Visitors to your attraction are looking for enhanced experiences. Mobile apps can go a long way towards facilitating this, primarily because they’re optimised for mobile. And technological advances support an ever expanding list of possibilities. If you’re an operations manager investigating this complex area, it can be something of a minefield. And one of the important considerations that’s ofter overlooked is visitor privacy. Below we’ve highlighted several critical reasons why mobile app visitor privacy needs respecting:
Some basic truths about mobile app visitor privacy
Firstly, the majority of visitor attraction apps run off the back of highly complex templated systems. The downside is that this can limit creativity in terms of visual delivery and interaction. This is particularly true when it comes to exhibit or artefact display. Additionally, these complex templated app solutions are often geared towards upselling. Generally speaking, they rely on visitors entering their personal information so this can be enabled. The motive for upselling could be to push cafe food offers for instance, urging visitors to spend. It’s understandable from a commercial standpoint – but there are genuine downsides.
respecting privacy
Our own view is that it’s never been so important to respect the privacy of individuals in this digital era
In the real world!
The reality is that many attractions are of the single-visit type, this most certainly is the case for visitors travelling from afar. It’s known that visitors are increasingly reticent to enter their personal information. Yes, people install mobile apps and enter personal information for essential functions such as banking for instance. But people are wary of mobile apps generally, and there’s no guarantee they’ll install yours! See reasons visitors fail to install app.
Mobile app visitor privacy – people aren’t stupid!
If you’re commissioning a mobile app for your visitor attraction, it’s easy to assume people will install your app. However, it’s important that you make opening your app friction-less. By this, we mean that you need to provide visitors with the easiest and least liability app option for them. Progressive web apps are the best option if you want to ensure the highest opening rates for your visitor app. This is because you don’t need to install them, they just open in a tab in your phone’s browser.
Experience rather than upselling
Our own view is that it’s never been so important to respect the privacy of individuals in this digital era. It’s why the apps that we create concentrate on visitor experience rather than selling, being explicitly non-invasive. We create web apps that open and run in a mobile browser tab. This ensures they can be quickly and easily closed if the visitor wishes, when leaving your venue. Our cross-platform web apps also run on devices other than mobile, such as tablet, desktop and laptop. Generally speaking this is anything that has browser software installed. As app developers, we’re acutely aware that mobile apps need to respect visitor privacy.
Our specialism is to develop mobile apps for the heritage attraction sector – find out more about us.