The Mobile Conundrum - Part 1 of 2

What, really, is your mobile strategy?

What does mobile mean to your business? I believe the answer is unsurprising in most cases. It’s like an answer to the World Peace question. It’s great, it’s awesome, it’s the future. Women, children, youth, engagement, 3G, 4G, tablets, blah and more blah.

So, what really is your mobile strategy?

I think most businesses are in denial. I believe one could get interesting results by hooking CEOs to polygraphs and asking them questions like, “is mobile happening?”, “has it already happened?”, “will it happen?”, “will it not happen”, “what is mobile?” etc, one might get interesting results, if there are any responses at all.

We guys believe in mobile and World Peace. We believe the world will be 5 or 7 inches across (sorry, did I miss out on 11”?). We believe there will be tons of mobile-first consumers. We still ask users to register. We ask them to block a userid, then we ask for an email id. Our registration page is 20 fields long. We forget all these screen-holders have a Facebook id (well, almost all, unless someone’s really trying to make a statement), all the android guys at least, if not all, have a gmail id. We forget that it is really easy for a person to have 500 email ids, but difficult (/ expensive) to have more than 3 mobile numbers. All the junk we have in our user-bases, all the waste of coupons can become so much lesser if we start using the mobile number as our identifier.

We forget the 7 inches when we give him 247,000 results for his query, images unoptimised for the mobile screen, one-time-password-flows for checkout (i.e. the user exits the app / browser, goes to SMSes, picks up / memorises / copies the OTP, exits SMS, re-opens the browser / app and feeds in the password) and so on forth. What, really is our mobile strategy? We want the user to use drop-downs, buttons close-together, images in PC-screen resolution, and browse through our jungle of tiny text and million pages with tiny arrows to click, and still feel like paying at the end? And if he does, go through the payment flow described above?

Hmm... tough one, this one, anyone?

...to be continued