Posts in the ‘mobile design’ Category
“A picture tells a thousand words”!
I love this; it hits the nail on the head! Perhaps I should not spend time writing blogs and just find some artistic talent and produce a piece of art to make a point…on second thoughts I could go to http://tomfishburne.com whose website and angle on marketing is great!
Apps are quite simply the coolest thing to happen in mobile for 10 years – sure SMS has been big but never in my 20 years of being in the mobile world have I seen a phenomenon the like Apps have caused. But one thing is certain and has never been any different, technology, especially in mobile, driven by the voracious appetite of consumers, never stops evolving. So whilst Apps have had their place and will continue to be a massive growth area and of vital importance to any brand or enterprise’s marketing and engagement mix, an App on its own is only a small part of the puzzle.
2011 has been branded “the year of the mobile” and this is probably true – it is estimated that mobile browsing will exceed PC browsing globally in 2011, so on that basis I think it’s safe to say that Mobiles are now a fully integrated part of our lives and will increasingly form a key component in marketing, advertising and engagement, giving brands the ability to reach right into the heart of a consumer’s most personal space and form a one-on-relationship.
Apps, like music downloads, will score highly for short periods and as quickly as they rise, they will fall to obscurity, with only a very few gaining the accolade of a classic and remaining embedded in our everyday lives, so any mobile strategy has to be built around a number of technologies and access points. Having a really cool App that links to a standard PC website is always going to disappoint so spending huge sums just to “get on the band wagon” is potentially wasted. What you need is a cohesive well thought through mix of an App, supported by a well designed mobile website to give the customer a really good experience – fast effective and relevant to a ‘mobile’ browsing experience not a cut down version of a PC site that was originally designed for broadband speeds, a big screen, mouse, keyboard, a chair and probably a cup of coffee!
Once engaged, you can offer customers more targeted functionality. For retailers this is going to be especially important. Offering an augmented shopping experience is paramount, let’s face it, if you don’t, your customers will do it for themselves: using the web on their mobile to get the best prices and your store to look, touch and compare.
HP and Walmart recently launched a fantastic mobile shopping experience designed to enhance the retail environment, having researched their consumers, they found that on average shoppers would come into the store up to three times before purchasing. They concluded that people were going home to compare products and prices before finally coming in to buy. By implementing a product comparison service delivered to the mobile browser they have increased sales of peripherals by 11.2%. And this is just the first step – local WiFi will allow customers to browse the web for free while they in store which means more data capture.
So it’s no longer App versus mobile web, it is ‘simply mobile engagement’, using all the tools available and carefully weaving them into your sales and marketing strategy.
If you are going to the trouble of designing mobile sites for different devices and screen sizes, then you should be taking into account that many smartphones have the abilitiy to change orientation from portrait to landscape, giving a much wider screen width.
You can use Javascript to register the change in orientation, but how can you deliver a different user experience when the user flips the phone?
With bemokoLive, it’s very easy to use the context rules to change the behaviour of your site when the user flips the device.
Context rules allow you to change the behaviour of the bemoko rendering engine with parameters on the URL. In this case we can use some javascript to note the change in orientation and call a URL with the relevant parameters set. The javascript looks like this:
<script type="text/javascript">
var landscape = isLandscape();
function updateOrientation(){
var landscapeToUpdate = isLandscape();
[#--
Only redirect if landscape flag has changed
--]
if (landscape != landscapeToUpdate) {
landscape = landscapeToUpdate;
if (landscape) {
window.location = "${intent.serverRelativeSiteEndPoint}/landscape/${intent.name}"
} else {
window.location = "${intent.serverRelativeSiteEndPoint}/${intent.name}"
}
}
}
function isLandscape() {
switch(window.orientation) {
case -90:
case 90:
return true;
break;
default:
return false;
}
}
</script>
The important piece in this script are the lines where the window.location is changed. Note the addition of the landscape parameter. As this parameter is before the intent in the URL it acts as a context rule.
To get bemokoLive to recognise the context rule, it has to be registered in the site-config.xml
<context> <rules> <rule name="landscape"> <param action="add" name="type">l</param> </rule> </rules> </context>
This makes bemoko add a parameter called “type” to the context if the landscape context rule is present. We can use this parameter to change the device category recognition for the device, again in the site-config.xml
<uigroup>
<ui name="landscape" expr="intent.get('type') == 'l'" fallback="ajax" />
</uigroup>
This change has the effect of overidding the standard device identification, adding the landscape category into the fallback chain. This means that any files or fragments in the landscape category will be delivered to the device, allowing you do do anything from simply delivering wider images to changing the whole look and feel of the page.
You can find more on context rules at http://bemoko.com/wiki/Context_Rules
For a live demo showing one use of context rules, take a look at http://bemoko.com/addons/imagetranscoder/test/i – the alternative rendering links at the bottom of the page use context rules to change the way the device is recognised.
- More than 80% of surveyed UK web users do not trust emails and web sites that do not effectively represent familiar brands
London, 20 April 2009: Mobile internet software specialist, bemoko Ltd today announces a co-operation agreement with Monotype Imaging Inc., a leading global provider of text imaging solutions, to provide expertise to Monotype Imaging customers by introducing them to bemoko’s range of mobile marketing tools, which are designed to deliver improved mobile web presence and represent brands more effectively across fixed and mobile connected devices.
Recent research conducted by Opinion Matters and commissioned by Monotype Imaging revealed that the vast majority (86%) of approximately 2,000 survey respondents in the UK would not trust a communication from a source they often use, such as a bank, if the details were sent in an unfamiliar font. Millions of people are now receiving email messages and surfing the web on mobile devices. However, the sheer number of mobile platforms available (considering the many different operating systems, screen resolutions and other variables) means that brands struggle to ensure their identity is represented effectively. bemoko is working with Monotype Imaging to provide expertise for brands looking to exploit the mobile opportunity with consistency of experience across different mobile devices.
bemokoLive™ has been specially developed to support the rapid creation of mobile web sites that can deliver relevant and brand recognisable content to mobile devices, regardless of screen size, operating system or other characteristics.
Julie Strawson, Director of Marketing, Europe, Monotype Imaging Ltd, said; “Even with most advanced screen technology, poorly designed and delivered text raises suspicions amongst users that legitimate communications are spam or phishing scams. Our goal is to educate customers, and, through the process of introducing bemoko to our customers, raise awareness of the opportunities for delivering online branded experience to the desktop and also across mobile phones.”
The co-operation agreement between bemoko and Monotype Imaging will allow creatives building multi channel sites with bemokoLive™ to be able to engage more easily with both companies to help ensure that a new site can go live fast, and have the confidence that logos and font types will be rendered correctly onto target mobile devices.
Mat Diss, Founder, bemoko said: “For branding on the mobile web to be effective it is essential that people believe that a communication is genuine – if they do not the effect will be to destroy brand trust not to build it. Working with Monotype Imaging will help us to facilitate logos, font types and content displaying effectively on a mobile device, enabling organisations to represent their brand more effectively in the mobile space.”
-Ends-
About bemoko:
bemoko (www.bemoko.com) is the leading innovator in flexible mobile web solutions providing a comprehensive platform for delivering compelling mobile web sites. It provides a multi-device, multi-channel delivery platform for mobile content, designed with flexibility and speed of deployment in mind. For more information: www.bemoko.com
Monotype is a trademark of Monotype Imaging Inc. registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered in certain jurisdictions.
For further information please contact:
bemoko
Chris Bignell, XL Communications Ltd
+44 (0)7834 020460
In this tutorial we will start exploring some of the features that bemokoLive provides to allow you to develop dynamic, intelligent and reusable multi-channel websites.
We will start with a run through of intents – that is, mapping what a user wants to do – through to extending your website using the plugin architecture to integrate dynamic content into your pages. Along the way we will again look at some best-practices that can be applied to speed up your own development work and some of the features the bemokoLive provides to add intelligence to your pages.
This is an extract from our new tutorial on building dynamic sites using the bemokoLive platform. If you would like to read more, please download the full tutorial from our developer wiki at http://bemoko.com/wiki