Offering greater reach than any one Smartphone and providing more content than an SMS text message interaction can ever hope to, the mobile web is an appealing component of the mobile customer experience. Success on the mobile web is a function of developing sites for its unique form factor as well as considering how targeted customers will consume the content – often in tandem with text messaging, as in linking from the message to a browser, or in similar fashion between an application and web-accessed data.
Having been in meetings with businesses considering iPhone development projects, I can say not all view the mobile web this way. Without a well researched understanding of how a customer would interact with the mobile web and derive value from such interactions, many businesses have been offering mobile versions for some time simply because it makes sense (be wherever possible customers might want to find you, convert your site to size correctly on a small screen). Next, they are looking at Smartphone apps, iPhone in particular, as “must have” novelties to be pursued quickly via re-packaging existing small form web content into an application “container.” Smart business people are choosing these short sighted paths. How could this be?
Today I came across two different articles that help explain the situation. One, titled “The sad state of the mobile Web gets even sadder,” from an InfoWorld blogger, describes how ill-suited the mobile web today is for application developers – especially those using tools such as Adobe Flash, which recently has been positioned as a rich app development platform to run within mobile browsers. It goes without saying (but I will anyway), that this means the mobile web for now is a viable content delivery platform alone, to complement other mobile interaction strategies – it cannot practically be otherwise. So the mobile web has a valuable place within the mobile customer experience, but as basis or reason for developing a Smartphone application it is not.
The other post, from the TechFlash blog, “Microsoft’s Ballmer: The Internet is not designed for the iPhone,” quotes Microsoft’s Steve Balmer answering the question of whether mobile phones could supplant PCs as the technology of choice for mobile consumers:
“Let’s face it, the Internet was designed for the PC. The Intrnet is not designed for the iPhone…That’s why they’ve got 75,000 applications — they’re all trying to make the Internet look decent on the iPhone.”
Of course his answer is colored by Microsoft’s position, or lack thereof, within the Smartphone space, but it also illustrates how many businesses are incorrectly viewing the mobile web versus applications.
Without widely adopted best practices for navigating the mobile customer experience based on business objectives, too many marketers are taking siloed approaches to mobile. No, the internet was not designed for the iPhone, but it can provide a conduit to real-time data for an application designed for the unique form factor of a handset and intended to help a consumer perform some task or make a better decision. The internet was also not designed for the mobile web, but likewise web content can be a powerful contributor to mobile interaction strategies. Some businesses are doing it right, like Newser, and others would be wise to follow their lead.
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