Customer experience drives mobile commerce design

Imade Mouline, CTO, Gomez

The question of whether retailers should design a mobile site separate from the e-commerce site or let the mobile device reflect the e-commerce design is best answered by a detailed study of customer behavior and expectations, says Gomez chief technology officer Imad Mouline.

Mouline, who will speak on web page presentation and design is a session entitled Designing for mobile: Create a new mobile site or go with your web site? at the Mobile Commerce Forum 2010 Oct. 12-13 at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago, says any design-related issues should begin with a thorough understanding of how customers expect to use a mobile site.

“There is a lot of existing infrastructure that can be used in the design process to optimize display and navigation and I will point out what those are,” he says. “I’ll also point why retailers must focus on performance in their mobile commerce design and what they can do to ensure consistency.”

In the session, Mouline will talk about how most online retailers dig deep into web analytics reports, web traffic logs and other data to understand how customers are shopping an e-commerce site, or look for clues that can yield results by designing better features and functions. He will talk about the importance of doing the same when analyzing whether to build a mobile commerce site from scratch or optimizing a current site for users of web-enabled handheld devices, says Mouline.

“You need to analyze how people best want to use your mobile site based on how they already shop your brand,” he says. “There may not be a need to design a main mobile commerce page with a vast majority of your products, when what mobile shoppers really want to see are the daily specials or the search box to find a specific product.”

Whether it’s designing a new site or optimizing an existing e-commerce site for mobile, there is ample opportunity to leverage existing technology and infrastructure to launch—or update—a successful mobile web site.

“If you understand the end user experience and respond in ways that surpass their expectations, your design approach will come together successfully,” says Mouline. Gomez is a division of Compuware Corp.

Why the editors asked Mouline to speak:

As Gomez's chief technology officer, Imad Mouline has a special understanding of the challenges organizations face when implementing and operating mobile commerce sites, apps and text message campaigns. His breadth of expertise spans mobile commerce, Web 2.0, cloud computing, web browsers, web application architecture and infrastructure, software-as-a-service and streaming video.