Earlier this week, my colleague Sheryl shared some compelling stats around the growth of the Internet and increase use of mobile in the IR world.
Today, I’m going to discuss three different approaches that can be taken to incorporate mobile into your online communications:
- Mobile Sites
- Responsive Design
- Web apps
Traditional Mobile Sites
Mobile sites were created during, what I’ll refer to as the pre-iPhone era. This is when phones were not as powerful and tablets didn’t exist. The thinking at that point of time was the mobile site should be trimmed down, with no images and give users just what (we think) they want. An example of this type of site is EA’s mobile investor site http://investor.ea.com/common/mobile/?CompanyID=ERTS:
Although these types of sites do provide the basic information, in today’s smart phone era, these sites are not as useful and in many cases are skipped to view the full site. Reason being, most phones can now easily navigate a full site and access whatever they are looking for. As well, these types of sites remove all ‘communication’ in terms of design, graphics, etc.
Responsive Design
A recent trend in the corporate website market are sites based on responsive design. These are sites that reformat based on the screen size of the device accessing the site. A desktop users sees a wide site, a tablet user sees the same site but formatted for a smaller screen, the same with a smartphone user.
The primary benefit of a responsive website is that companies are able to create and manage one site that responds to each type of device accessing that site. A responsive site ensures that your corporate website will be fully optimized to meet the specifications of any new device that is released to the market.
However there are some drawbacks to responsive websites including the fact that the screen sizes of newly released devices are not changing at the same rate. Another drawback to responsive design is that it is more challenging to design corporate websites in this manner, especially if your site outsources its IR site and your vendor doesn’t support responsive design (Q4 does!). In general, whether a client is redoing their corporate website using responsive design, we’re 100% supportive in either running the entire site on Q4 or just the IR section.
Finally, a third drawback of responsive design is that they cannot employ any app specific features including: gesture navigation (swipe, pinch, or zoom) or device integration such as adding to calendar, subscribing to iTunes, etc. or enhanced integration of multimedia and social media capabilities.
Web Apps
A newer mobile option, Web Apps are created using HTML5 and provide the experience of an app that has been downloaded from the app store, but can be accessed from a mobile browser instantly.
To view the above, access via your iPad or similar tablet device: http://q4cepheid.herokuapp.com/
This is a similar app that you would get if you downloaded Cepheid’s app from the Apple app store https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/cepheid/id562217523?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D2, however it is accessed instantly through the browser.
The main benefit of a Web App is that a company can provide a complete app experience to its users accessing their site on a tablet, while at the same time providing the same app as a download from the app store (which has its own benefits below).
The main drawback of this approach is that an app for each type of device (phone and tablet) has to be created – which can drive up costs and effort. However, using the same framework for both the phone and tablet apps can easily mitigate these issues.
Native Apps
Native apps are those that are downloaded from an app store, such as Apple’s app store or Google Play. These apps are designed specifically for each type of device and have the ability to leverage the multimedia capabilities of devices like an iPad, as well as access to devices notifications, calendar and save documents to the device.
Newmount’s iPad app is a great example of a native app that makes use of multimedia to create a better user experience – it provides all of the basic IR content, along with a great amount of detail regarding their operations, sustainability, etc.
The key benefit of a native app is its ability to notify users of updates, integrate with their calendar as well as leveraging the powerful multimedia features of their devices.
The main drawback of native apps is the requirement to deploy device specific apps (iPhone, iPad, Android, etc.) – which as stated previously can significantly drive up costs. However, based on our analytics of the market, the iPad currently accounts for more than 90% of all tablet traffic so it’s not a requirement (in our opinion) to deploy an app for all types of devices at this time.
So what does this mean?
The mobile market is evolving quickly. Soon mobile traffic will outpace desktop traffic. At this time we are advising our clients to provide a mobile experience that is beyond a basic mobile site. If they are planning on including mobile in their site redesign, we advise using a responsive design approach. If the client is creating a new IR site, we suggest creating a web app optimized for smart phones and tablets. Finally, for clients with a loyal following, looking to further strengthen their connection with investors, we feel a native app will provide the most immersive and high value experience.
We see tremendous promise with mobile and look forward to the exciting days ahead.