Mobile, Tablet & Desktop. Photo Credit: Shuji Iibuchi
Every October I look out for Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technologies; a list of the technologies they advise enterprises to be investing in. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed keeping up to date with the list and, this year in particular, I got quite excited when I read through – sorry, nerd alert!
The first five technologies on the list are:
- Media Tablets and Beyond
- Mobile-Centric Applications and Interfaces
- Contextual and Social User Experience
- Internet of Things
- App Stores and Marketplaces
What I find interesting about this is that mobile runs across all 5 of these technologies; tablets are essentially “mobile”, context can be about linking social, mobile, location and commerce, the internet of things covers areas like near field communications (used for mobile payments) and, of course, who could forget the impact app stores have had on our lives.
Certainly, back in the land of good old web design, things are promising. However, it’s still quite difficult to convince people why they should be investing in mobile – although authoritative companies like Gartner pushing it does help. Of course, building a mobile application needs to have a key objective, certainly because of the costs. But do people really need that for a responsive website?
The answer is of course yes, but it’s hard to get any ROI figures as to why, and whilst the web community has embraced it, I fear it’s some way off before the approach of “responsive web design is web design” is accepted as the norm.
Nevertheless, and since we’re not ones to give up, here’s a few reasons from the Gartner report on why your new site should be considering mobile users (at least to respond to different platforms as a very minimum):
- Enterprises will have to come up with two mobile strategies – one to address the business to employee (B2E) scenario and one to address the business to consumer (B2C) scenario
- The user interface (IU) paradigm in place for more than 20 years is changing….HTML5 will also provide a long term model to address some of the cross-platform issues
- By 2015, mobile Web technologies will have advanced sufficiently, so that half the applications that would be written as native apps in 2011 will instead be delivered as Web apps
- Through 2013, context aware applications will appear in targeted areas such as location-based services, augmented reality on mobile devices, and mobile commerce
- Gartner forecasts that by 2014, there will be more than 70 billion mobile application downloads from app stores every year
Some quite compelling points made! Ultimately, developing the mobile side of your marketing strategy does cost more money. A cheaper and easier way to start off is to build a responsive website. You can check out this site for some inspiration!