| | APRIL 20198CIOReviewIN MYOPINIONBEING CUSTOMER CENTRIC IS KEY TO DRIVING YOUR APP'S SUCCESSBy Kurt Fulepp, Global Chief Product Officer, AccuWeatherBeing the creator of a leading mobile app could you shed some light on what mobile application developers need to do to stay abreast in the market? When we think about our mobile application, there are three areas that I would like to focus on. One among them is Forecasting; the forecasts that we deliver are the most accurate and relevant to a user. The second part is our global reach; we're not focused on one specific geography; we're focused on being a global weather app on supporting language, supporting local custom (severe weather alerts and anything relevant to that local consumer). And the third being the utility part of the weather, which is helping you make decisions around your day or moment in time and that can be everything from planning which is incredibly critical in life-saving. I like to bubble that down into by stating that our app is not just about the present it's also about the future particularly with products such as the minute cast which is our patented minute by minute weather for the precipitation forecast for the next two hours. Based on hyperlocal activity knowing where you and your device is, we can give you the most relevant forecast that enables you to decide what you're going to do next with that piece of information. So when we think about mobile, it's about building critical information to that user that is hyper-localized to their location such that it gives them more than simply what's happening right now but also helping them plan based on the predictive nature of our forecasting technology.Please elaborate on the challenges that the organizations will need to address in Mobile Applications space.I think that discovery, particularly in the apps around App Store optimization (both paid on organic levels) is a big challenge for any product team. Because not only you have to differentiate yourself and your product experience but also you have to differentiate yourself in the messaging of that such that you can cut through the clutter. After ensuring that we are delivering a fantastic user experience another challenge is ensuring that people can discover it and become its evangelists. I think building with a shareable mindset is becoming ever more critical. Whether you are building for sharable iOS or Android ecosystem or natively for iOS and Android are a conversation that myself and our chief technology officer are talking about frequently on the basis of being able to share components between two competing platforms. This helps you to improve your speed to market, resourcing constraints that you have, and also deliver features that our consumers and users are hoping for at a faster rate. When it comes to balancing the high-end versus low-end feature sets there's a really interesting place for product teams. Particularly to think that high end phones are delivering significant processing power and feature capabilities; but when you take a global approach and a broad customer view you have to also account for those other devices that are not sitting at the top end of the spectrum in terms of functionality. We want to ensure that your applications can stretch from all users and want to minimize the forking that you create out there. The push towards augmented reality (AR) is an interesting aspect that we're thinking about a lot. For instance, take the phones' native camera and build an AR experience to make that Kurt Fulepp
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