Data Roaming: size matters!
Every byte counts when your customer pays for reaching your website
While attending London Online conference, I felt so proud of working as web professional in the European Commission. Why? Let me explain.
This slide down here illustrates average cost to do a single visit (one page) of the listed websites via a UK mobile operator outside EU, price per Mb is up to 6 £/minute.
The amount is influenced by two factors:
1. Roaming charges
2. The size of pages [for mobile usage].
Factor 1. is the source of my pride as civil servant: within the EU we are helping cutting down one of the multiplying factor impacting customers data bills: roaming data tariff have price caps. This will stimulate more traffic to web addicts in mobility around EU.
However, this is still a reality around the world as this slide shows.
Factor 2. interests me as web professional. It tells how much we need to work on responsive and adaptive design, content filtering and copyrighting to support our users when browsing our sites in mobility or they will not visit us anymore (already 15% of our visitors are mobile and increasing, Average Europa site is at 5%).
- Responsive Pages means not just re-sizing and moving blocks of information, but also adapt fonts, menus, avoiding “pinch to zoom” to the maximum. Cut unnecessary items on a finger-based navigation.
- Adaptive: we will not replicate the desktop version, but only push critical information cutting down pictures [size], boxes and so forth.
- Content creation: Less is more. Users nowadays have very little time to read, especially mobile users. So stick to the essential facts! Baroque writing is outcast. Also your desktop version will benefit from it. (read also The Hindenburg and the web)
User will be grateful and come back.
A final consideration on the disparity of figures in the slide: It is mostly due to the business behind the site. If we are Apple, Pintrest… we sell images, brand, dreams and after that a product that is tangible.
This often need images and quite some tooling, which is heavy in Mb. Not all of this is easy to compress in a mobile version (apps can be a partial solution).
On the other hand, if we are Reuters, BBC, Google News, which products are (mostly, but less and less) facts, words, bla bla … aka text; which is very light in data transfer. (And apps can make it even lighter as you just transfer the articles)
Bottom line: it doesn't matter what business you are in, you must favor your customer visiting your website from everywhere.
Did you already checked how much your pages cost to your visitors?
After all, size matter. This time small is better though ;)
Did you liked this story? I look forward your comments, tips, suggestions, tweets (@fabiozib), linked readings, feedback… any sign of life ;)
I will do my best to reply to everyone.
