Two out of three mobile web users have encountered problems when accessing web sites on their mobile phones in the last 12 months, and slow load times was their No. 1 issue, experienced by almost 75% of users, new research shows.
What’s more, more than half of consumers said web site content was either too large or small for the size of their mobile phone’s screen, showing that many web site publishers and e-retailers in mobile commerce failed to optimize sites for mobile phones, according to “Why the Mobile Web is Disappointing End-Users,” a new study conducted by Equation Research on behalf of Gomez Inc. Gomez is a web application experience management firm.
The study, which surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. mobile web users, revealed how unsatisfactory mobile web experiences can negatively shape a consumer’s opinion of an organization, Gomez says. It also discovered that mobile web users do not have patience for retrying a web site that is slow or not functioning. In the survey:
- 85% of consumers said they are only willing to retry a mobile web site two times or less if it does not work initially.
- More than half are unlikely to return to a web site they had trouble accessing from their phone.
- 40% said they’d likely visit a competitor’s mobile web site instead.
“While mobile users may accept sites that are ‘light’ on richness and small in form factor, they are evidently not willing to sacrifice performance,” says Matt Poepsel, Gomez’s vice president of performance strategies. “The mobile web is all about convenience—the web in your pocket—and slow mobile pages contradict that benefit.”
Mobile users have high expectations for mobile web performance. Survey respondents overwhelmingly stated that if performance were better, they would access the mobile web far more often. More than 80% of them said they would access web sites more often from their phone if the experience was as fast and reliable as it is on a PC.
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