Consolidated Platform

Desktop traffic is reducing with YoY sessions falling by 10%. Mobile websites are becoming more important all the time. Most companies have the same problem: How do we successfully transition our users from desktop to mobile?

Mobile phones can be faster than desktop machines and 4G/WiFi connections enable a rich user experience. People are now using their mobile phones more and expecting websites to be fully featured, engaging and easy to use on a smaller screen.

In development terms people have used the phrase ‘mobile first’ for several years. In the past, mobile websites were a greatly reduced version of the main website, usually designed by removing components or features from the desktop version. Mobile first changes this around by focusing on developing the mobile experience first and then creating a desktop journey.

We recently re-platformed our mobile experience. As part of this process we moved from page design to responsive component based design and focused on user workflows. This created a much more engaging user experience.

We were then left with the issue of work duplication to create an engaging desktop experience. We decided to try and use the same pages in desktop by enhancing the components and layouts to work on desktop screen resolutions. In the past, we would have added extra things to the desktop experience, but we resisted this approach as mobile should be our focus because this is where our user base is moving to.

We saved large amounts of development time from component reuse and this then let us spend more time designing and developing our components and workflows. The main different between desktop and mobile became touch verses click. This had as much impact in the design as screen resolution.

Overall, the consolidated platform process took more time than doing only the mobile first aspect of web development but less time than doing this and developing the desktop site. In addition, the quality of the mobile experience is superior to previous versions because the focus is purely on one platform.

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