The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has released a report titled “Reimagining Smartphone Experience – how surfaces can play a key role in making the phone smarter.” The report provides interesting insights into how the smartphone is being used by today’s users, revealing the key activities with phones, frequency of those activities and some interesting nuances across demographics. One out of two times users pick up the phone they do so without knowing why they fired up their smartphone.

BCG’s research reveals varying clarity of intent in three such unique journey types – pre-determined, exploratory, and spontaneous. While around 50-55 per cent times the consumer has no clarity of intent, about 45-50 per cent of the times consumers are very clear on the task to be accomplished and 5-10 per cent of the time consumers have partial clarity. The findings in the report are based on actual clicks/swaps data of over 1000 users and in-depth consumer interviews conducted across India.

The key findings of the report are:

  • Over the last decade or so, use-cases enabled through smartphones have proliferated from just socialising to a spectrum of more than 9 use-cases (streaming, shopping, searching, scoring/gaming, saving and payment, seeking (news), studying and storing/tracking)
  • Research indicates that across three journey types, there are multiple friction points in terms of inconvenience, irrelevant information (in form of ads/suggestions) and lack of discovery – even in case of a pre-determined journey where the consumer is clear about the app and intent they find toggling across apps/visiting multiple screens to check for key updates, as challenges worth solving for.
  • ‘Surfaces’ the next frontier in human device interaction has an enormous potential to delight consumers by providing a seamless, smart, and serendipity-rich experience while showing the potential to address challenges pertaining to broken experience and much more.
  • Leading innovators for example Glance for Android ecosystem (circa 2019) and Apple for iOS ecosystem (circa 2022) are seeing increasing adoption for their ‘Surface’ offering – for instance Uber leveraging ’activity kit framework’ in iOS 16 to offer users select functionalities (ride-tracking, cab/drive info/one-time password (OTP)) right onto the lock-screen providing convenience.

While surfaces do exist today in their most nascent form, they are poised to become the artificial intelligence (Al) powered engine, driving interactions between users and apps, manifesting as a rich, dynamic screen right from the start of a user’s phone journey. Some of the ecosystem stakeholders are building advanced use-cases already and the results are evident with ‘Surface’ innovators clocking more than 220 million monthly active users (MAUs) in India today, indicating strong engagement onto surfaces.

Commenting on the findings, Kanika Sanghi, lead – centre for customer insights India, BCG, said, “In our research, we have seen around 50 per cent of the times consumers do not have clarity on why they pick up the phone – they do it out of habit. Such occasions provide a great opportunity to guide consumers into relevant directions based on their interests by using surface in a smart manner.”

Meanwhile, Nimisha Jain, senior partner and managing director, BCG, said, “Smartphones are evolving – the recent spate of discussions in media and at industry events on themes like AI on device or app-less experience through generative AI (GenAI) is a testament to that evolution. ‘Surfaces’ can serve as the conduit to deliver this new evolved experience that is smart, seamless and often enables serendipity.”

BCG’s report also includes a few crucial consumer journeys reimagined with the surfaces, for instance, live-scores and match-highlights visible onto the lock screen without going into the app.

The report further sheds light on proliferation of use-cases ranging from streaming to shopping which are enabled by smartphones today. Indian smartphone users love to stream video content (short-form/long-form) – as 50-55 per cent of their time is spent on streaming apps, while socialising (texts/calls), shopping, searching (for information on travel, jobs, hobbies etc.) and gaming feature among the top five activities for consumers spend their smartphone-time on.

The key stakeholders of the smartphone ecosystem – the phone makers, the telecom players, the advertisers (brands), app developers, content publishers and gaming studios have a huge role to play in realising the full potential of the surfaces.

Furthermore, the report outlines how each of the players can embrace the opportunity and deliver a great consumer experience through a few strategic imperatives. Two case-studies where in industry-leaders and innovators in the smartphone experience category have driven business results with ingenuous use of surfaces are also included in the report.