Companies are aware of the vast customer reach and revenue potential of the mobile Web, but many have been hesitant to dip their toes into these waters because of the complexity involved in delivering optimal Website display and application functionality for so many device types.
Viewing the market as fragmented and underdeveloped, companies have not prioritized performance for the mobile Web in the same way they have for the PC Web, resulting in mobile Web performance lagging significantly behind the PC Web in terms of speed, simplicity, and reliability.
When you take into consideration that two seconds is now considered the new threshold users are willing to wait before growing frustrated, abandoning a site, and going to a competitor, it’s not surprising to learn that only 14 percent of US Web buyers who own an Internet-enabled mobile device have actually used it to make purchases. In fact, almost half who haven’t yet used the mobile Web to make purchases said they would do so if it offered a faster experience, and/or if mobile Web content looked the same as content on a desktop PC.
Like the traditional Web 15 years ago, the first critical step in driving more widespread mobile commerce adoption will be the creation of more highly satisfying, convenient user experiences. To achieve this goal, companies must leverage existing and proven technologies and best practices from the traditional Web performance management world.
Here are some suggestions for companies interested in improving their users’ mobile Web experiences:
1) Know your users. Make sure you can answer the following questions:
Where are your users located?
Which ISPs do they engage?
What times of day do they visit your site?
What are their peak traffic times seasonally?
What devices do they use to connect to the Internet?
What browsers do they use?
Once you’ve answered these questions -- and others -- you’ll have a clear sense of which users, geographies, timeframes, devices, and browsers are the highest priorities for your business.
2) Ensure your mobile Website or application looks good.
You need to proactively test how your application renders on all the devices that your end-users carry. This testing needs to be conducted from the perspective of users who are at the outer edges of the Internet and whose experiences are subject to an extremely wide range of third-party services and network elements, including ISPs, carriers, content delivery networks, browsers, and devices.
3) Verify that your mobile Website or application is available and performing optimally. Take action to identify, diagnose, and resolve mobile Web, SMS, and application performance issues across devices, networks, and geographies, whether the faulty component is inside your firewall or somewhere across the Internet.
4) Check that your mobile Website or application performs at different levels of load. Too many visitors during peak times may degrade response time. Industry best-practices suggest load testing prior to major events like the holiday season to ensure that Websites can scale to handle peak traffic loads.
5) Be there for your users. Test mobile Websites and applications, not only before deployment, but frequently thereafter, in order to pinpoint and resolve problems quickly -- before they hit users.
6) Make sure your third parties are delivering the performance and availability you expect. Understand the performance of third-party partners and how it affects the user experience. And make sure that any cloud service providers you enlist can deliver consistently high performance to your users, by insisting on the right service-level agreements.
In order for mobile commerce to move to the next level, all members of the mobile Web ecosystem -- carriers, device manufacturers, industry consortia, and standards bodies -- must work together to address major challenges, including greater device diversity, conflicting standards and payment platforms, limited management tools, and a lack of established best practices.
Superior user experiences will capture an opportunity that’s too large to ignore and will help ignite the tidal wave of industry-wide change needed to unlock the full potential of mobile commerce.
— Imad Mouline is CTO of Gomez Inc. , the Web performance division of Compuware Corp. (Nasdaq: CPWR).
Thank you for this intriguingly helpful IE article, and what great timing too as a company I recently launched has been working tirelessly on launching an iPhone and Android application. I'll be sure to pass this article along to my other colleagues as we are planning to launch a mobile version of our web-site soon as well.
It's interesting to note for anyone launching a mobile site or mobile app for iPhone or Android and they are looking at monetizing their site and apps via advertising:
1) Regular Google Adwords doesn't appear to work for Mobile sites, though their subsidiary AdMob (acquired May 2010) does - it's their market focus. Kudos to Google on this intelligent and strategic buyout.
2) On the Mobile app side; be sure to read your Developer Terms and Conditions very carefully with Apple. They allow independent third party advertising but not advertising from companies that "have mobile OS's" - take a guess who they're trying to shut out (*cough* Google *cough*). Apple will want you to utilize their Advertising API instead. On the other hand; Google Android doesn't appear to have any issues with third party advertising on their apps at all, though Apple's Advertising API will NOT work on Android.
The only other suggestion I've had when it relates to a mobile site is: have a URL address that is easy to remember if your site doesn't auto-recognize mobile phones and which in turn directs the user to the mobile site. If this is not part of your set up, look into it. You will save your customers a lot of time. The other popular option is a web-site address like: "m.yourwebsite.com" (m = mobile. :P).
Nice elaboration, Imad. Apart from these factors, you also need to cater towards people who have certain disabilities. This would include people who have problems with eyesight, audibility etc. You cannot leave behind any users since that would simply mean loss of business. You have to design interfaces which can also allow these people to effectively use your application.
This is a common thing for this kind of technology. Release the technology to the developers. Leave it up to developers' imaginations and the rest will follow. Also, WW3C has the standard for developers.
I wholeheartedly agree that user experience design / UX / human factors are incredibly important when designing for mobile. The very first step that I mentioned in the original post talks about "knowing your users". This includes knowing the device that they're using or likely to use. What's its size? Capabilities? Form factor? What's the expected look and feel for the typical application? Your mobile app has to "feel" native, whether it's a native or browser-based app.
One key UX aspect that, when designing for mobile devices, stands out for prominently than when designing for their desktop counterparts, is context. Context also fits under the "know your users" heading. Here are some questions and examples to ponder:
- When do your users access your mobile site / app? What are they doing at the time? Are your users moving, or are they static?
- Are they likely to be at the airport, walking through the terminal and dragging a rolling suitcase? If so, they can only operate the device with one hand. Can your app/site be navigated easily with a single hand?
- Are they likely to be in the subway? They might lose the signal frequently. You may consider offering more offline features, making the most out of the caching capabilities of the device, and ensuring that the site is resilient in the face of lost sessions.
- Do you know what the most frequently used transactions or paths are? If so, have you optimized them to make sure that they are as fast as they need to be? If you don't know how fast that is, benchmark yourself and your key workflows against the competitions. If their site allows a user to accomplish a task in 3 clicks, yours can't take 4. If their site allows a user to get through a transaction in 4 seconds on average, yours cannot take 7 seconds.
Please keep in mind that HTML 5 support is still evolving. Many browsers and devices do support access to advanced features that were previously only available to native applications. Access to geo-location services, for example, is now more widely available. Support for hardware accelerated graphics are one area where browsers are fiercely competing in. I'm not sure whether there's any real support out there for the <device> tag, but the HTML 5 spec is going down the path of opening up access to some of these widely available native resources, such as cameras.
As mentioned in my reply to Michael, though, HTML 5's support for these native resources will always lack their widespread availability across devices. If an m-commerce site really needs to use such a native resource, that's one sure way to decide in favor of a native app instead of a browser-based one.
I think when it comes to developing applications for mobile, be it web applications or mobile apps, designing suitable interfaces is very important. The role of human factors is highly important while choosing screen size, color scheme, font sizes, navigation schemes etc. In order to make a successful application which can help you with m-commerce, the design factors are highly important. In many mobile apps the technical part is very strong but the interface part lacks, this makes the apps very difficult to use and it becomes a natural failure.
The net effect of optimized mobile experience extends beyond pure user satisfaction into an area that is the key to mobile commerce, and that's trust.
Fundamentally users fear of spending money on unreliable or dodgy services. It took years to get to where we are with the likes of Amazon on the web.
Yet, looking at the number of mobile commerce transactions done via iTunes suggests a path to success:
- Ease of transaction (no need to manually enter complex strings)
- Reliable & responsive service
- Secure transaction
Responsive mobile service that provides users confirmations and prompts for commerce transactions is key to drive trust in those services. Further, proliferation of marketers adding commerce components to their optimized mobile services will drive a sense of trust with end users.
On the topic of HTML5, I stand with Imad in the sense that although HTML5 can be used to make a mobile website appear to be rich experience as a mobile application, technology and commercial aspects of the mobile ecosystem will prevent it from ever getting access to some native resources that are only available to resident applications like, for example, the address book, camera etc.
Don't forget HTML5 itself is still in Draft phase right now, as such browser manufacturers at this time may choose to implement parts of the Draft and not others. Even if they all decided to implement a certain feature, they may not implement it the same way, hence different behaviors will start to surface.
Mobile commerce doesn't necessarily require completion of a transaction for it to be effective. Geo-location apps that push coupons and offers based upon your proximity to a retail outlet are a great and proven marketing tool. Of course, if one is that worried about privacy and location, you had better not use a cellphone at all or keep it mostly switched off, since the mere fact that they ping towers does mean you are traceable.
It has a much better chance of doing so when compared to an official application. That was my point. I suspect that it will get even better with time, just like computer web browsers.
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Social media has been with us for a decade -- but employer policies and the law are anything but firm about the most appropriate usage of this powerful tool.
Businesses often struggle to decide which domain to use. When it comes to purchasing a domain name, you have plenty of extensions to choose from, ranging from .com and .net, to .me, and even .mobi. But which one should you pick?
I've been writing about how the next evolution of the Internet might just be an advertising revolution, and how corporate IT can stay involved as the enablers and providers of the technologies that make this possible.
In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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