Our Unreasonable Expectation For Devices And Apps

I was reading an article the other day about devices like FitBit and their use within corporate wellness programs. One of the questions it was asking was why use them when people abandon them after a while.  I found this great chart from Endeavour Partners in their whitepaper which looks a lot like an adherence curve.  They say that 1/3 of people abandon their devices within 6 months which makes it a hard investment for anyone.  

It’s the same question you might ask around mobile apps.  While this chart shows that Americans install almost 33 apps, the questions is how long they use them.

(Source: http://www.statista.com/chart/1435/top-10-countries-by-app-usage/)

According to Flurry, most apps peak within 3 months, and they show that health and fitness app retention is only 30% after 90-days. Again, that doesn’t make you want to invest a lot of money in a mobile app.  But, there are lots of reports out there telling us that people want to use mobile to communicate with their providers, track calories, and do lots of other health related tasks.  (see RuderFinn report, see IMS report, see Pew report)

So, what gives?  Do we have unreasonable expectations?  I would say yes.

We live in a ADD culture where people are constantly multi-tasking.  People want things that evolve and constantly change.  It’s the same reason we don’t want the same experience every single day.  It’s the reason that you’ve seen people from gaming coming into healthcare.  They understand how to keep people engaged over time.

Whether you want to picture it as a customer journey or different phases, the reality is that messaging needs to evolve with the consumer.  If you got the same letter every month, at some point, you don’t even pay any attention to it.  At some point, you wouldn’t even open it.

When I worked in healthcare communications, it was the same challenge from a strategy perspective.  How would we coordinate communications across channels?  What would the first message say versus the fifth message?  How do you avoid message or channel fatigue?

It’s the same thing in the digital or device world.  So, I ask the question…do we have unreasonable expectations about these tools by thinking that we can put them out there and sustain use of them?  I think so.  We need an evolving, constantly changing strategy about content, community, functionality, etc. to keep engagement sustained.