Super Apps: Issues and Future Perspectives
“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” — Steve Jobs
The Super Apps in India are still evolving, and many of them have garnered significant users. These apps are experimenting with many ideas to bring in additional services or any other daily functionality for the user so that he is nudged daily to open the app. The businesses want their customers to open their Super Apps more often and collect customers’ behavioural data.
At this stage, the home screen of any Super App is cluttered with a hoard of options offering a wide gamut of services. When faced with so many options at once, the customers, especially the millennials, often suffer from divided attention, face the choice overload problem, and may close the app.
Hence, for further evolution of Super Apps, businesses need to address the following issues -
Low Attention Span of Customers and Altered Consumer Behaviour
Humans of the current decade face problem in having selective or sustained attention. More often, they use divided attention to do multitask. Ex- People text on their phones while watching a movie, having a conversation or attending a lecture. It has taken many decades to reach this level. A young person will find it challenging to sit through a 3 Hour ‘Godfather’ movie, but he or she is more interested in watching the 4–5 seconds Tiktok reels simultaneously.
As per a recent study from 2015, Humans have an attention span shorter than a goldfish. The research states that –
“The average human attention span has shrunk from 10 secs in 2000 to only 8 seconds in 2015.
On the average web page, users most likely read only 20% of the words on the screen.
Users often leave a web page in just 10–20 seconds.”
This is a cause of concern for many digital marketers and designers as most digital products target tech-savvy Millennials.
Millennials don’t have the patience and have a very low attention span. They are habituated with so many one-click services that they search for instant gratification in every aspect of daily life.
This creates room for other apps that can convey their message clearly and deliver services fast and straightforwardly. Recent grocery business apps like Zepto, BigBasket, Blinkit and Fraazo promise 10-minute delivery are a testament to this altered consumer behaviour; what used to take 90 minutes early now only takes 10 minutes.
Hence, for Super Apps to progress ahead, finding the right balance of providing many services quickly and maintaining simplicity would be the key.
Government Caveats — Possibility of strict data laws
In India, the usage and popularity of apps like Amazon, Flipkart, Uber and the likes have sky-rocketed in recent times. They were able to experiment with many things to tinker the human curiosity. And these businesses were able to do that because there are no strong regulatory provisions that stop them from doing so. They all work in the grey space.
The Super Apps build predictive analytics capabilities and collect hoards of consumer data to train their analytics engine using AI & ML tools and generate insights. Such customer insights can be traded and used for commercial purposes. Hence, it is a cause of concern for many customers if Super Apps record every possible detail at various stages of their lives.
There were many apprehensions over the privacy-related issues with Aadhaar in 2016, but it was implemented after a considerable debate. Even right now, the Personal Data Protection Bill is at a nascent stage, but it may change the way Super Apps deal the consumer data. India has come a long way in data privacy , but it still has miles to create strong laws to prevent data misuse.
It is the responsibility of the Government to prevent anti-competitive practices and monopolistic concentration in the Super Apps space. But Government also has to ensure ample room for players to conduct their business through Super Apps in a fair manner.
Hence, it is a massive concern for Super Apps. Still, government regulations can’t be so repressive to kill the idea of Super Apps in the future.
Future Perspective for Super Apps
The way ahead for Super Apps in India would be to simplify their mobile user interface, offer an immersive experience, and deliver high-quality services. Also, Personalization right from the start of the user journey can help boost customers’ selective attention. At the same time, Human-like conversations through avatars can ensure sustained attention. Removing the clutter and providing a more interactive experience can boost customer engagement. This could tackle millennials’ short attention span and address the choice overload problem.
For, e.g., check out this app interface for the US-based ‘Lemonade Insurance’. It simply provides an AI avatar called ‘Maya’, which engages in a human-like conversation with the user. Here, all purchase related activities, product enquiries, quote generation, payments, document submission and claim settlement only occur through chat. No other options are displayed on the screen, but only Maya is there to assist. Thus, Simplicity is the Key.
The next stage of a higher immersive experience would be developing a hyper-intelligent virtual assistant, that can have free human-like voice conversations with customers. Customers can choose a male or female voice for the assistant. They can discuss every evolving need across various stages of their lives. Yes, this idea is from the ‘Her’ movie of 2013. The character of Joaquin Phoenix develops a relationship with Samantha, an artificially intelligent virtual assistant. She engages in everyday conversations with him and responds like a normal human being.
Eventually, Super Apps can leverage the Augmented and Virtual Reality in Facebook Metaverse.
The Metaverse provides immense possibilities for businesses to offer various services in their Super Apps through mixed reality and virtual-world experiences. Businesses can leverage this platform to offer virtual try-outs and mock purchases, among other features to entice potential customers.
Hence, Super Apps are here to stay, and it is yet to be seen how much more they can offer to the customers.
PS: Hope you liked this article. Please like & share your comments/Observations.
