Mobile Stats: 57% of Mobile Posting on Facebook from Mobile Web
One of the discussions we often get invited to contribute to with clients is a discussion on their mobile strategy.
What’s the right thing for them to do: mobile apps or mobile web?
Each client has their own situation, customer needs, goals and context. A blog post won’t do justice to answering the full question.
But this blog post seeks to provide some data on how people use the largest website in the world with their mobile devices.
Using data gathered by Dan Zarrella in his strong post New Data: 33% of Facebook Posting is Mobile, we broke down the 33% of mobile traffic posting to Facebook a little further to see how they were accessing Facebook.
(Click for full size image.)
According to the 70,000 samples Dan gathered, mobile web contributes 57% of the mobile posts to Facebook. All apps combined contribute 43%.
So when we hear rumors of Facebook’s Project Spartan now we can start to see the reasoning behind the investment and direction towards a full HTML 5 version of Facebook.
Reading into the numbers, I think we can guess that Facebook see mobile web’s popularity today and they also see a dominant future for the mobile web.
So while apps are part to their mobile strategy, the mobile web is essential.
(Thanks to Darren Barefoot for the coffee and conversation that spurred this post.)
Starting Guidelines for Tablet and iPad Website Design
In the last few weeks we’ve been working with clients on extending Mobify Enterprise, our galaxy-leading mobile e-commerce product to include tablets like the iPad.
As a result, we’ve been learning a ton about what works, what doesn’t work and what are some best practices when adapting a website design for a tablet and iPad world.
And we thought we’d share.
This isn’t a definitive list but it does provide a great start if you’re designing for tablets, reviewing wireframes or just thinking about how to reach people who are visiting your website on tablets and iPads.
As our senior engineer Roman Rudenko says, “These are my gut feel guidelines.”
- Make text larger for readability. Bonus tip: Consider offering a text resizing control.
- Increase padding and line-height of densely packed links to increase touch accuracy. This applies especially to form elements and calendar dropdowns.
- Remove mouse hover interactions wherever possible. If you want to keep them, extend them to support tap-and-hold interactions as well as mouse hover.
- Consider making design reflow-friendly to cover the full range of tablet screen sizes — from 600px to 1000px wide — instead of fixing page widths in stone.
- Beware the Flash. With iPads such a big portion of the tablet market, Flash elements need to be removed.
- Remove elements using the declaration (real or simulated) “position: fixed” because they slow down page scrolling on tablets to much greater extent than on desktop.
- Consider cutting some HTTP requests, as you would on mobile. While tablets have screen area close to that of laptops, their processing power is closer to that of phones. Additional on-page elements like Facebook Connect and Google +1 might fit into a tablet-sized wireframe but real-world performance and user experience can quickly suffer.
Have more tips to add? We’d love to hear them.
Please add them below as comments and we’ll keep building this out.
Google Predicts 44% of Searches for Last-Minute Holiday Gifts in 2011 Will Be Mobile
Do you ever find yourself stuck and wondering what to get that hard-to-buy-for friend or family member?
You’re not alone. Now where do you turn?
More and more people are turning to their smartphones, especially when the information they’re seeking is timely and location-sensitive — just like shopping for last-minute gifts for the holiday season.
Google knows this and, digging into its vast repository of data, has actually made a prediction about how many folks will use their mobile devices to search for last-minute gifts this coming holiday season.
That means more than 4 of every 10 shoppers searching for last-minute gifts will be using a mobile device.
But wait, there’s more!
Google also predicts:
- 15% of total “Black Friday” searches will be from mobile devices
- 65% of high end device users report that they have used their device to find a business, and then made a purchase at that business in person
- greater than 33% of both smartphone users and tablet users plan to start their shopping before Thanksgiving
Now what does your website look like on a mobile device?
If you’re not happy or you don’t know, click here — let’s talk and solve the problem.
Mobile traffic is only going to keep growing and we still have a short window before the 2011 holiday shopping season. The time is now!
