infographic via hackcollege.com
I’ve been thinking a lot about mobile recently.
Maybe it was the redesign of nd.edu.
Maybe it was recent 2012 Notre Dame Mobile Summit.
But I think it’s more of the fact that I can’t be anywhere without my cell. Seriously, when it’s on the charger I’m lost. I don’t know what to do.
It’s my email – my constant connection to the office.
It’s my calendar – I don’t know where to go without it.
It’s my weatherman – Who watches TV for the weather, I have my own radar at wunderground.
It’s my tasks for the day – If I forget to put what I told you I would do into my phone, I might as well have lied to you that I would do it.
It’s my notes – Can’t live without evernote.
It’s my music – Pandora is my choice because I’m too lazy to do Spotify.
It’s my money – banking online is my choice. I don’t even remember the last time I had to purchase checks (do they expire?).
It’s my brain – google, wikipedia, npr, espy (which tells me how the Cards and Notre Dame are doing all the time).
It’s my entertainment – Just got Kick the Boss app.
It’s my social network – Facebook mobile sucks. Let’s hope they don’t ruin Instagram.
It’s my alarm clock – It wakes me up and I look at it. I set the alarm at night and look at it one last time.
It’s my connection – phone and text.
BTW, my phone just told me St. Louis is tied with the Cubbies and I have a meeting in 10 minutes and I got three Facebook notifications.
You may think that I’m highly connected. I don’t think I am. I’m an old guy here in the 21st century. I’ll bet our Notre Dame students are a lot more connected than I am and I’ll bet they use their phones more than I do.
Did you ever walk across campus and see them come out of buildings? It’s amazing that there isn’t more in-flight collisions as they all pull out their phones and see what has happened over the last hour. If they even put them away during class. Here’s a big info graphic on their use from hackcollege.com.
So how are you thinking of mobile when it comes to your communication strategy?
First and foremost, your website needs to be mobile friendly. This isn’t an option anymore. If you can’t use your website on a variety of mobile phones, you are going to be shutting out a much larger audience than in the past.
When we rebuilt nd.edu, the team went mobile first and used responsive design. Erik, Nick and Philip insisted on this and I believe everything they said was correct. And now other people are asking them how they did it – which is great, because they are all awesome.
If you need help here on campus to go mobile, come chat with us. We can figure something out for you. Every website in Conductor was built with mobile in mind – maybe not responsive but we did use a mobile stylesheet.
When it comes to print, you need to think mobile as well. I’m not saying you should use QR codes – personally, I’m still not a big fan. I don’t use them and I can’t imagine a lot of other people doing it as well.
But I do believe in short vanity URLs that people can remember or type quickly. If you are still using http://nd.edu/~anything you need to change that. You can change that by emailing me and I can get you a vanity.
Always be thinking of multiple screens – not just the desktop – and mobile first.
Good news: last month while at a local Social Media Club networking event, a Facebook staffer says the company has shifted their development strategy. Going forward, all new Facebook features will be built with mobile in mind, then tweaked/adapted for desktop.
This represents a 180-degree difference from their strategy up to this point. Score another one for mobile!
It’s quite eye opening how connected we are to our mobile devices. Last week, I met with Karan Singh, the co-founder of ginger.io. They are using passive monitoring of mobile phone data (with patient consent) and massive data analytics to identify patients that health care providers should check on – all based on MIT Media Lab research.
He shared some astounding research with me:
91% of people keep their phone within 3 feet of them, 24 hours per day.
It’s the most likely thing you look at before you go to sleep and when you wake up.
That’s from a Morgan Stanley research report.
How do I live without my mobile phone? lol
Great article – pretty interesting. I think it’s the social networks that keep people staring down at their phones so much nowadays… I’m always on them. Have you heard of http://www.Formvote.com myself? It’s a pretty great network.
good news for mobile users like me