At Perficient, mobility isn’t something we add on to a project; it is something baked in from the beginning in almost every project. It is one of the reasons that our shift to User Experience and then to Digital Translation may have happened faster than other consulting firms. In our latest numbers, more than 75% of the clients fully require mobile, 20% are planning for it, and 5% have no need. This level of mobility is something we have seen for enough years that it isn’t a trend; it is shift. A recent personal online shopping experience drove home that some companies think that mobile is simply a smaller, vertical web page and why that isn’t true.
To start the story, I attended Mark O’Neil’s talk at the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition (IRCE). Mark is CTO of Thrillist Media Group, which consists of three main web properties and I will let them describe themselves:
Thrillist Media Group (TMG) is obsessed with helping guys live fun lives and reaches over 15 million of them across the globe, every month. Seamlessly blending content and commerce, TMG digs deep to inform guys how to best spend their time and money across the lifestyle categories they care about most. The TMG network consists of three brands: food, drink and travel property Thrillist; tech-meets-lifestyle site Supercompressor; and style destination JackThreads.
In full disclosure, I belong to Thrillist Chicago and have enjoyed a number of their articles, such as best Tiki bars, although I have not had a commerce interaction. Part of Mark’s presentation laid out the follow tenets of their mobile development.
Tailor your experience to your use case
Get the most out of your investment
Streamline your user experience
….
Mobile users driven to the app from email convert 354% higher than those driven to mobile web from email
….
Barriers to conversion should be minimal
iOS, Android, and mobile web each have a different type of user and therefore a tailored experience depending on the platform
Mark showed a number of ways that their mobile app design differed to help move customers through the funnel and remove friction. One of his comments was along the lines of they try to develop an app that a drunk 20-something could still complete a purchase. Mark’s team also knows that their demographic can be distracted and that an abandoned transaction is not a transaction delayed but more likely a transaction lost.
After the conference, these points were driven home when I tried to accomplish a straight froward web transaction. For reasons not worth detailing, I needed to purchase two mobile phones for my inlaws and add them to my existing plan. I had a window of about an hour; I had dropped my son at the dentist on a Saturday morning and needed to complete the transaction before it was time to leave. I found the mobile application from a major wireless carrier to be sub-optimal. Points that Mark had made such as changing the UI to quickly let a customer determine what was in inventory, pre-populating city from the entered zip and other minor changes were not available in the mobile app. The result was an experience that would have driven me to another carrier if I wasn’t already a customer. I had performed similar transaction via the carrier’s web site and found it to be fairly friction-less.
Because I don’t get to use the mobile applications we developer for our customers this experience made me realize how easy it is to made mobile application mistakes. It also made me appreciate the experience we bring to our clients and why at least one of our sites have won a JD Power award. Now I just have to get our team to redesign the mobile app from my carrier.
