A mobile experience shouldn’t be treated as a scaled down version of a larger web experience. In fact we should drop the terminology “mobile experience” all together. The amount of time people spend on a mobile device is growing 14 times faster than the time they spend on desktops. What this means is mobile UX is the real time experience.
In the connected ecosystem potential restaurant patrons check Yelp reviews before they call an Uber, shoppers compare prices on Amazon as they are walking down the aisle of their local big box store, and IT workers reply to messaging threads through Slack anywhere and everywhere.
“There are three billion connected people on the planet. The next billion will be mostly mobile only.”
–Harvard Business Review
Tomorrow’s mobile leaders understand that it’s the human behind the device—not simply the device—that’s mobile. They see how mobile fits into a much bigger picture of the entire experience. And they’re using this knowledge to engage with their Users in context of their current and past history of interactions.
Mobile Users only keep a few main brand apps on their phone, with that in mind a mobile web experience can be build to function more like an application’s ecosystem. Mobile experiences need build strong relationships which make their use invaluable. What this means is the context and content count most of all. Yelp, for example, is greatly paired down on the mobile experience. Most Yelp mobile user’s aren’t browsing, they know what they want to eat, they simply want it quickly, either delivery or to make reservations at a restaurant.
Mobile Can Be Difficult to Measure
The reality is users interact with a brand in many ways, thus creating an individual user journeys. A mobile device is no longer a phone, it’s an extension of the human being using the device. It’s a fashion, social, and technological statement. Interacting with user’s with that mindset let’s us see that we’re having a conversation, the days of spoon feeding a user information are over, today a user wants to be apart of the brand and their mobile device is how they do it.
Marketing and Advertising’s Goal
The goal is to evolve to real-time, personalized experiences based on contextual data. So you can deliver the best experience to customers whether they’re on the move, in-store, at an event, or waiting in an airport. Once detailed, integrated data, is collected and analyzed it’s possible to use the date to increase engagement.
Engagement becomes the most valuable metric to gain further insights. From here we can contextualize the data. Insights such as location, past time-based behaviors, and buying and usage preferences lead to the creation of a personalized experience with a brand.
And that personalization is what makes a user loyal to a brand.
