Mobile vs. desktop: Are you optimizing both experiences? By Aaron Strout

• Good user interfaces (UI) win.Have you ever been on a website, whether mobile or desktop, that’s hard to read? Or the navigation makes it hard to accomplish what you set out to do? We all have at some point in our browsing experience, and it’s a direct result of a poorly thought-out user interface.

While a bad desktop user experience can sometimes be a little more forgivable, on both platforms, this leads to higher bounce rates, less time spent on site and lower likelihood that customers can and will complete the task we want them to.

• Researching and digesting content. There are obvious trade-offs when it comes to researching and digesting content on desktop versus mobile devices. It’s much harder to read on one’s laptop on a crowded train or plane than with a tablet. It’s also less enjoyable to read a book on a phone.

But most publishers today have figured out how to deliver reasonably good experiences on all types of devices. And research tools like Yelp, Google or Kayak have made it pretty straightforward to find what you want, when you want.

• Email. While there are definitely different benefits to reading and writing email on a PC or a laptop versus a tablet or phone, people have become pretty facile at both. And in many cases, people use both experiences to their advantage (Mobile for quick perusal and responses to urgent emails and desktop for digesting or crafting lengthier emails).

• Photo browsing/editing. Taking photos or videos is still much easier to do on a mobile device than on a laptop or PC, but browsing, and even editing, are relatively easy to do on both formats now. In fact, one might argue that it’s easier for the novice to edit photos on a mobile device with built-in capabilities in applications like Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook than on the desktop.

However, it will be a while before creative types choose their smartphones for deep-dive Photoshop editing over their MacBooks.

• Real estate. In a desktop world, page real estate is rarely an issue, whether the user is tracking supply chain activities, scrolling through Facebook or researching which car to lease. Although I personally find that I am more facile with Facebook on my phone than on my desktop (too many choices and less intuitive placement of features).

On a phone, less real estate means different choices, including more compact navigation, different graphic layouts, bigger type and less text.

• Location. Although more desktop sites are now asking users if they can “access their location,” the means for tracking a user’s whereabouts are much less precise than on a mobile device, which usually knows where a person is in the world down to a five- to 10-meter radius.

Desktops will continue to get better at this as IP addressesprovide more precise locations, but mobile users are increasingly reliant on their devices knowing where they are and leveraging that to help them with smarter searches, photo-tagging capabilities, directions and even weather alerts.

• Photo/video capabilities. In the “Similarities” bucket, I discussed the fact that browsing and editing photos on a desktop/laptop and a mobile device was not radically different (at least at a surface level). However, taking photos and videos with a mobile device is much easier than in a desktop environment, and technologies like Periscope (Twitter) and Facebook Live are now enabling true broadcast capabilities.

As smartphone and tablet cameras catch up with the megapixels offered by high-end digital cameras, more and more photos and videos are being captured every day, allowing more people (and businesses) to become their own media outlets.

• Push notifications. Alerts on our PCs and laptops have been around for dozens of years. And while those aren’t going away any time soon, they don’t have the same impact (or messaging opportunity) as push notifications on a phone or tablet.

I explored this topic a little over a year ago, when I asked if push notifications could eventually replace emails. (I think the answer is no, but we will see a greater bifurcation in how we use both over the next few years).

• Portability. File this under “no duh,” but this is one of the reasons mobile-only usage has overtaken desktop usage. At the end of the day, many of us have our smartphones (and maybe even our tablets) with us everywhere we go.

With a laptop, we gained more mobility than we used to have with the PCs that sat in our offices, but even then, we wouldn’t carry our laptops with us to the beach, up the slopes, or even to our kids’ soccer games.

1. A good UX starts with marketers asking the question, “What does my customer want to do?” My friend (and former head of social/mobile at McDonald’s), Rick Wion, told me that customers using their mobile app fell into two primary categories: a) job applicants who didn’t have a PC and wanted to fill out an application online; and b) parents with young children who wanted to find a location with a jungle gym on premise.

While I’m sure those two activities take place on the desktop version of McDonald’s site, they may rank far below other use cases like finding nutritional information and downloading coupons.

2. As I highlighted above, even if customers can do a task like email equally well on desktops and mobile devices, leveraging the benefits of each environment can be a huge win.

Desktops are great for more intensive tasks that require heavy-duty editing, reading, writing and processing, while mobile is better for real time, digesting and capturing. Are you creating the best experience on both for your customers?

3. Have you mapped out your customer journey? Very often, your customers will likely use more than one device as they consider buying a product or service from you. Leverage these so that the experience you create across mobile and desktop works in a complementary fashion.

As an example, if you know customers are on their mobile phone and researching a car, you may want to offer to email them a link to a more in-depth report from Consumer Reports that wouldn’t be easy to digest from their phone. Or if you know it’s easier to scan a barcode with their phone versus their desktop, ask them in an email if they would like to SMS a link to their mobile device for later usage.

4. Take into account which demographics prefer which devices, but don’t assume that always holds true. For instance, it’s always assumed that Millennials dislike email and desktop environments and prefer to use smartphones and social apps like Snapchat and Instagram. While this can be a good starting place, prove this true by looking at your web stats, surveying your customers, or better yet, watching their behavior over time and adapting how you interact with them.

5. Keep abreast of evolving trends. I remember 15 years ago when I was working at Fidelity Investments, we had a “Chief Mobile Officer” who would tell me every year that “this is the year of mobile.” He wasn’t incorrect, because every year, mobile became a little more important.

But what you could do then versus now is night and day. And while that might be obvious, think of how much smartphones have evolved just over the last three to four years — new hardware, more functionality, greater processing power.