products and services
The increasing pervasiveness of iPhones and their competitors has done what BlackBerries did not: create consistent demand for mobile Web access.
That trend is only going to intensify as smartphones become more and more common. After several years of saying, “Next year will be the year of mobile,” it appears 2010 may be that pivot point. As more and more mobile phones get 3G and WiFi functionality, jumping online to view a Website becomes a common activity.
Today’s mobile devices are decently capable of rendering a basic Website. But optimizing the mobile browsing experience will create higher levels of user satisfaction, leading to better site performance.
So how would you optimize m-commerce? Here are some basic guidelines for putting the right strategy in place.
Know your audience
A good mobile offering will, of course, be accessible to nearly all mobile users. But the experiences can be custom-crafted to speak to different users. Knowing how your site is being accessed will help you make user-oriented choices.
If you have a traveling sales force that accesses online data regularly, chances are you’ll want to optimize your site specifically for BlackBerry users, empowering your internal team to make the most of your site. If your brand speaks to younger or more visually oriented people, the iPhone will be your primary concern.
Design for use
The mobile version of a Website should, by its nature, not try to cram all the activities of a full-browser site into its pages. Instead, the items most important to on-the-go users should be emphasized, and the lesser items omitted entirely.
The Amazon.com home page has roughly 150 individual links. The Amazon.com mobile home, on the other hand, has 22. Amazon has stripped out the many upsell and cross-sell functions to focus on the core user experience, optimized for small-screen devices.
At the same time, two of those 22 links are to launch the full-browser version of Amazon.com—it...