[original article by Gerry McGovern, my commentary here]
Mobile is a platform. It is a tactic, not a strategy. What you need is a strategy for the connected customer.
If a Norwegian man is sitting on the toilet reading the news on his iPhone, is he mobile? Well, research indicates that one of the most favored places where Norwegian men use their phones is on the toilet. iPads are used a lot on the couch but the iPhone is more popular in bed.
Mobile is not necessarily mobile. It is flexible, convenient, fast, and private. Pictures of sexually transmitted diseases are often accessed through mobile devices. This could be because mobile is particularly favored by young people. It could also be because a phone is more private than a computer. A number of people might have access to the computer you use, for example.
I’ve read that mobiles will be used a lot this Christmas, particularly for last minute gifts. That implies that people using them may need advice on what to buy, because by definition they will not be buying for themselves.
“Desktop copywriting must be concise. Mobile copywriting must be even more concise,” Jakob Nielsen writes in his article ‘Mobile UX Sharpens Usability Guidelines.’ We need more than content reeducation according to Jakob. “The feature set should be much smaller for a mobile site than for a desktop site.”
However, the customer is not always in a hurry. Some people read more on their smart phones than they read on websites. So, one of the most important links any mobile website can have is a link back to the main website.
A major weakness of organizations is that they behave reactively rather than strategically. “We need a mobile app.” “We need to be on Twitter.” “We need more video.” “We need to blog.”
Web strategy is far more about psychology than technology, blogs, Twitter or any other forms of content. The more people use the Web to live their lives and do their jobs, the more web professionals need to invest in understanding human behavior. This is because the Web removes the human touch points, the opportunities to observe, the empathy zones.
There is so much we learn when we are physically in the presence of our customers. If I were hiring a web professional the greatest attribute I would look for is empathy; the ability and desire to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. A web professional should have a service heart.
What are Norwegian men doing with their smart phones when they are on the toilet? What do people typically do when they are on the couch? Do the tasks change when they get into bed?
Read the original article and other good stuff from GM here.
My thoughts are that this is more or less semantics. GM is right and wrong. Mobile is a platform. And it’s also a strategy. They go hand in hand, but it depends on the target audience and their needs. A good example is YouVersion‘s Bible app (available on pretty much every platform under the sun). I’ve been using the app from several updates back (about 18 months now) and it’s gotten progressively better and better, not only from a content standpoint but also in it’s delivery. Note that the content isn’t copywriting in this case – the Bible is the Bible (at least in whatever version(s) one likes to read).
The feature set, however, is pretty much the same on both the desktop and phone/device systems. What differentiates the app is the delivery – well designed and heuristically easy to figure out. And for the most part, I’m not in a hurry when I use it.
Fast forward to this week when I offered to help my church fix their suffering web site (which I will be writing about over the next few weeks). One proposal is to improve the mobile presence, and yes, it is part strategy and part platform simply because what we use each for will differ. The web site one would use for basic information, which the mobile would largely be for contemporaneous and updated event information and social connectivity. Two different needs, significantly different physical presence limitation and likely different user groups. So sometimes we do have to look at the device as a platform and not just a strategy, but without the strategy there’s no point to the platform either.
And just a note, as of this writing, this blog has no (good) mobile presence or strategy. I’ll get to it one of these days. When my wife asked why I don’t hold off (re-)launching until I had it all in place, my response was “why wait?” Is there a point to holding off? If I had 10K visitors a day like she does, I could see it, but the small handful of people who might actually read this are highly unlikely to do it on your iPhone (or Android) so I’m pretty much not worried.