Are websites keeping pace with the Mobile Web evolution?
As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, the evolution of web browsing experience triggered by iPhone, Android, Blackberry and other new devices have attracted a large mass of users to mobile web. Even the mobile browsers like Safari and Opera have started to evolve to dramatically improve the mobile web browsing experience. With these radical changes taking place, the lines between the PC and Mobile browsing experience have started to blur. But do the B2C websites keep pace with this mobile web evolution?
A number of market research studies continue to indicate that the web browsing experience remains to be poor despite the evolution in the mobile browsers. I would like to point you to some statistics that I came across related to this topic. Jeremy pointed me to an interesting market study by Bango that indicated that “half of the top 20 most trafficked websites are not optimized for mobile devices, despite the fact that mobile web users now account for an average of 5 percent of all site visitors”. A recent worldwide study indicated that a poor experience on their initial use of the mobile Web made them "reluctant to access" either the site - or the Internet in general - on their mobile phones again.
With the increasing number of users trying to get to the Internet from their mobile phones, I believe it is time for the websites to get up to speed with this new trend and see how they can best utilize the mobile web. Major Internet sites are beginning to optimize their site layout to address the population of consumers accessing the Internet through their mobile devices. But the number of users with the high-end phones like an iPhone or a Blackberry is far less compared to standard phones from manufacturers like Samsung, LG and Nokia (even these phones have started coming with an enhanced browsing capability). So when the websites are being designed to support mobile based access, they need to keep in mind a wider range of phones than targeting only high end phones which is the only way to increase traffic to their websites through Mobiles.
The Mobile Web user experience still has a long way to go and this time it is the websites that will need to evolve to address these user experience issues. With increasing mobile web usage and an increasing number of consumers with Mobile phones, will the B2C websites start taking this trend more seriously and start optimizing for mobile based access? How quickly will B2C websites take advantage of this evolution and start unlocking the revenues from an increased traffic generation is a question that remains to be answered. Will online retailers take advantage of this trend to start driving more transactions through the mobile phone? These are some interesting questions and we will have to wait and see how these websites evolve over a period of time to start addressing the Mobile Web market. I would like to hear your thoughts about this topic.
Comments
Interesting examples of where mobile websites are going are
bmw.mobi and mercedes.mobi
-Werner
Commented by: Werner Egipsy Souza | December 3, 2008 1:51 PM
Werner, thanks for pointing out the .Mobi examples. .Mobi websites provide a great advantage for the users in terms of the experience because all of these sites are optimized for the mobile viewing experience. With the introduction of .Mobi, we have seen a rush with the companies trying to register and create a website in that domain.
But I feel that taking the .Mobi route could result in different websites being created to address different device platforms (PC web browser and a Mobile browser) and the companies will have to cope with the redundancy of content and additional overhead of maintaining two different flavors of the same web site. The most optimal approach would be to use technologies that are device-aware and present the optimized website experience accordingly.
I think, the need for the hour (whichever route they take) is for the website companies to start targeting the increasing population of the users with a wireless device and optimize their websites so as to attract traffic and create revenue streams in the Mobile Web market which I feel is still largely untapped!! What do you think?
Commented by: Sandeep Chandrasekar Seshadri | December 5, 2008 8:25 PM
That mobile web is picking up is quite evident from the fact that the W3C is aggressively perusing the Mobile Web Initiative. The goal of this initiative is to improve mobile viewing of the web content. Mobile web application best practices is one of the publications by this group, also it has come up with the application mobileOk Checker which tells how mobile friendly is your web application. Also Microsoft's ASP.Net Mobile is quite capable to handle device diversity which can streamline the user experience to a certain extent.
Commented by: Parag Dave | January 14, 2009 11:52 AM