropriate.
Example: You are deciding whether or not to purchase jeans that are worth $150. A salesperson approaches you and informs you that these jeans are on sale for this week only. As a result, you buy the jeans because you assume that you got a great deal.
Practical Application: The Anchoring Bias persuades potential customers to spend more money. When customers purchase products, they often indicate WTP (highest price of what they are willing to pay) and WTA (lowest price of what they are willing to accept). Understanding the determinants of consumers WTP and WTA are important to understanding customer's’ decision making when setting prices in a website/mobile app.
Definition: Attribute Planning is when you engage people by exposing them to a stimulus.
Example: When consumers can be inclined to purchase one product over the other by simply talking about an attribute of a product to a customer before they make a decision.
Practical Application: By mentioning a distinctive attribute of a product, UX designers can encourage and influence a purchasing choice.
Definition: The Availability Heuristic is a mental shortcut that involves making fast decisions and judgments on information that immediately comes to a person’s mind when evaluating a specific topic.
Example: When you are swimming in the ocean and something brushes your leg and you instantly remember the movie Jaws and experience an instant panic of a shark attack. Another example is if someone has personally experienced an earthquake, he/she will believe that an earthquake is more likely to occur than someone who reads about it in a newspaper.
Practical Application: Customers tend to make decisions that are influenced primarily by easily retrievable information that they can recall aka “their gut feeling.” App development agencies should use the Availability Heuristic to increase their perception of risk and likelihood of succeeding in their marketing copywriting and sales goals. One way to utilize the heuristic is to consider and be aware all mental warning flags that may potentially arise from the target audience before investing all resources, time and effort in app development. Another good strategy to consider is to use vivid storytelling in marketing and sales messages to allow customers the ability to envision their success through using the product being offered.
Definition: The Choice architect bias is the design of how choices are presented to consumers and the impact of that presentation.
Example: Offering effective mapping to make it easy for a customer to imagine what they will experience once they purchase a product or service.
Practical Application: The way products are presented to consumers will impact a consumer’s decision-making process greatly. The chosen strategy will affect how consumers respond to the information presented and ultimately influence their buying influence in both the short and long-term.
Definition: The process of releasing a working version of an app made by an engineering team, app designers, and product managers.
Example: Fueled’s DDS lasts about 2 weeks where the team spends 315 to 400 hours to work on a working version of the app.
Practical Application: The DDS process ensures that the app is of high quality throughout all phases of development.
Definition: The Decision Paralysis involves offering a lot of choices to the individual will inhibit the consumer to take action or make a decision. (Lack of ability to make a decision).
Practical Application: UX designers should keep in mind that sometimes less is more and too much choice can reduce sales conversion rates. A good way to manage this problem is to provide good defaults within an ethical framework. This will allow consumers to make decisions and purchases faster and easier.
Definition: The Empathy Gap bias is a cognitive bias in which people underestimate instinctive feelings on their own attitudes and preferences.
Hot-Cold Empathy Gaps
Example: When one is angry, it is difficult to understand what it is like to be calm.
Practical Application: Marketers can close this empathy gap by understanding customer needs in detail and understand how things feel from the customer’s point of view. By understanding the desires of the consumer, UX designers can increase consumer engagement, satisfaction, sales, growth, and better brand recognition. Designing an application for mobile development agencies must focus primarily on building organic empathy by delivering what matters most to them.
Definition: The Framing Bias is a form of cognitive bias where people react to a choice depending on how it is presented to them.
Example: Consider the format of these two questions. First, “Would you like to go out tonight” and second, “What time do you want to go out tonight.” Both questions address the same thing but are “framed” differently.
Practical Application: Marketers nowadays must carefully tailor any piece of copy towards the attitudes of those to whom the campaign is directed to. Knowing the value of “framing” for online marketers can result in great benefits. For instance, marketers can increase conversions by utilizing specific keywords and taglines to show the benefits of a product. Consequently, mobile app developers should realize the powerful effects of “framing” and the profound degree of influence it possesses on people. As a result, designing the application should entail effective communication that will impact the recipient’s interpretation and reaction to ultimately optimize conversion rates and landing pages.
Definition: Information symmetry is a state in which information is freely available and known to all.
Example: Employment contracts.
Practical Application: Product development efforts should recognize the benefits of information symmetry by facilitating the free flow of information across the supply chain all the way to the end consumer. People make judgments based on what is available to them and UX designers control the information that is presented. Examples include providing two-way user reviews and surge pricing transparency. Today more than ever, consumers can see right through marketing schemes and inferior goods and services so it is crucial to provide consumers with a balanced distribution of information. Information asymmetry will negatively affect customers, the business itself and the competitive market.
Definition: A KPI is quantifiable measure value used to indicate a product’s success criteria and performance over time.
Example: Fueled uses KPIs before beginning on a project and uses them as goals to achieve key business objectives. After launching an app, the team will review KPIs they set in advance and assess if the data relating to the KPIs is sufficiently captured.
Practical Application: Setting KPIs help with evaluating the success and progress of a company’s efforts towards achieving a project’s goals.
Definition: The Libertarian Paternalism involves increasing people’s options to make their own choice. (Protecting people’s right to choose).
Example: Choosing what type of mortgage would be the most suitable option.
Practical Application: The designer is in a position of power when it comes to product design and development. Offering people some kind of beneficial choices first, while still leaving the choice up to consumers themselves choice will influence their decision-making in a positive manner.
Definition: MVP is a development method that showcases an early prototype of a product with sufficient features for early adopters to test. Early adopters will then offer feedback that will help evolve the product to its greatest potential.
Example: At Fueled, we build an MVP to test a project’s core assumptions by launching a version with just enough features for users to experiment. After receiving their feedback, we iterate our process to fit the needs and wants of the end customers.
Practical Application: An MVP can save an app development agency time and cost by releasing a semi-complete version of a product to test its performance. Being able to test a product hypothesis, will help app developers stray from building products that customers aren’t satisfied with.
Definition: The Nudge bias is a concept which states that positive reinforcement can influence a person’s or group’s decision-making.
Example: Usually at the end of a game on an app or website, scores of other players are revealed, which can ultimately influence your motivation to challenge the competition and beat their scores.
Practical Application: A good nudge can inspire the consumer’s behavior in a positive manner. When designing a product, simplifying the audience’s decision process and reducing the complexity of choices can help the consumer make a faster decision about the product.
Definition: PDS is a process that takes product/service through designing, prototyping, and user testing.
Example: Fueled’s PDS is a one-week process that consists 70 hours of work done by project managers, designers, and developers. The process starts by understanding how the product with solve the problem and how the solution will translate into a positive user experience. Next, the team will prepare the product to quickly move to development by building a prototype with impressive design patterns and technological architecture.
Practical Application: This approach allows app development agencies to test concepts, iterate and reduce risks when bringing products to market.
Definition: The Planning Fallacy Bias is the tendency to make optimistic predictions about how long a task will take.
Example: Underestimating the length of time it takes to travel to a particular destination. “I was unfamiliar with the way last time but this time it should be less time."
Practical Application: Customers will intend on purchasing what they need but can be enticed to prolong their shopping experience more than they originally planned. Product designers and developers should consider the outcomes of customers’ attitudes of being overly optimistic regarding shopping activities. One important tactic is designing a UI framework that includes a wide range of metrics such as user retention, productivity, and loyalty. If the UI framework is well-designed, customers are prone to interact with it more often.
Definition: The Pluralistic Ignorance bias is a situation where a majority of group members privately reject a norm, but incorrectly assume that most others accept it, therefore they go along with it. These situations typically occur when norms are older than members of the group or a small group can force their opinions on the rest of the group.
Example: When a professor asks a classroom “Does anyone have any questions?”, there will often be a deafening silence, even if in fact nobody understands the lecture.
Practical Application: This behavior affects design, marketing, and development in order to please a greater audience as opposed to breaking barriers and norms. Agencies must moderate the occurrence of pluralistic ignorance by testing hypotheses with survey data to find support for their design and project management theories. By presenting evidence of public consensus, mobile app developers can anticipate how to better redesign their applications/websites. Moreover, understanding what facets of available data is important to users will help support them in making decisions.
Definition: The Power of Free is the discount and perceived quality of the product that can drive a consumer’s purchasing decision.
Practical Application: People always love to receive free stuff when exploring options on what to buy as it evokes unreasonably positive feelings in their brains. In exchange for customer acquisition, UX designers can use the strategy of offering free things to drive interest in consumers’ decisions.
Definition: A project kickoff is the first meeting with the client and the project team. This meeting plans the project’s objectives, timelines, expectations, milestones and planning activities.
Example: The kickoff meeting at Fueled lasts 2 hours and that time is used to get familiar with the team as well as identify the problem to tackle, formulate the MVP and draft the use cases and user journeys.
Practical Application: A kickoff meeting is useful to determine the strategic direction and set expectations of the project.
Definition: If you make something suddenly more efficient to do, people will do more of it.
Definition: The Representativeness Heuristic is used when people judge the probability of an event A belongs to class B by looking at the degree to which A resembles B.
Example: Suppose John is a soccer fan who enjoys playing soccer daily with his friends. Growing up, he dedicated a lot of time to practice and learn new skills. Which situation is more likely?
A. John is a soccer player for a major soccer league
B. John is a farmer
The majority will choose A because of the description that was provided but in reality, the likelihood of B being true is greater because farmers make up a larger proportion of the population.
Practical Application: Customers will often mistakenly judge and will generally assign a high probability in categorizing a situation based on how it fits in their pre-existing prototypes. Customer’s representativeness heuristic can cause misperceptions in their decision making. App developers should be aware of this when designing a product as it’s important to consider the product presentation in a way that doesn’t fit easily into an incorrect mental model.
Definition: A product backlog is a list of prioritized features with concise descriptions that are desired to be incorporated into the app. The list of items typically included are features, bugs, technical work and knowledge acquisition.
Example: The first step in Fueled’s DDS is creating a product backlog. The information placed at the top of the backlog indicates its level of importance.
Practical Application: The team expresses the product backlog in the form of user stories which as simple and concise information of the functionalities required told from the perspective of the user.
Definition: The Spotlight Effect Bias is a phenomenon in which people assume that they are being noticed more than they actually are.
Example: When you spill something on your shirt and you do the impossible to avoid all social interactions for the day, but in reality, no one even noticed the stain.
Practical Application: In the case for mobile development agencies, it is the assumption of securing the spotlight and attention from their audience but in reality, the app may be obscure and has possibly received “artificial” buzz. The way applications perceive their performance plays an important effect on their Marketing/PR strategy. Becoming conscious of the spotlight effect is important to creating a steady word-of-mouth growth. When App developers value media feedback, they must pay attention to the kind that comes from active users and execute a consistent strategy that sets realistic expectations for product design and development. Since money and time is at a premium for all companies, each activity should count towards saving them from the spotlight effect.
Definition: A Sprint is a set period of time during which work has to be completed and ready for review.
Example: Fueled’s agile development runs in two-week sprints. This avoids surprises and keeps customers aware of their project’s progress on a regular basis.
Practical Application: This approach to mobile app development focuses on customer involvement, continuous evaluation, flexible planning and risk management. The main aspect of agile development is that the fact that it never ceases. Some common procedures include:
Definition: The Status Quo Bias is a cognitive/emotional bias that is evident when people prefer the current state of affairs to stay the same. (Preference for familiarity) People are likely to continue a course of action since they have traditionally pursued even if it’s not in their best interest to do so.
Example: Sticking with your current service providers for some specific reason when you know that cheaper options exist.
Practical Application: Overcoming this bias is a great challenge for online marketers because customers are browsing a website and they are hit with a status quo bias when reviewing products when deciding whether they should or shouldn’t make a purchase. Often, if customers did make it that far, customers abandon their cart and give up. Mobile app agencies should consider retargeting and cart recovery tools to understand why customers experience their own status quo bias. Therefore, designing the website should entail tactics that overcome the status quo bias.
Common tactics:
Definition: People simultaneously approach thinking and making decisions by encountering one of the two distinct systems.The first system is the Automatic System, which is rapid and instinctive. The second, on the other hand, is the Reflective System, which involves reflection and rationality. The key difference between the two systems is that that the Automatic System does not involve any type of thinking and is rather a spontaneous human response to any given action.
Example: Americans will have an Automatic System reaction to temperatures given in Fahrenheit as opposed to Celsius, and in an effort to convert the temperature to Celsius, they will use their Reflective System. The opposite is true for all other nationalities.
Practical Applications: Being aware of behavioral economics that results from the interplay of these two systems can allow App Development agencies to better understand how consumers make decisions on a daily basis. Therefore, they can shape their design and development efforts to facilitate the lives of their consumers with their biases and heuristics in mind.
Definition: The Thumb Zone is a critical element of app design and a key principle to ensure consumers can efficiently and painlessly browse content through a seamless experience.
Practical Application: Understanding how thumbs interact on devices through user testing can help mobile developers better design mobile interfaces, navigation elements, and human-friendly experiences.
Definition: User Experience Design (UX) is the process of improving an end user’s interaction with an app’s usability and accessibility.
Practical Application: UX design is concerned with all phases of the overall experience delivered to app users with the mission to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Definition: User Interface Design (UI) is the process of ensuring all elements of an app is easy to access and use.
Practical Application: Understanding app users’ goals is important when designing an interface of an app. Keeping the interface simple, consistent and purposeful will influence the users’ interaction.
If you feel we are missing a term or two, let us know and we'll be happy to update the page. Cheers!
