Big Results on Small Screens: New Releases for Mobile
The rate of smartphone users across the globe is growing rapidly. Globally there are over 1.5B smartphone users with a YoY growth rate of 31% according to the Internet Trends report by Mary Meeker and Liang Wu. Not only do more people own smartphones, they use them to consume more content and do more business.
Today, consumers want to do the same things on their mobile phones as they do on their desktop, and businesses should be able to test their mobile sites just like their desktop sites.
A Pew Internet poll from spring 2013 found that 34% of Americans access the Internet mostly from their smart phones and not a desktop computer.
In the past year alone, we have seen mobile traffic to Optimizely.com double.
In spite of these numbers, many companies are still behind the curve. Only 6% of Fortune 100 companies have sites that comply with Google’s mobile site requirements and the majority of websites for companies in the FTSE 100 are not optimized for mobile either.
Hence today we have two big announcements to make Optimizely more mobile-friendly and mobile ab testing available to everyone.
First, we are launching Optimizely’s mobile dashboard where you can view results for, start, and stop all of your experiments for all of your projects from your smartphone and tablets.
The decision to build a mobile optimized dashboard was born out of talks with customers where we heard recurring feedback: people want to check their experiment results on the go and be able to start or stop one from anywhere at anytime. (They also cited a strong addiction to checking results.) Log into your Optimizely account from your smartphone or tablet now and try it out.
Use the mobile dashboard to view results for, start, and stop all of your experiments for all of your projects from your smartphone and tablets.
And second we are making mobile website testing available to each and every Optimizely customer. All plans from Bronze to Platinum are now able to run tests on their mobile websites. There is little distinction anymore between mobile and desktop browsing, and we feel the same should be true for mobile website testing.
“A lot of things don’t necessarily translate from desktop to mobile,” says Scott Ehly, website optimization and usability analyst at RentPath, an Optimizely customer who has seen great results from testing their mobile sites. “One of the biggest mistakes a company can make is to just assume that the functionality on the big screen will work on the little one.”
Creating a delightful mobile experience is just as—if not more—important than creating a delightful desktop experience.
“You don’t get to decide which device your customer uses to access the internet. They get to choose,” author Karen McGrane wrote in a recent HBR article on the mobile-only user. “It’s your responsibility to deliver essentially the same experience to them — deliver a good experience to them — whatever device they choose to use.”
By making mobile website testing part of all Optimizely plans and introducing our new mobile dashboard, we hope to help more companies of all sizes deliver seamless, delightful experiences to all of their visitors.
