When I think about eToro’s most important goals in 2013, one thing is clear: Our user experience must be optimized for mobile users.
We should assume that the most frequent interaction with our products are through mobile devices, and we must make sure our mobile products are better than our web products.
It was recently announced that more than 50% of Facebook engagement is on Mobile. We expect this number to grow in 2013. There are significantly more phones than computers, and they are all gradually becoming as smart as your computer.
What does focusing on Mobile mean? It means taking your best people and making them work only on mobile. It means designing your products and your new features for mobile first. It means demanding that ALL your products work on mobile or let them go. It means checking whether your business model is different for mobile. And if it is, change it. It means rethinking about distribution, if online advertising to mobile advertising is not trivial, offline and B2B distribution and mobile play is a completely different ball game. It means understanding it’s a decision, and might be a long and expensive process, but also a necessary one.
In most industries, the shift to mobile is a paradigm shift: it changes how audiences behave. eToro’s mobile users are not the same as our web users. They log in as much as 10 times more, on average more than 5 times a day.
To illustrate this shift in approach to user experience, I look at my 2 year old son. The interaction he has with his iPad (and my phone) shows the shift in where the attention needs to be. My son knew how to use YouTube when he was 1 year old, and in the last year learned very basic English and math using his iPad.
If you are creating content for kids, you need to realize that a huge audience of kids from 1-5 suddenly can consume content on their own. It is a new paradigm, your audience which was once captive of cable networks, is now free to download any app or video over the internet. This will bring about a new business model, more direct and with fewer intermediaries.
Mobile is a new (ish) paradigm shift. It has the potential to bring a new, ever-connected audience to every business model.
A great way to test if your business is already “mobile first” is using two simple KPIs :
- Are at least 50% of your active users on Mobile ?
- Do you attribute at least 50% of your revenue to Mobile ?
We always quote the famous “innovate or die”: In 2013, its time to realize “Mobile first or die”.