With more people going online using mobile devices, the PC is no longer the default mode of web access. As Boris Kraft of Magnolia CMS explains, this demands a significant attitude shift for any business running a website. If you don’t have a mobile internet strategy, then it’s important to give serious consideration to whether you should.
We are entering a new technology age. That is the prediction of Morgan Stanley analyst and internet guru Mary Meeker, who announced the dawn of the “era of the mobile internet”. According to Meeker, the number of people accessing the internet using mobile devices is rapidly moving to overtake the number of fixed users, and by 2015 Morgan Stanley’s figures predict around two billion mobile users compared to around 1.6 billion connected via the desktop.
If the proportion of visitors to a site using a mobile browser is particularly high, then this already makes a strong case for dedicating resources to a mobile implementation. However, it may equally be true that the poor performance of your current site is deterring mobile visitors.
Existing website analytics provide an excellent starting point when deciding if and how best to dedicate resource to a mobile implementation. Most analytics tools can be used to assess the type of devices people use to access a company’s existing site and understand the level of end-user demand for a mobile site. This leads to the next consideration—the value of mobile users to your goals as an organisation. Here, three main factors come into play:
1. Are your most valuable customers more likely to use mobile? For example, are you targeting highly mobile executives or perhaps phone-addicted teenagers? People on the move? If your main target audiences are heavy mobile users then this again strengthens your business case for mobile.
2. Are customers more valuable because they are mobile? Mobile could offer your business a whole new channel.
3. Will your content become more valuable to people by virtue of being mobile? Accessing the internet on the move has the advantage of making relevant information and services available to users at the point of need—which, most often, won’t be when they’re sat at a desk.
Meeker argues that e-commerce can gain a huge boost through mobile usage, due to the inherent advantages of mobile. These include the ease of payment: users can access content via trusted payment systems such as the mobile operator’s billing system, or platforms like iTunes or Amazon, providing safe payments within a mobile-friendly number of clicks. This payment infrastructure makes it possible to generate revenue from impulsive behaviour, and—crucially—is cheap and simple enough to enable micro-payments. This is enabling a new type of business built around small transactions for things like virtual goods—music, games, or any type of digital content.
Any successful website anticipates and meets the needs of users, but mobile users are different. While a desktop user can navigate the link maze and eventually find information, a mobile user doesn't have the time, patience or—on a small (touch) screen—the dexterity to wade through information not relevant to the task in hand. It is vital to create an environment with task-oriented content and a structure that is optimised to reflect this. But what does a mobile user want?
A mobile user is constrained by three factors—time, place and their device:
1. Time: Leaving aside games and entertainment sites that don't answer a timely need, most businesses have a product to sell or service to provide, and mobile users will need that information quickly and without having to search too far—four clicks is too much to ask! Keeping this in mind, the content of the site should reflect the most important information. When a mobile user visits their local gym website, the site should show them the opening hours and pool hours first. When they look up a restaurant, they should see today's menu, opening hours and a phone number to book a table.
2. Place: Similarly, mobile users will expect content that will help them when on the move. When a mobile user goes to a public transportation website they see a timetable. This makes perfect sense as they are probably walking to a bus stop or already standing there waiting for the bus. This user won’t care about the latest quarter's passenger numbers. That same logic can apply to any business (retailers showing nearby stores and banks the closest ATM).
3. Device: Currently, the smartphone is the dominant platform for consuming mobile web content. Compared to a desktop browser, a smartphone’s limited screen real estate makes it necessary to pare down content—focusing on the priority content described above—and in line with the device's capabilities.
The good news is that you probably already have the content that mobile users will value most. Serving a useful mobile website does not necessitate a huge technological leap forward. While social widgets and location-aware services can be very useful, look at the content you already have. Got opening hours? Map? Address? Phone number? None of these are 21st century inventions. Prioritising and serving them to mobile users upfront will go a long way.
Getting content right need not be a headache but an additional consideration is how best to format the site to look great on a mobile device. Again, this need not be complicated. A good content management system (CMS) can do much of this work, with the software able to figure out which device is calling and serve content in the appropriate format, delivering both desktop and mobile websites from a single system.
However, alongside the mobile website approach, recent years have also seen the rise of the smartphone app, which offers an alternative route to getting your business mobile. While more complex to develop, apps have offered several advantages.
By asking the user to download a programme you can have a more ‘sticky’ relationship through an ongoing presence on their device. It can also be a richer way to present a brand as apps can utilise more complex graphics and functionality. In part this is because apps are less compromised by a limited mobile data connection—lots of the fancy formatting can be saved on the device rather than loaded each time. Apps can also repackage web content in a task-oriented format tailored to a particular mobile operating system and may offer a greater ability to exploit the built-in features of a device such as its camera, accelerometer or GPS.
Despite the advantages, apps do come at a cost, with an additional overhead of developing for a range of platforms. The programming skills and tools needed to develop for the leading smartphone operating systems—Android, iOS and Blackberry—all differ significantly. Creating ‘native apps’ for each and every common platform could involve making multiple investments or taking the call to focus on one community of device users to the exclusion of others.
This fragmented environment presents a real challenge to businesses, but increasingly this is changing. For one, mobile websites are starting to be able to offer a more app-like experience as the browsers on the leading smartphone platforms have become able to provide mobile sites with access to device capabilities like GPS. More significant still is HTML5—a revision to the core language used by the worldwide web. HTML5 will improve the multimedia performance of websites, improved security and enable browser-based applications that continue working offline when internet connections are lost or unavailable. All of these features will help make the experience of websites on mobile devices far richer and with more of the device specific functionality that apps offer today. It will also make it possible to offer a consistent experience across different types of mobile device—removing the challenge of the developing multiple apps for multiple platforms.
When will this change take place? According to consulting group McKinsey, it won’t be long. It recently estimated that “...more than 50 per cent of all mobile applications will switch to HTML5 within three to five years—and the rate of transition could be considerably higher and faster”.
In part, the speed of uptake for HTML5 is likely to be driven by the cost advantages for companies looking to deliver content. By providing one common format for apps and the broader mobile web, HTML5 and its related technologies are likely to dramatically reduce the cost of developing even very rich mobile experiences.
We are already in the mobile internet age, but things are still evolving fast. The near future will bring radical shifts in the cost and capabilities of mobile websites. The good news is that a successful mobile site is within the grasp of most companies—often by following common sense best practice and more effectively using the content, digital assets and, increasingly, the CMS powering their desktop site.
The rush to develop native apps for smartphones is a justifiable choice for businesses that require a very rich mobile experience today; but it is one to be considered very carefully. Unless you can make a short term business case for the investment and commitment to a specific platform, then it’s best not to be seduced and to plan for the standards-based approach offered by HTML5.
These are not simple decisions, but with your customers already online and on the move, can you afford not to go mobile?
Boris Kraft is chief technology officer and co-founder of Magnolia CMS. www.magnolia-cms.com
