Mobile Internet World - Day 1 - Morning

I'm trying a new format for posts from conferences. Instead of writing for each session, I'm going to simply merge the writeups from one half of the day. For example, this post will cover information from the morning of Mobile Internet World day 1.

First, the conference is heavily sponsored by The Yankee Group. The name was always familiar to me, but I was never clear that they are a research firm, very similar to Gartner or Forrester. For the morning, I choose the Mobile Development track. I heard three presentations. First, Carl Howe of the Yankee Group, spoke about mobile technologies in general. Near the beginning of his presentation he mentioned that "people in living in huts in Africa are mobile addicts." What a coincidence, one of my colleagues loves to cite this example as well! Another very important point he made that I remember reading in a book on mobility (can't remember the title at the moment), is when planning your mobile strategy, remember to mobilize, not miniaturize your site. This is very important. There are plenty of bad examples where companies try to simply mimic all functionality on their PC web version of their site, on their mobile version of their site. Carl makes a weak argument against native applications for mobile devices in favor of the mobile web. While I agree with his point that there are far too many devices to try and write a native app for each, I think there are certainly applications in which native applications make sense. I recently purchased an iPhone. For whatever reason, I find myself using Facebook's native app 100% of the time, instead of accessing their iPhone website. I think it feels a little quicker, or for some reason, more convenient? After trying to convince the audience why the mobile web is the optimal platform for apps, he identifies the problem of finding a company's mobile website. Is the address xxx.mobi? Is it mobile.xxx.com? etc. There's also the problem of browser standards. His research indicates that Opera and WebKit will continue to gain market share.

Next, Carl discussed some work the Yankee Group did to score mobile websites against criteria his form defined. 32 mobile websites were picked in three categories, financial services, shopping, and airlines. He didn't really go into the actual criteria used for evaluation, this is actually contained in the formal Yankee Group written research (which I've requested). The most interesting point in this part of his discussion was that, out of the 32 sites they reviewed, not a single site scored higher than a 68 out of 100 points. Highest ranking mobile web sites included Bank of America's, Southwest, Fidelity, and Edmunds. Highlights include:

Southwest - incredibly minimalistic. No graphics or colors, just text. Users can do the few tasks that one would expect on an airline website from a mobile device (check in, get flight status).
Fidelity - Any brokerage activity that one can perform on Fidelity.com, one can perform on fi-w.com. Also of note, the separate domain for Fidelity's mobile site, less letters mean it's easier and quicker to type.

Carl also mentioned WURFL. WURFL is an online open source free xml database containing a list and description of nearly every mobile device on the market. A very valuable research tool.

Carl now gave the floor to Francesco Rovetta, director of ebay mobile commerce. Ebay has one of the most successful mobile websites. The goal of developing mobile ebay was to make using the site as easy as making a phone call. I'd say they achieved that goal. Their native app for the iPhone is also very successful, in fact it's top rated in the Lifestyle App Store category. How have they measured the success of their mobile website? Well, Francesco indicated that users who bid on an item from their mobile device are twice as likely to win the auction. He stressed that when designing for a mobile site, never lose site of user experience. Provide the fewest screens and clicks possible, reduce complexities and distractions for the user, and be sure to consider hardware and speed constraints.

Primary lesson learned from ebay's mobile forays:
Provide a consistent experience across different Internet touch points (whether desktop, mobile, or native apps)

Ebay has separate development teams for their desktop and mobile websites. Additionally, the use cases provided on the mobile site are a very small subset of that on the desktop version of the site. For instance, new users cannot register on ebay's mobile site.

Hardest problem for ebay (and probably many other companies): Determining the best desktop features to mobilize.
Unfortunately Francesco didn't suggest any techniques for answering this question.

Next, Michael Neidhofer, the CEO of Netbiscuits presented on ........... Netbiscuits! I'm going to keep this brief because I really hate when presenters use a conference as a channel for a product pitch. In fact, I see it as very similar to how presidential candidates use national debates to simply rant about their platforms on national TV rather than actually answer the posed questions. Enough of that, Netbiscuits is a platform for mobile development. It seems ok. I haven't developed on it, nor have I really used many websites that are built on it, so I won't pass too much judgement. Probably the most insightful thing Michael said was, when designing for mobile, focus explicitly on the use case you're addressing (meaning, pick the use cases! Don't just design a mobile version of your website!).

Overall, an impressive morning. I'm looking forward to the rest of the conference. Next, I'll discuss the two keynotes of the day.