The more engaging the mobile environment is, the more customers will return and spend.
Motive’s Approach to Designing and Building Mobile Sites
There are important differences with mobile applications, the most obvious being smaller screen size, reduced browser capabilities and limited connectivity.
At Motive we know that the mobile environment should do two things:
- Help users find what they want in the fastest, easiest way possible
- Provide an experience compelling enough that they will return
We keep those two objectives in mind throughout the process.
Engagement
It’s all about engagement - engaging in an ongoing dialogue with customers, taking full advantage to build new relationships. Engaging immediately as there’s limited time in the mobile environment. We think of mobile customers as impatient consumers.
Having a compelling mobile interface, to engage and convert users, will keep them coming back and help gain repeat business.
The combination of limited screen size, and the expectation of instant information, means that features must be streamlined to capture attention and keep visitors engaged.
We keep the user interface simple to invite exploration and don’t overwhelm visitors with too many options. Exposing the most important content and ensuring that functionality is useful for someone on the move reduces the risk of abandonment. It needs to be convenient for users to find what they want, achieving their goals in as few steps as possible.
There is a different set of needs for people using a mobile site - they could be walking down the street, sitting in a car or on a train or standing in a queue. Remember, they are in a hurry and are easily distracted. The Motive team tests mobile sites in similar circumstances to see how they perform.
The range of devices that visitors will use is thought through – iPhone, Android, BlackBerry – understanding the differences is vital.
Mobile sites get high traffic and repeat hits so we design an environment with quality and frequency of use in mind. We use light, top-line navigation, buttons sized for fingers, minimal number of links, and compress content to avoid slow performance. Clean and simple design will give visitors an optimised experience. We make sure content is eye-catching, uncluttered and intuitive.
Findability
Mobile users accessing the website are redirected to mobile optimised web pages by Kentico’s mobile device redirection web part. This web part reads the incoming HTTP request and checks the User Agent string submitted by the client browser.
Multiple Platforms
The team at Motive are users of a number of mobile devices including, iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. Testing of mobile sites is carried out on these devices (rather than emulators), to ensure an awesome user experience across multiple platforms.
We also optimise desktop sites to work perfectly on iPads and build highly optimised iPad specific sites, when required.
A desktop website optimised for iPad should function beautifully and fit perfectly on the screen, so there is no need to redirect to the mobile site.
iPad users don’t want to be forced to view a site designed for a device with only a quarter of the screen size!
Content Management
Motive is a gold partner of Kentico whose new version 6 CMS we deploy and recommend.
The management of content for both desktop and mobile sites is easily managed through the one CMS.
Instant updates can be made so special offers can be published straight away.
You can react immediately to market conditions.
Staff administration time is kept to a minimum.
Sales and marketing messages are consistent across multi-channels increasing effectiveness and consumer interaction.
Growth is maximised across all channels
Synergy
Care is taken when designing the mobile site to ensure images and copy from the desktop site can work on mobile, with minimum of transformation or re-writing. Images are automatically resized to optimal dimensions for both desktop and mobile; we make sure the image aspect used throughout the desktop site slots perfectly in to the mobile design.
Administrators’ time isn’t affected and there is complete synergy between the sites.
One Web
Some businesses run separate mobile specific sites under the “m.” subdomain. While this allows mobile sites to go live quickly, running a separate mobile site brings some obvious operational / maintenance overheads and compromises the options available for user engagement.
The Motive team believes that a “One Web” approach, as recommended in the Worldwide Web Consortium’s Mobile Web Best Practices, is a better fit all-round.
“One Web means making, as far as is reasonable, the same information and services available to users irrespective of the device they are using. However, it does not mean that exactly the same information is available in exactly the same representation across all devices”.
It is clear that different devices offer different user experiences: screen dimensions, image sizes and mark-up must be adapted to suit the accessing device. This technique, known as Content Adaptation, is an essential ingredient for any mobile website.
Motive’s One Web solution works as follows:
- Mobile device users get the same website, no separate “m.” domain name
- Mobile devices are automatically detected (user can opt-in to mobile version or browse the desktop version if they wish)
- Mobile device users browse the site via the same URLs, but the pages they see are adapted for mobile with optimised amount of content, layout, image sizes etc.
- Sophisticated template and content management features allow full customisation of the mobile user experience, whilst maximising code re-use and leveraging the power of any existing content and functionality, and e-commerce framework.
Contact us to discuss how we can take your business into the mobile environment
More information…
The more engaging the mobile environment is, the more customers will return and spend.
More and more consumers are accessing the internet on their mobile devices each day. There are over five billion mobile phones worldwide and, by this summer, smartphones accounted for more than half of the UK’s mobile users.
Rising smartphone use means consumers are expecting more from their mobile experience and, due to the cost of smartphones and, not forgetting tablets, users are likely to have higher disposable incomes.
The user’s experience is the most important thing. It must be an easy, quick and pleasing experience for the user to do what they want, such as check prices on their phones and look at product reviews. User expectations are high yet there is still a lot of room for improvement on many mobile sites.
Have you checked the appearance of your own website on a mobile device? More than half of small businesses haven’t. In a recent survey, just 7% have already optimised their sites for mobile, but 65% had no plans for a mobile version (source: Econsultancy). This is a huge missed opportunity. To reach the widest market possible, businesses need to communicate across multiple-channels and on multiple-platforms providing a joined up customer experience.
Mobile versus app
There is also the decision of whether to go down the app route or the mobile site route. At Motive we believe that there are distinct advantages of going with the latter option. Here are some reasons why:
- A mobile site offers more advantages, in particular reach – across multiple platforms to a wider audience
- A mobile site appeals to customers across a variety of phones, not as restrictive as an app
- A mobile site will attract the mobile searcher - you can’t search for an app
- A mobile site is less expensive than an app, an important consideration for smaller businesses
- UK users prefer to access the mobile internet using a browser rather than an app: 70% versus 55% (source: Orange).
Retailers
A mobile site offers more advantages to retailers, such as findability. Online purchases are expected to reach £275 million by 2013 (source: Ovum and Verdict Research) and online shopping is becoming increasingly mobile, so make sure you can be found.
Mobile commerce (m-commerce) potential is to give consumers tools for research, comparison shopping and retailer interaction.
Links
On the mobile web you can always email a link and any browser can open it, but you can't link to and from an app.
Having a mobile site allows you to benefit from links, and makes it easier for mobile users to share URLs of product pages.
It’s a better solution for smaller businesses - one thing that users miss when using apps is the hyperlink.