What Do Your Mobile Users Want?
You now understand that you have to deal with how your customer chooses to consume your content but what do they really want?
Whether you’d like to believe it or not, a mobile user will do all of the same things they’d do on a desktop as long as YOU make it easy and seamless for them to do so.
Read a long sales letter? Yup.
Watch a 15-minute video? Yup
Fill out that long order form? Yup.
If you make it easy for them.
All of those experiences come down to 4 key areas. In fact, mobile design though leader, Brad Frost calls these 4 areas the Hierarchy of mobile user needs.
Brad Frosts Hierarchy Of Mobile User Needs
Access
At the bottom of the pyramid you have access. It all starts here. Your customer wants access to you, your business and your content.
You may not be allowing them access in the way of not having a mobile friendly website.
That’s an example of denying access.
Remember, you have no say how your customer chooses to connect with you.
If they are looking for a piece of information that you have but for some reason, they can’t access it on a phone, you’ve denied access and you risk losing that customer forever.
If you have an image on your site that says “click here for the 10 tips to better customer service”, when the customer clicks that link you should be delivering them what they expected.
Access is as simple as that, yet, most websites still aren’t mobile friendly, meaning they are ignoring their mobile users and denying access.
Is that you?
Interaction
Once you’ve provided access you’ll need to enable your customer to interact with you. As a marketer this is the first real opportunity to tern a prospect into a customer, which is if you deliver a delightful experience.
Have you ever been on a website from your mobile phone but couldn’t find the navigation bar?
Interaction meets your customer commonly within your navigation. If they can’t tap their way around your site to get more info or accomplish a specific task they’ll leave.
46% of consumers will never return to your mobile site if it didn’t work properly the first time. Not being able to navigate your site is one of the top issues people have.
Don’t make them work to get what they want because they’ll just go somewhere else.
Performance
Now that they can access your content and get around to get more of what they needed, done, there is performance.
The most overlooked aspect to mobile.
Many of just assume our users have high-speed connections or are connected to wifi.
When in reality mobile users may be on the cellular network or broadband connection.
If your site is heavy with images and tons of re-directs or server calls you’ll kill the performance.
If your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load from a mobile phone, 75% of your audiences will abandon the experience, per Google.
Have you tested your mobile site for how fast it loads? Longer than 3 seconds? You have a problem that needs to be fixed.
Enhancement
Once you’ve done the 3 things above you can start enhancing the experience knowing your customer is on their phone.
Mobile browsers are different than your desktop browser and are capable of things a desktop cannot do.
Knowing your customer in on their phone you can enhance their experience by using their location to give them turn by turn directions, trigger a phone call with one click or zip code fields easier to fill out using the numeric keypad vs. alpha-numeric.
Those are just a few things you can do to actually help the user in their mobile experience with you.
The fact of the matter is, if you’re not thinking of and taking these 4 needs into consideration, any mobile tactic you try will fall flat.
In the next post in this series we’ll discuss strategy. Some many marketers claim to use but quickly jump past to go to the tactics.
We won’t be doing that here.
See you next time to discuss mobile strategy.
Image originally posted here: http://creativesrus.blogspot.com/2011/01/uks-young-top-european-mobile-net-users.html
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