Way back when Apple was only awesome at personal computers, design software and portable music players, it faced a difficult decision in how to enter the mobile space. At the time the mobile landscape was murky, plagued by sluggish networks, device disparity and fragmented operating systems. Operators’ grip on the mobile consumer was unchallenged; they controlled the hardware, software and even mobile Internet. Apps? Psssh.

At the hardware level, while few challenged Apple’s chops for good design, many more thought the pecularities of mobile would handcuff the company. Devices were getting smaller, not bigger (remember the RAZR?), and the notion of a smartphone hadn’t really been fully baked at that point - the RIM Blackberry popular among email warriors notwithstanding. Would it have a full keyboard? Stylus?  Mobile operators had spent billions of dollars on expensive infrastructure, complex hardware alliances and OS design. Superbly-crafted walled gardens protected their feifdoms. How would a new player in the space be able to navigate this tricky landscape?

In a word, brilliantly. So brilliantly, in fact, that in its clamor to sell the device, AT&T all but caved to some rigorous, unprecedented demands from Apple, including a $10 per month royalty for every iPhone customer.  More importantly, the carrier yielded complete control over the design, manufacturing and marketing of the iPhone’s hardware and software.

Apple started with a clean slate, desigining a completely new mobile experience from the ground up with little, if any, regard for how mobile worked before.

Facebook is doing the same thing.

The same rumors that swirled around the debut of the iPhone ran rampant around Menlo Park as Facebook contemplated its next move in the mobile space. Would there be a Facebook phone? Who would make it? Will it compete with iPhone? What platform will support it? What carrier will ship it? How much will it cost?

In April, we got our answer in Facebook Home. It is an operating system. It is an app. It is the mobile web. It is all of those things. It is none of those things. It is, simply, mobile done right.

Here’s why

While the spending in mobile is on apps, video, mobile Internet and a dizzying array of mostly ineffectual advertising platforms, companies like Facebook are throwing away everything we thought we knew about how to do mobile.

First off, Facebook sought an experience that echoed the original intent of the phone as it was first imagined – to connect people. “Traditionally, phones and operating systems were designed with apps and tasks in mind. With this, we wanted to recreate the most social device you have around people,” said Facebook’s Justin Stahl. More tellingly, Facebook product director Adam Mosseri adds, “People and content should be first, and we thought that needed to happen at a really deep level. Apps get in the way. Having something meaningful show up the second I turn on my phone is by far my favorite part of the experience.”

The app (yes, it is software you download) immerses you in a world free of menus, widgets and rows and rows of apps. Acting as a sort of wallpaper for your phone, Facebook Home’s cover flow is an engaging presentation of the latest photos and posts from friends. It is gesture based - even more natural and intuitive than conventional touch screen UX design; Facebook describes it as “organic.” Chat Heads, Facebook’s innovative attempt at recreating the mobile chat paradigm, is a great example. You can touch a head or anywhere else on the screen to dismiss the chat, and then have fun flinging your friends’ heads around the screen at will. Blues Clues help Facebook Home users navigate around the app.

While the reviews for Home are decidedly mixed (there are nearly four times as many one star reviews as five star reviews), as a first pass I think this is a really strong effort from Facebook. For Facebook users more inclined to use phones as a way to connect with friends and family, rather than, say, play with apps or tinker with widgets, it is a solid choice. That Facebook took this route, rather than designing an entire operating system, or, worse, getting into the hardware game, is evidence the social giant is serious about addressing one of its most vexing challenges to date - how to monetize the mobile channel. Based on the amount of behavioral data Home can collect, the future looks pretty bright in Menlo Park. 

Editor’s note: In the midst of Black Friday sales and Cyber Monday shopping, let’s take a moment to examine how we’ve adapted to mobile since the birth of the iPhone, and where there is room for improvement in designing for mobile devices. Tablets have permanently changed the mobile platform, and as retailers work on designing their e-commerce experiences for the holiday rush, it is increasingly important to focus on tablets. 

It isn’t particularly courageous to argue Apple’s iPhone instantly transformed the mobile landscape when it made its debut in June of 2007. One look at the Nokia 1200 – at the time the bestselling device in the world, should make even the most strident of Apple haters begrudgingly concede its historical significance.

The iPhone was the first device to seriously challenge the notion that browsing the Internet on a mobile device was required to suck (unlike RIM, whose reluctance to embrace the mobile Internet is almost singularly responsible for its total irrelevance a mere 5 years later), and replaced goofy things like trackwheels, multi-tapping, and styluses with an elegant touch interface. The iPhone also brought high quality mobile content to consumers, wresting control of the market from operators too busy building walled gardens to realize it was Steve Jobs inside the shiny wooden horse out front.  Apple did nothing to knock down the walls, but it certainly evicted the tenants, and added a few bricks (a locked-down operating system) and a treacherous moat (iTunes) for good measure.

Like other breakthrough innovations, the iPhone destroyed as many markets as it created, playing a not insignificant role in the destabilization of the standalone GPS, camera, camcorder, wristwatch, alarm clock and portable music player markets.

Half of adults in the U.S. have a smartphone. Nearly 30% of Americans use mobile devices as their primary device to access the web. Retail sales for Black Friday are nearly 70% higher than they were this time last year. Game-changing technology does this. It is a good thing. 

As ground-breaking as the iPhone was, it will go down in history as less significant than the iPad. The iPhone changed the mobile phone. The iPad changes the entire digital landscape.

Responsive design or standalone mobile presence? Yes. Also, no.

Most organizations have either built or have plans to launch a mobile version of their website created specifically for smartphones. The process, distilled down to its most common ingredients, usually involves a red marker, wireframes of its desktop presence, a pair of scissors and a garbage can. The result is commonly a stripped-down, barebones experience that does a few things decently, if not elegantly, and little else. It is less of an exercise in building great experiences than it is in eliminating broken ones. Most typically, these organizations deliver the full desktop experience on tablets, the bulk of their design budgets allocated to the desktop.

Other organizations are embracing the concept of responsive design to create sites that dynamically optimize layouts according to the unique requirements of the devices accessing it. These companies essentially create variations of the same set of experiences across the entire digital spectrum. Here, the tablet is simply another accessing device. It’s great in theory yet rarely in practice.

But both approaches are in danger of missing the larger point, which is that the tablet - not the smartphone or the desktop, is the most appropriate starting point. The iPad is the perfect marriage of full-scale functionality and elegant usability.  It is as pleasing and easy to use as the iPhone, and nearly as functional as a desktop computer to the average consumer. Newer tablets like Microsoft’s Surface – itself an exemplary device, further blur the line between computer and mobile device.

Chances are good that the iPad is already outpacing all other mobile devices in terms of visitors to your website. Chances are better that what you’re showing them is simply a smaller version of your desktop site. Essentially, that’s enforcing a click and scroll paradigm on a device built for touching and swiping.

Let’s look at a few examples to illustrate the point.

Amazon’s smartphone website is the posterchild of reductionist mobile design. It is a stripped-down version of its desktop site, with an emphasis on search and an uncluttered navigation. Its tablet site is all but identical to its desktop site, complete with horizontal navigation, a dizzying array of calls to action, and a complicated filter and sort mechanism in the sidebar. Imagine if the e-commerce giant focused on the tablet first, and built an uncluttered, touch-optimized website featuring streamlined navigation, prominent search functionality, and a simplified checkout function. Now tell me why its desktop site wouldn’t benefit from that approach. That same approach would also yield dividends for its smartphone website, which would benefit from the focus on touch first, size second.

CNN is much like Amazon in its two-pronged strategy for smartphones and desktop sites, with tablet users simply getting the PC website. While the smartphone site is usable, it is ultimately the unloveable, yet serviceable offspring of its overly-complicated parent. The website rendered on the tablet is all but forgotten, requiring a combination of pinching, zooming and tapping that is much more frustrating than it ought to be. 

With a thoughtfully-designed hybrid navigational structure, readable fonts, and a layout that utilizes the entirety of the screen, ESPN’s tablet site is superior to its desktop site.

The discussion your marketing department should be having isn’t necessarily about a smartphone or desktop strategy, it should be about how good UX design for tablets can carry over to to desktops and smartphones. Clicking and scrolling are giving way to touching and swiping. And even if it takes the industry another ten years to make the mouse go the way of the floppy drive, the design methodology of the tablet will most likely improve your site’s performance in the short term.

As more tablets find their way under Christmas trees this season, the trend for shopping to be distributed across an array of digital platforms will continue. The lessons learned from effective tablet design can improve sales across all digital experiences. And that’s all any retailer really wants this season anyway.

As more tablets are released and they become more affordable and widely used, e-commerce will transition from the desktop shopping to tablets and smartphones. As the progression of technology gains momentum, retailers need to embrace a more tablet friendly approach to their overall web design. Will the tablet be the number one device for e-commerce next year? This 2012 holiday shopping season could easily mark the tipping point for more responsive design incorporated into e-retailers digital properties. 

Mobile Practice Lead, Mark Emery, delves into mobile solutions for the hospitality industry. Using key examples from the work Definition 6 executed for La Quinta Inns & Suites, Mark explains some best practices brands may utilize for a successful mobile web strategy. 

Mobilizing the Hospitality Industry

Mark Emery: The hospitality industry was really quick to develop e-commerce websites back in the late 90’s during the first tech boom if you will. Shortly after, they began to get into mobile as well and they were some of the early investors and adopters of mobile technology. They built lots of mobile websites and applications 10-12 years ago. Unfortunately for many, that’s where the investment stopped. Where we’re at today is we have consumers on faster and faster devices running on faster networks expecting rich experiences that are not delivered by a lot of hospitality websites simply because they were built a long time ago when you had to build for slower networks and devices.

La Quinta’s Mobile Solution

Mark Emery: Whereas most initial investments in mobile websites are really extensions of that is happening on the PC or desktop web, the new La Quinta mobile solution is the result of taking a look at what the mobile audiences want from the ground up and developing mobile content that is optimized specifically for a mobile audience. It’s the question of developing an optimized experience versus porting what’s already happening on the web. To do that effectively it takes looking at your audience form the ground up. 

La Quinta Re-Invents Mobile Booking

Mark Emery:  La Quinta identified the booking process as a uniquely painful experience on most hotel websites and got serious about re-imagining / re-inventing that experience for their mobile audience. What they came away with was the LQ-Instant Hold™. The Instant Hold feature of their mobile website and downloadable applications allows the user to book a hotel room without entering a credit card or filling out a complicated form and simply entering a 10 digit mobile phone number.

La Quinta’s Innovative Mobile Experience

Mark Emery:  The La Quinta Instant Hold is definitely unique. In fact, they’re actually trademarking the instant hold. Another is this website experience we developed for them is contextually aware. It’s predictive in nature so when I go to LQ.com on my mobile device as a new user, I’ll be asked for my permission to use my location and it will immediately show me results of hotels in my area. If I’m a repeat customer or perhaps I am on on-site or even post-stay the mobile website changes its performance and changes its behavior based on where I am at in that whole revenue cycle.

Tips for Brands Entering the Mobile Landscape

Mark Emery:  If you have a website at all, which you probably do, your mobile users are already using your website on mobile. They’re probably not getting what they want (or they are) in which case the first thing I would recommend doing is taking a look at your web analytics and take a look at a few things there. Check out what types of devices are accessing your site currently and where they’re jumping off, how much time they’re spending on the site, what they’re able to get and what they’re not able to get. You’re actually able to glean a lot of useful data about how your website is performing on mobile devices by simply looking at your web logs.

Why is it So Important for Brands to Address Mobile?

Mark Emery:  Really there are two reasons; One, simply because consumers are holding powerful devices and expect really rich experiences on those powerful devices. They’re accessing data on high speed networks. Something like 60% of all smartphone data traffic happens over a Wi-Fi connection here in the United States so they’re expecting demand rich experiences.  The second one is simply the fact that our work, our lives as Americans and as global citizens for that matter is increasingly transient. We’re always on the go, we’re always in movement. Creating a mobile website and a downloadable application for people that are in motion was a smart thing for La Quinta do and it would be a wise thing to do for other organizations in the hospitality industry to take a look at. 

Has this ever happened to you?  The woman next to you in line at the grocery store -- the one with the full cart standing next to an empty conveyor belt, holds everybody up while she chuckles at her iPhone.  Or the guy in the sedan in front of you who missed the light turning green because he is reading responses to a post he made in a gardening forum -- and will check 19 more times today. 

But let's face it -- it's not him. And it isn't her, either. It is you. And it is me. It's cliché to say we are a distracted people. It is cheap to complain about how our digital lives can lay waste to our personal ones. And it is a sine dicendo to say that when we can't get what we want, when we want it, at the price we want, and where we want it, we are prone to hysterics.

I elaborate more on this in a recent Mediapost article "Why Your Friendly Neighborhood Mobile Technologist Needs a Swift Kick in the Ass."

With the proliferation of tablets, smartphones and other connected devices, we are acccessing content more than ever on the go. So why aren't there more innovative mobile apps or mobile sites that "wow" us? Haven't we come so far that we can at least deliver something that won't make us leave the second we get there because of a fail to load or clunky navigation?

This is not a rant - but simply a call out to mobile technologists and developers to get excited. Get innovative. And to deliver something spectacular.

On Monday of last week I had the (mostly) pleasurable experience of speaking on an IAB mobile advertising panel in New York. I say mostly because, technically, 10% of me burst into flames on the subway and never actually made it. 

Panels like these used to be the stuff of software geeks, carrier overlords and some gnarly, unholy combination of the two. The conversations were invariably technology focused as people scrambled to make sense of a fragmented industry growing at a bewildering pace. It took a few years longer than it should have, but at some point walled gardens, WAP decks and SOAP APIs gave way to use cases, ROI and sound design principles. 

The conversation has shifted again, and now people are beginning to contextualize mobile as part of a branding continuum, where digital, traditional and emerging media converge to tell a story that engages people in motion. Simon Bond, CMO of BBDO, pointed to a study his firm had done which found people are more likely to wake up and reach for their mobile device rather than their lover (or themselves, for that matter). Razorfish is doing really ground-breaking stuff in mobile advertising, working with publishers and networks to create dyanmic new ad models. Michael Collins of Joule talked about how the metrics mobile provide are on par with - even exceeding in many cases - the analytics available on the desktop web. 

At Definition 6 we are bringing serious innovation to our mobile clients. From mobile websites that predict behavior and present contextualized experiences, to mobile marketing applications that leverage unique combinations of variables like speed, distance, orientation and time of day, we are helping our clients deploy mobile marketing strategies that transform their businesses.

Check it out:
 


It begs the question - how is your firm using mobile marketing and advertising to build your brand? If you aren't, somebody else is. 
 

Looking for another lengthy blog post on the state of mobile technology in 2011?

Me neither. 

Here's what the graphic says for those who prefer to read than scroll through an egregiously long infographic:

1) There are a lot of people in the world;
2) Many, many of them have mobile devices;
3) Many, many of them have smartphones;
4) Many, many of them have iPhones;
5) But not as many as you might think
6) SMS is huge;
7) Advertising is huge;
8) Apps are still growing;
9) The U.S. is behind in smartphone adoption and mobile broadband;
10) Most mobile websites still suck*

*This is not actually on the infographic, but still true. Call us, we can help. 

Background: It’s almost impossible to describe the smartphone market accurately without sounding overly prone to hyperbole. Worldwide, nearly half a billion smartphones will be shipped in 2011. By Christmas of 2011, one in two Americans will have one. Gartner predicts that in 2011, 85% of all handsets shipped globally will be able to access the mobile Internet.

In Q1 of 2011, Android supplanted Apple as the #1 smartphone OS in the U.S. While smartphone manufacturers jockey back and forth with one another for frontrunner status, swapping places with every latest hardware entrant, only feature phones (where the OS is proprietary firmware, and NOT a third-party development environment) are left in the starting blocks; there is little churn in the segment. In fact 2011, according to Nielsen, will be the year smartphones overtake feature phones in global mobile shipments.

For brands looking to build or maintain a mobile presence, the smartphone onslaught simply cannot be ignored. Nor can it be oversimplified. Too many American marketers think mobile is merely a stripped-down digital experience, a checkbox extension of their digital initiatives created automatically through the advent of rich smartphone browsers. The reality is that, worldwide, more people access the Internet through mobile devices than personal computers. It is the first screen, not the third. That over 95% of domestic digital marketing budgets are earmarked for non-mobile initiatives is an unpardonable lack of imagination, courage and good sense.

Smart brands and advertising agencies must consider several factors when evaluating how to create a mobile presence for smartphones. First the upside of browser-based mobile applications:  

• Write once, run anywhere: This is the siren’s call of mobile that promises cost efficiencies by keeping the time spent creating, maintaining and updating applications to a minimum through the utilization of a tool-based multi-platform design paradigm.

• Universal browser availability: A rich browsing experience is all but universal in the smartphone market. If a brand presence can be defined and made accessible through a mobile web browser, it reduces the number of headaches to resolve for platform-specific nuances as long as you stick to the lowest common denominator.

• Support of advanced features available in HTML5: There are some components of HTML5 that will be a boon to mobile devices. Unlike mobile browsers of old, HTML5 promises offline support. Also, video in HTML5 is standardized, which will make adding video content to websites much easier. HTML5 also supports a GeoLocation API, allowing web developers to capture critical location data.

• Layout standardization: Web browsers depend on a layout engine at the presentation layer. While there are myriad mobile browsers available, WebKit and Gecko are the layout engines used by most, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.

Unfortunately, there are also downsides to a browser-only approach, including:  

• Browser diversity: The most prevalent smartphone browser in existence is the Blackberry, which has its own layout engine used by precisely nobody other than RIM. At the very minimum, creating a browser-based smartphone application that works on a majority of devices will require at least two completely separate development efforts.  

• Limited HTML5 support: When Steve Jobs lambasted Adobe’s Flash in 2010, he pointed to HTML5 as the author of its death spiral. Somebody forgot to tell RIM, who supports the Opera browser while remaining ambiguous about HTML5.  

• Hardware-specific amenities: Downloadable applications are typically able to access many features baked into the hardware that a browser-based application simply cannot. From the iPhone’s popular “shake” feature to other phones cameras and GPS chips, in order to unlock the richest of features from a mobile device, you have to think thick-client.

While the debate continues, what is certain for brands is to contemplate the merits of downloads vs. browser-based applications on a case-by-case basis. Mark Donovan, comScore SVP of Mobile concludes, “with mobile media consumption on the rise, the discussion of how consumers are accessing content -- whether it is via application, browser or both -- continues to be an important factor for companies looking to invest further in their mobile brands.” In every scenario, however, it is important to consider what will not work, and that, specifically, is to think that just because an HTML-based application works on a personal computer, it is sufficient for a mobile device. Mobile users have limited and hugely variable display capabilities, awkward and difficult input mechanisms, and the mobile mindset differs vastly from the PC user’s mindset.

In future posts, I’ll talk about mobile application design principles and dissect smartphone platforms in an effort to provide color for brands contemplating including them in mobile marketing strategies.