With a rapidly increasing number of people accessing the internet from their mobile phones, the world's leading brands and developers are committing serious resources to engaging with their customers via the mobile channel.
However, even with considerable amounts of time, effort, and budget committed to building mobile solutions, many of these companies are still making simple mistakes that are preventing them from delivering a good mobile experience.
So, why are big industry players that are successful on the web still struggling to understand mobile? The answer is simple: Mobile is often assumed to be a smaller version of the desktop web. Companies fail to realize it is actually a much more complex platform where the usual online rules typically don't apply.
If you look at the mobile market as a whole, you can see that, with nearly 4 billion mobile phones, its size and reach are vastly bigger and more diverse than the desktop internet. New and more sophisticated handsets are launched into the market almost daily, each with very different capabilities, browsers, and settings. With such complexity, solutions that work on the desktop internet often do not translate easily onto the mobile internet.
Here are three key areas and typical scenarios where some of the big players are failing on mobile:
1. Mobile search
The division between desktop and mobile web pages often remains unclear, and leading search engines still regularly index and return desktop results on mobile. Even when a mobile page is available, the user is often presented with the traditional version, which doesn't render properly on the phone.
With companies like Google putting a lot of effort into building mobile applications, like Google Maps, it is not surprising to see core businesses like search fail to deliver acceptable results for mobile consumers. In contrast, Yahoo now focuses on a web strategy, and the quality of its search results has improved as a result.
As an example, I recently searched for British Airways using Google on a Nokia feature phone. But rather than being presented with the British Airways mobile site, which is a great and well-designed site, I was sent to the PC version instead. The page had a landscape layout, which did not render well on my phone, and it took a lot of scrolling to find what I was looking for.
But it is not just the search engines that are to blame. Many brands are still failing to offer a mobile optimized version of their sites. In fact, in a recent study by Bango that surveyed online brands, many admitted they do not even know how much mobile-originated traffic is hitting their desktop website.
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