There’s a lot of things to consider when thinking about the mobile experience of your digital ecosystem. Screens smaller and use different aspect ratios. User behavior (and patience) is different across devices. And the smaller, more personalized devices (specifically mobile phones) can have different functionality as larger devices that are often shared between users.

Currently, my team and I are working on a pitch for a potential project with a well-known organization. While pitches are all different usually when working with a membership organizations the process includes the following steps:

1. A formal RFP
2. A round of questions about the RFP
3. A formal proposal
4. A formal pitch between the top few contenders

Personally, I enjoy the process. It’s interesting to look inside organizations that you normally wouldn’t know anything about. You get to interact with passionate people who want to evolve and push their organization forward. The thing that I like most about these pitches is they allow me to try to solve real problems in real organizations, with real people. During the process, I often ask questions about publishing strategy and process, content strategy across platforms, and information about usage across devices and from various platforms. Sometimes organizations will share their data (usually pretty generic or anecdotal) other times they won’t.

The pitch my team and I are working on right now, the organization did share their device numbers. Over the last year, they had more than 50% of traffic from mobile. This represented a double-digit percentage increase year over year (YOY). I found this interesting, but not surprising. It’s a trend I’ve seen time and time again across industries, even when the current digital ecosystem is not nearly optimized for mobile.

Our personal devices

Mobile devices are personal. Think about it, when your friend, significant other, stranger, etc.asks to borrow your phone there’s usually a second where you hesitate before handing over it over. It’s not because there are secrets on there, well maybe there are, but our phones represent a personal device. They have all of the information about our lives, from our contacts to our social media to our photos to our locations and everything between.

Phones are often thought of as an extension of ourselves. They are small devices that are usually with us and allows us to do the majority of things that we do. Mobile phones have made their way into our lives and became that personal device. That means that in general users are more likely to embrace personalized experience on our phones. If we subscribe to this philosophy, then it makes sense that mobile phone usage is growing across all organizations, especially those organizations that are membership based.

As trends show digital users desire a more personalized experience with the brands/organizations, it makes sense to ensure that their personalized devices are a great place to start.

All AMPed up

There are multiple solutions to consider when thinking about the best approach to optimizing digital experiences for users. Google AMP (Accelerate Mobile Pages) is a great place to start. This is a program that Google rolled out in 2016 as a response to Facebook’s instant articles. Originally for news content AMP pages have expanded and will continue to expand. The AMP concept is simple. Mobile users don’t wait for content to load, so these pages load extremely fast. To accomplish this, these pages are simplified. They often give up some of the complexity and functionality to display the content quickly.

While the AMP program is still evolving, it has seen adoption and good results. With the recent launch of the official WordPress plugin, I believe the adoption of AMP will continue to grow. Here’s a great breakout of AMP to help you decide it’s the right approach for you.

Google AMP is one approach to improving the mobile experience when it comes to speed. These pages target users coming from search and can provide an overall boost in the number of users who can consume your digital content. With all things there is a give and take, but AMP is definitely something to consider.