3 Reasons Your Mobile Web Content is Failing and What to Do About It

By Simon Lande Nov 14, 2011

The mobile web holds enormous potential for business success. From the perspective of customer engagement, customer service and increasingly for commerce, its role within a business’s overall online strategy is continuing to grow.

However, despite investing a lot of time and money in mobile web strategy, many organizations aren’t yet reaping the full benefits — and there are several common reasons why. Here are three of them — and some suggestions for how you can avoid them.

Fail #1. Treating Mobile Design as an Afterthought

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen recently conducted a study on mobile user experience and said,

the current success rate for mobile web use is about as was measured for desktop web use in 1999. The current desktop success rate is 84%; unless mobile usability starts improving more rapidly, we'll have to wait until 2026 to reach that level.

In short, businesses are about as good at designing mobile experiences in 2011 as they were at designing desktop web experiences in 1999. And the rate of improvement is too slow.

What to do about it: High quality mobile user experiences start with two foundations. First, they need to be designed specifically for mobile use: this means developing design and content that takes into account the distinct requirements of mobile users. The second is that they need to be measured against different user experience standards. Here are a few examples of best practice standards for mobile sites:

Keep page content short — aim for no more than 500 words
Don’t use Flash, as many popular devices don’t support it
Don’t make images more than 200px wide
Limit link text to 15 characters, but don’t make them so short they can’t be easily selected
Don’t use tables for layout

Fail #2 – Failure to Plan at the Speed of Mobile

According to a recent study done by Morgan Stanley the average iPhone user only spends 45% of on-device time making voice calls. The amount of mobile site data consumption has exploded. But, while Justin Bieber might have a 6G Phone — the rest of the world does not. When developing mobile sites, many businesses forget that most of their audience do not have unlimited data plans, and that mobile internet connections can be intermittent at best. Perhaps most importantly, the speed at which your site is rendered on a mobile device can be a huge influence on the quality of that user’s experience.

Like so many other web content quality issues — attention to speed and quality tends to degrade substantially over time. In a 2010 Web Optimization study, researchers found that over the last six years, the size of the average web page has more than quintupled with content. And, the number of external objects (links, images, video) has more than doubled. This code often goes out to the mobile site as well, causing unnecessary download bloat.

What to do about it: Successful mobile web experiences are built for speed. And, beyond the user experience, speedy mobile sites can be a huge benefit for the business more generally. In fact, Google now includes mobile optimization performance as a critical factor in determining your ad quality score. So, any organization using paid search to direct users to a mobile experience can directly affect their bottom line ad spend with a better performing mobile experience.

Other best practices for keeping a mobile site fast and sleek include monitoring and managing content quality for speed and size specific to the mobile experience — including: