The Here I Am team enjoys working with churches to help their congregation adopt the app. We continue to focus on key needs of end-users to drive usage of new smartphone tech. Trust, particularly with the older population, remains the key hurdle towards adoption (we wrote about that topic earlier this year, read it here)
On a smartphone, the home screen quickly becomes cluttered with a large number of apps. The home screen is a trusted location, and also the place where apps are accessed. On iPhones, Apple populates the home screen for the user with their own proprietary apps (weather, stocks, news, maps, etc.) Other phone companies will even populate the phone with popular apps like Facebook, that can’t be deleted!
Users place a certain amount of trust in Apple and automatically uses the apps placed before them. A similar affinity occurs within Android phones where users trust the apps provided to them from Samsung or Google. To download and place a new app on the home screen requires the user to ‘trust the app;’. This trust typically comes from an endorsement of a friend or family member. We hope the church can also provide this level of trust to try a new app.
Trust can be just as easily lost as it is gained. It can be lost when an app crashes, or works erratically. With the high quality of apps today, crashes are not expected. The recent global outage of Facebook highlighted this need. People suddenly lost trust that the app would always be there and began to think of alternatives.
Trust is also lost when an action does not deliver an intended result. If a user does not trust the ‘Post’ button to post a picture in the manner they desire, then doubt and uncertainty creep in.
Trust also erodes when data is misused. If an app-based game suddenly starts advertising a product that was recently searched for on Amazon, skepticism arises and trust in both apps begins to fade away. The erosion of trust can happen in many ways and must be avoided.
Building and maintaining the trust of users on a new smartphone app remains a top priority. Working with our older users continues to reinforce this need for the Here I Am team, driving our focus on education, training, and adoption to bring a Church congregation together on the smartphone.
