Optimize End User Experience For Mobile Devices

Today it’s all about CONTENT, being able to access it QUICKLY wherever you are and whenever you want…and iPhone does that well.

The first thing I did after getting my phone was not a phone call, but I went to Facebook and updated my status.

If I am a content provider, I would love to get the full insights for my website. Since my users could be coming from any device, I will need to understand how my site downloads and performs on different devices. This will help me improve the end users experience at least on popular devices, if not all of them. Optimizing it for one device is just not good enough!!!


Related Links

• Mobile Device Testing From End User's Perspective
• Website Availability Monitoring
• Mobile Application Testing - On Any Device, Any Network

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.

Emulation Technologies and Mobile Device Monitoring

Many Websites and services require only a browser to render the page and do not depend on the operating system of the device (for example, SMS). To accurately monitor such services on a broad range of possible combinations in the mobile ecosystem, the mobile monitoring solution needs to be able to emulate the vast array of devices available. A diagnostic capability helps to quickly pinpoint the root causes of failures when something goes wrong. Emulation technologies must contain, along with a wide range of device profiles, an awareness of the multiple factors comprising the end-user experience.

Emulated mobile device monitoring can be performed by content owners in two separate modes:

● Over the air mobile monitoring for true end-user experience

This requires a measurement solution that truly emulates the entire technology behind mobile downloads—including the actions of the operator network that sits between the Web server and the end user’s device.

● Direct over the Internet monitoring to measure only the availability of content without the impact of operator networks

By using this method, you can quickly identify the root cause of failures experienced by end users.

Read More on Mobile Monitoring

Mobile Web Optimization

Testing mobile web applications lets you in on several challenges in the mobile web. Decision making is crucial when it comes to your testing options. It is necessary to explore all the challenges first, to understand them. This helps is explore our technology options and to manage each challenge in an effective way. We will need to measure positives and negatives of each challenge before we choose the combination of testing options that suits best. Mobile testing challenges include devices, network and scripting.

One of the biggest and the most obvious mobile testing challenges is when it comes to mobile devices as its used by customers. There are thousands of client devices that could be used on your mobile site, therefore all are to be considered while testing your mobile applications. If we try and reduce this number, we will be taking a chance that out application might not work on a few devices and that will lock out a number of potential customers.  To handle this challenge, we will need to test using real devices or use emulated devices.

The next challenge is a regional challenge, the Network. Considering about 400 mobile operators in the world some being GSM, some being CDMA and the remaining use local or less common networking standards. Since each network has a unique combination of network, it wouldn’t be possible to discuss a challenge without discussion location. Also travelling to each network would be expensive. There are several ways of dealing with network challenges. (More about Network challenges in separate post)

Call scripting being the last challenge is actually used to execute the test script. Script execution can be manual or automated where real devices require manual scripting while emulated devices can use automated scripting.  

We need to understand a lot more about these challenges on mobile web testing. To lay down a path, once we understand the above challenges, we would need to focus on how to utilize the information and what would be the testing strategy for mobile application testing.

Mobile Monitoring & Analysis - Develop your own expertise in-house.

The first step in improving the user experience for mobile content, services, and applications begins with mobile monitoring and collecting the right mix of performance data. Once you’ve collected that data, the next step is to understand it and make the right decisions to improve your service quality. This is where the challenge lies. It requires time, resources, and expertise to analyze data and make actionable decisions. You can add headcount and develop your own expertise in-house. However, an outsourced solution is often more cost-effective and can instantly bring a broader base of knowledge right to your fingertips.

The mobile portal adapts the company’s standard portal to a form factor that works with mobile devices and can be accessed over various mobile carrier networks. When a user makes a request using a mobile device, the server automatically determines what device the request has come from and returns content that has been adapted to that device—for example by offering fewer graphics and text fitted to the mobile device’s smaller screen.

Mobile Testing Challenges

More than finding errors, the ideal goal of testing should be to understand the quality of offering. Its working, Does it function as planned? Will it meet the customers needs?, etc.

There are unique challenges when it comes to mobile application testing. The challenges of mobile testing will present you with tradeoffs that you will need to consider and choices that you need to make about the mix of different techniques and methods that you will use in testing. Each testing option you consider will have pros and cons associated with it, and you will probably find that no one testing option  will be completely satisfying. Rather, you will need to consider a testing strategy that combines different testing options that together provide you with the best overall testing result that balances the tradeoff between cost, quality, and time to market.

Read More on Mobile Testing Challenges