I recently gave up my iPhone for an Android phone. My biggest reason? Screen size. Filling out online forms and reading blogs or articles that were not formatted for mobile users is extremely difficult on any phone, but my hope is a larger screen will help with that. Obviously, I’m not the only one browsing the web from my smartphone. 19% of all website traffic is now coming from mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Consumers across the board, including B2B clients, are forcing marketers to devise strategies that optimize their mobile engagement.
However, understanding such a need and actually doing something about it are two different things. “Reducing Customer Struggle 2013,” a study by IBM Corp. and conducted by Econsultancy, reveals that two out of three marketers do not have a strong understanding of the mobile user experience in the first place to devise an effective mobile strategy. In fact, only 7% of the companies surveyed report an “excellent” understanding of the mobile user experience.
About 40% of the respondents also believe delivering a positive experience through mobile screens is hard, considering the inherent limitations of small screen size, the difficulty in completing a form, and poor navigational capabilities of mobile devices, especially smartphones.
Organizations looking to provide an enhanced user experience through mobile devices need to:
- Prioritize the core features and focus on providing those, keeping everything else optional and outside the limelight.
- Go overboard on simplicity with a plain design, shorter content, clear and direct messages and call-to-actions.
- Make it convenient for the user by incorporating buttons instead of links, infinite scroll capabilities, etc…
- Adopt responsive web design, wherein the design would match the screen size.
- Leverage the added capabilities of mobile technology such as GPS positioning and barcode scanning to provide added value to the user.
- Provide content relevant to the device. For instance, plain text with less graphics works best on smart phones whereas digital catalogs display best on tablets.
Have you deployed a mobile user experience strategy with your brand? Was it successful and how did you measure that success?
