Mobile Enabled vs. Mobile Optimized

Over the past couple of years while auditing companies’ websites, I’ve come to a realization: Most companies have mobile enabled websites, but they’re not mobile optimized.

With the spread of Flexible Web Design, teams stopped looking at their mobile experiences as a strategic decision. Having a mobile website has become a simple check-box, and this has significantly declined the customer experience.

Understanding Mobile Optimization

Around 15 years ago, I was at an “Executives in The Know” roundtable in Atlanta where UPS was presenting their mobile website redesign.

To set the proper stage: This was before either Google Maps or Flexible Web Design were commonly in use. For the younger reader, this meant that if you wanted a mobile experience, you would have to build a separate m.com version of your website that would display based on different screen sizes. This resulted in companies putting a decent amount of thought and strategy into what their mobile experience would look like.

When UPS investigated their website analytics, they found that their customers on mobile devices acted very differently than their desktop users. As a matter of fact, over 90% of customer actions on mobile devices were contained to just three things. And within those three options, the majority of customers used the mobile site find a nearby store.

To address what they were seeing, UPS redesigned the mobile website experience to focus on those three actions above all others, with store location as the first thing users saw. As a result, they saw a significant rise in utilization of the site, as well as dramatic improvements in their customer experience scores. In the race to get customers into their stores, instead of USPS or Fedex, this was a huge advantage.

While this lesson was fairly eye-opening for me 15 years ago, I think it may be even more important today. Most website design platforms have made it extremely easy to create a mobile version of the website at the same time as the desktop site. All you have to do is design your desktop website, click the mobile button, drag a few borders and blocks around, and poof: Mobile Website.

The problem is, that capability has almost eliminated any thought as to a mobile-optimized strategy. Here’s the simple reality that’s been lost:

Does it work, and does it look good are not strategic questions!

The lesson I learned from UPS all those years ago has led me to always question two important things when designing experiences:

1. What do your customers do the most on mobile devices, and is it the same as on desktops?

2. What don’t your customers do on mobile? Is it because it’s less efficient, or is it harder to get to?

Thankfully, most analytics packages today allow you to pretty easily build reports to answer those questions.

What do your customers do on mobile devices compared to desktop?

You should be looking at your entire website dashboard through two separate lenses: Mobile and Desktop. Identify the top 10 items that customers do on your desktop site, and the top 10 on the mobile website. Do they match? If there is a 1% difference in utilization for the categories, you might be safe assuming that customers interact with you the same no matter what device type they’re using. However, if the lists don’t match, or the utilization breakdowns don’t match, then you might want to reorder your mobile site.

What don’t your customers do on mobile?

This is the other important distinction to make: Are there certain things that your customers don’t do on the mobile website?

I’ve found that these generally come down to one of three reasons:

First Reason: The mobile experience simply isn’t a good fit for what the customer is trying to accomplish.

For example: A customer is working on a certification course that you provide. They have to inspect schematics & diagrams, take tests, take notes and learn how to utilize your product. The mobile device is not the best option for accomplishing these tasks. You might be able to make the user experience better, but you’re never going to make it a really clean experience.

Second Reason: It’s simply a bad experience for the customer.

The action is harder to accomplish on a mobile device compared to a desktop. This might show up at first in completion data, where customers start, but then don’t complete an action. But over time, they will learn to not even bother trying to accomplish the task on a mobile device since it’s so difficult.

Third Reason: Something in your website design is essentially hiding the functionality from the customer.

For example: When redesigning the AT&T Business Support website, I found that 46% of desktop users immediately navigated to the ”Account sign in” option. However, on the mobile experience, only 0.6% of users would sign in to their account.

On the desktop experience, the sign in button was located in the top right corner of the screen, in the header menu. This meant there was one click to access the menu. However, on a mobile experience, the sign in option was buried within the hamburger menu, four clicks down.

On further research, we found that the dramatic drop-off in utilization was actually a combination of both the second and third reasons. AT&T’s header design effectively hid the log in option on mobile devices, but the actual user portals were themselves poorly optimized for mobile use. Strategically, both the mobile experience on the website, and the mobile experience on the portals needed to be improved in order to drive higher utilization. 

Conclusion:

Don’t assume that just because your website works for mobile users, that it’s optimized for mobile users. Check the data and understand how users use your websites depending on the device they’re on. Mobile websites are easier to create than they’ve ever been, so leverage the extra time focus on your user experience strategy.