Mobile Is Changing Everything. The first thing many people do when they start their day is check their phone for messages, social network updates, and email. The easy mobile access we enjoy is changing how the business world reaches customers, and how customers find businesses. This presents interesting challenges for businesses, as much of the enterprise technology ecosystem will continue to go mobile to keep up with the growing mobility of the workforce, and increasingly mobile consumer.

Technology is rapidly changing to a “mobile first” mentality as businesses address the changing customer landscape. Since a mobile interaction is frequently the first exposure a person has with a company, it is important to think about the times you had frustrating mobile experiences and make sure customers don’t experience that frustration with your application.
Mobile Search
If a person is searching for a business from their mobile phone, they may be on the go, and have less patience with the limited keyboard and interface of the device than if they were sitting at a desktop. Understanding this basic difference in a user’s perspective on desktop versus mobile is one of the many reasons technology for business is so rapidly advancing. We have already seen the World Wide Web evolve from “the Internet” to Web 2.0, and mobile 2.0 is just around the corner.

The mobile first approach is also forcing business technology to move towards greater scalability, connectivity, and useability. We see this very clearly in social media, where users are flocking from one platform to another that provides expanded space to share specific audio content, upload longer videos, or post new types of content they can share. As technology continues to develop as a result of our individual mobility, ease of use will remain a major focus as will stability and future scalability.

One of the challenges facing business is that many of the attractive widgets and gizmos of the website just won’t work on a mobile device. The mobile screen is too small, and the circumstances of mobile use demands a quick, straight-forward, productive experience from start to finish. You and I no longer have the patience to sit and wait and wait for a web page to load. I have, many times, simply gone to a different provider’s site when I felt I had waited too long for a page to load. Most consumers expect to wait no more than five seconds! If your page doesn’t load quickly, <em>blip!</em>, they’re gone! The easier your mobile app is to use, the more functional its capabilities, the more customers are likely to come back.

Visuals are very important in getting the message across, but the mobile platform will continue to force alteration of theWVRR25 way in which our information is presented to the end user. Visuals can be processed by the mind much faster than text. That’s why we see so many websites loaded up with visual material from photos to graphics and animations. But, we can’t structure a mobile app with all those visuals, because it bogs down the page-loading process, and can cost us return visitors.

The mobile first approach is also forcing business enterprise technology to move towards greater scalability, connectivity, and useability. We see this very clearly in social media, where users are flocking from one platform to another that provides a new place to share specific audio content, upload longer videos, or post new types of content they can share. And, all of this, predominately, on a mobile device!

Now is the time to prepare your business for mobile, or your business can be left behind. But, make sure you’re not just going mobile, but that you’re going mobile with an application that is quick, scalable, stable, and encourages connectivity.