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With the rapid increase in social networking, gaming and commerce traffic coming from mobile devices, there’s suddenly a gaping need for a Web experience designed primarily for access from mobile devices, and not from the PC. According to a recent report by Morgan Stanley, the mobile Internet is expected to hold a majority of the world’s search traffic by 2015. It’s increasingly clear that we’re missing a mobile Web experience that is both contextual and customizable, and one that enables users to tailor their browsing experience to the realities of a mobile-first world.
To understand where the mobile Web is going, it makes sense to look back to where it has been. Several years ago, alternative desktop browsers like Chrome, Safari and Firefox began adding user-picked and even user-curated “extensions” to browser interfaces, which all of sudden let people do things within their browsing session without actually having to leave that session. Think of the “share on Twitter” extensions so common in desktop browsers now; or the ability to save content for later, once an extension was downloaded and installed, to “reader” applications like Instapaper and Readability. Personalized browsing was born, and it greatly enhanced the Web experience by allowing users to achieve in two or three clicks what they once achieved in nine or 10.
These enhancements, however, began to hit mass consciousness just as browsing traffic began to rapidly shift over to smartphones and tablets. Adobe found that global web traffic on these two mobile platforms was up to 15% of total Internet usage in February 2013, and that tablets in particular viewed 70% more Web pages than desktop browsers, with lengthier, more in-depth visits than desktop Web browsing.
To me, this begs not the question, “What happens to the desktop Web?”, which is, while interesting, far less relevant than the question, “How does the mobile Web now evolve to meet the hyper-connected, social, commerce-driven expectations of its users?”
You’ve seen hints of it in action already. Some mobile browsers have evolved to enable same-screen access to social tools like Facebook and Twitter, rather than having to jump out of a browsing session and into an app in order to share something. That’s a nice start, yet it doesn’t go far enough. Enabling what I call “contextual” mobile commerce and recommendations is the next frontier. Contextual means that your browser has a series of extensions that examine the context of the page that you’re on, and once those buttons are clicked, offers an overlay of personalized recommendations that helps to direct you into things that complement, enhance and extend the page you’re on.
This contextual overlay might scan the shopping site you’re browsing, and by integrating with a third-party deals provider like RetailMeNot, offer up mobile-only promotion codes or exclusive offers. This type of personalization will become even more critical with the emergence of the local Web, providing users with recommendations, reviews and coupons for nearby local restaurants, merchants and services. Or, it might allow users browsing sports scores to tap an extension button on their browser’s “toolbar,” and find sports apps intimately related to the context of the page they’re on – the sport, the teams and even the media outlets feeding the scores to the page.
Mobile operators can take advantage of this type of personalization to provide their subscribers with recommendations, promotions and advertising, should they wish to do so – as well as capture a share of revenue generated by the aforementioned shopping and app recommendation engines. Mobile browser extensions, properly configured for the realities of today’s mobile user, should also enable the operator’s users to add, delete and change the initial extensions selected by their operator, as often as they want, from a curated list of contextual and social extensions made by third-party developers. Operators who’ve watched their mobile browsers morph from captive, “walled garden” WAP experiences to today’s wide-open generic browsing landscape now have the opportunity to claw back some of that heretofore lost real estate – all while providing users with a configurable and unobtrusive experience.
A key to a positive mobile browsing experience is allowing users to control their own extensions, up to and including being able to go into their browser settings and turn the entire framework off if it’s not to their liking. Consumers will reject any solution that smacks of “bloatware,” so it’s important that mobile browser extensions on operator-provided browsers are nearly universally perceived as additive, and ultimately as an essential and “how-did-I-ever-browse-without-this” part of the mobile Web experience. Mobile browser extensions are a logical answer to the many questions raised by the rapid adoption and usage of the mobile Web. It’s high time that the consumer browsing experience became elegantly aligned with the unique interests of the individuals who are using it.
