For this Mobile Mondays
post we’ve invited Netbiscuits to offer you best practices and tips for
creating a good mobile experience for your users. Netbiscuits is a
leading cloud platform for the development and delivery of next
generation web apps across all mobile devices and connected platforms.
Cultivating a user-focused mobile experience isn’t just about shrinking
your existing website to fit a mobile screen. In a single day, a
connected consumer interacts with your brand and consumes your content
across smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and game consoles. To meet
consumer demand for instant, optimized access, marketers must design
engaging “connected experiences” that respond differently for each
device as they each present unique size, capability, and content
consumption challenges.
In solving these challenges, marketers need to focus on a responsive
design that takes the multiplatform world into account and allows for a
device-optimized “Content Centric” user experience. The layout should
morph depending on the size and shape of the device’s screen ensuring
the experience adapts as new devices are introduced in the marketplace.
Touch enabled devices have evolved the digital user experience by
providing users with a “Parallel Response Experience” to their request
as opposed to a “Sequential Response Experience” found in a traditional
“Point and Click” mobile user experience. Designing a “Parallel” mobile
experience with many touch enabled features ensures a more natural flow
of information which dramatically increases site effectiveness. For
example, instead of re-using a traditional website interface, many
mobile commerce clients use a drag and drop interface for placing items
in a shopping cart which has greatly increased sales on touch enabled
devices.
Along with the design layout, responsive design must adapt a content
centric approach to the user experience. Your users must be served
content based on the topics for which they have shown interest as well
as based on time of day, weather, or geographic location. A system
remembering the items in your shopping cart has been an essential
element of a cohesive e-commerce experience for some time. But this
concept can be expanded upon by associating a broader range of content
to the individual that results in the serving of an article that
interested the customer earlier in the day or weather information for an
upcoming trip. To foster a good user experience, this needs to be done
in a streamlined, accurate manner that limits clutter.
One of the more challenging attributes of going mobile is the varying
screen sizes of tablets and smartphones. When it comes to tablets, we
advise clients to take a layered approach to designing and delivering a
“one-page” experience. By embedding or layering a video or photo gallery
on top of a page, consumer engagements and actions happen without
forcing the user to leave the page.
Being responsive to the user’s device and serving appropriate content is
done by using analytics. The insights gleaned from mobile, including
device models, screen resolution, device capability, service provider,
and preferred user language cannot be matched by traditional marketing
activities. Compared against geographic location, savvy marketers use
this data to define product offerings and regionalize discounts.
Once you understand these strategic points, you should also keep in mind these simple best practices:
- Mobile is not a channel. Mobile is an integrated solution where CMS,
CRM and commerce updates should occur at the same time and in the same
systems as updates to your traditional website.
- Research! Engage your team, friends and family to get insights on
how they use their mobile devices. Conduct a competitive analysis to
learn how your competitors illustrate and deliver their product and
services.
- Design your site to solve the main problems or situations customers
might find themselves in. Consider what features, tasks or existing site
elements translate best on mobile and implement them.
- And finally, don’t simply duplicate your traditional website. Consumers want and expect a different experience on mobile.
Posted by Craig Besnoy, Managing Director, The Americas, Netbiscuits
Visit Netbiscuits.com to learn more about the Netbiscuits platform.
