Is your mobile site up to speed for back to school shoppers?

It’s back to school time, is your site ready to handle the traffic?
Over the past year we've seen quite a few retailers jump on the mobile bandwagon recognizing that mobile shopping is now mainstream. Innovative new social shopping applications like Zoomingo, Wrappand even one launched by Seventeen Magazine, are inspiring a new age of mobile consumers to shop at the tip of their fingers.

According to Keynote Competitive Research’s mobile user survey, 47 percent of smartphone owners use their phones to purchase products and services.The survey also shows that mobile shoppers like their apps, but they like the mobile web even more. Along with the increased number of users shopping on mobile, the tightening of expectations continues when it comes to performance and the user experience.

According to NRF's Back to School Cheat Sheet, 43.8% of U.S. tablet owners will use their tablets to research products and compare prices this season. The survey also found that 28.4% of shoppers with children in grades K-12 will make a purchase with their tablet; slightly more, 34.5%, will purchase college items via their mobile devices.

Considering that 16 percent of mobile users will not return or wait for a website to load if it takes too long  to load and six percent will go to a competitor’s website (Keynote Competitive Research 2012), making sure a site is optimized for mobile is critical for this back-to-school shopping season.
If your mobile site isn't up to speed, here are some basic tips:

• Considering Data URIs (Universal Resource Identifiers).
• Lighten the load on your home page with fewer objects and smaller images.
• Display a clean, simple mobile-friendly user interface. Remove all content a mobile user doesn't need.
• Optimize your website for the mobile screen following mobile design best practices for better usability and performance.
• Create a unique site for tablet users. Don't send them to a smartphone or desktop site.
• Monitor your mobile website's availability around the clock.  Mobile shopping isn't necessarily a Monday - Friday (9am - 5pm) activity.

You don’t want your mobile site to add to the stress of any back to school shopping, so be sure your mobile site is geared up to go.

Real tests use real devices

It's not that testing with real devices is the gold standard, though that's one way to look at it. The fact is, there is simply no way to emulate the behavior of a mobile app in the field unless the device is literally in the field. System overhead, memory usage, CPU speed — a host of variables impact app functionality in ways that just can't be reproduced in a lab. To get real test results, you have to deploy real devices.

But creating an internal test program using real devices is a challenge. The devices have to be bought, carrier contracts have to be established, test scripts created, users trained, results compiled and analyzed — for each geographic market. And then the devices and contracts have to be dealt with after the testing is done, or maintained for ongoing monitoring.

This complexity is why so many enterprises use an outside test partner that offers an established infrastructure with hundreds or thousands of devices deployed over a broad geography. The test provider works with the client company to develop the necessary scripts, and then leases time to them on its network to run the tests. This is testing in the "public cloud," which means that many clients utilize the same devices and infrastructure to conduct their tests. It's an ideal solution for most companies — there's no upfront capital expenditure and tests can be quickly executed on demand, on a budget-friendly pay-per-use basis.

Source: http://keynote.com/benchmark/mobile_wireless/article_mobile_app_performance.shtml

Mobile Content — A Monitoring Challenge.

One of the most important differences between mobile and desktop-based Web content is the need for mobile content to be tailored for the various characteristics and capabilities of a particular device. This added level of complexity affects development of monitoring strategies, and it must be taken seriously in order to truly understand how the full spectrum of end users accessing mobile content will experience it.

Clearly this expansion of the scope of content monitoring is one of the major differentiators from a  desktop-based Web monitoring strategy. With literally hundreds of device types in circulation and more coming on the market each day, attempting to understand the end-user experience by manually testing content on each device is cost—and time—prohibitive; automated monitoring strategies are required.

Read More on Web Mobile Monitoring

Managing the mobile end-user experience with mobile monitoring

Measuring performance is not a new concept to mobile either. However, until recently performance in mobile has been synonymous with voice quality. When network coverage and dropped calls were the only metrics that mattered, it wasn’t surprising that mobile performance monitoring was mostly a concern for the mobile network operators. Data performance was less of a concern when mobile content, applications, and services took a backseat to voice. However, with the mass consumer popularity of advanced smartphones and SMS, the accurate delivery of content, applications, and service over mobile data networks has become increasingly important to content owners.

Companies with a more mature Web presence are now embracing mobile channels and making them a key part of their growth strategy. However, for companies making the move from Web to mobile it is important to understand that performance-monitoring solutions that worked on the Web cannot be simply applied to mobile. Managing the mobile end-user experience requires an understanding of how it’s different from the Web end-user experience

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User Expectations and Mobile Performance

Performance is critical for this mobile portal. Explained a company executive, “End users are accustomed to high speed downloads when they access our Web site from their personal computers. However, mobile
connections have long offered slower response times. While newer 3G networks offer larger pipelines
that enable quicker response times, many end users still use older devices and are unable to download
mobile sites quickly. This can leave them frustrated with our service— and can ultimately harm our brand.”

Because of the disconnect between user expectations and mobile performance, it is critical for the company to monitor the performance of its mobile site and fix problems quickly to ensure that it offers the best performance
possible.

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