From the category archives:

User Interface

The .Mobi Craze: Not A Craze At All

by Mitch on April 8, 2008

Yesterday, a dealer asked me what my thoughts were on buying up .mobi domains for his rooftops. First of all, I’m just happy to know that someone in the auto industry actually knows what a .mobi domain is… we’re making progress folks, slow but steady.

But seriously, don’t buy into this .mobi crap.

I don’t know if it was initially intended to be a scam, as technology trends tend to make fools of many a forward-thinker… but a scam is definitely what it has become. For those of you unfamiliar with the .mobi concept, it’s a new-ish domain extension (like .com, .net, .org) that requires the developers of the domain’s website to create mobile device-friendly content. If you’ve never checked out a typical website on a mobile device, trust me - it’s a mess. To appeal to current mobile device users, you have to minimize the quantity of your content and re-organize it so that its’ easier to browse from such limited devices. So the idea of .mobi is that if you wanted to surf BMW.com, but were on your cellphone or Blackberry, you’d just instinctively go to BMW.mobi instead and the content would be appropriately organized. From a layman’s point of view, this sounds like a great idea. But then, a lot of scams sound like great ideas to laymen… that’s how scams work.

So, why is .mobi not the wave of the future?

#1: Your current site is just as capable of being mobile-fied. The .mobi domain doesn’t actually do anything to make your site mobile-friendly or mobile-exclusive… it’s just understood that a .mobi site will look correct in a mobile browser, which is your responsibility as the site owner to ensure. And how do you design a site for mobile devices? With a combination of HTML and CSS, the two primary coding languages responsible for all the websites you normally view. So what, you say? Well, there’s one important stipulation in CSS that needs to be mentioned: you can use CSS to deliver a different layout and organization of content automatically to mobile device users. CSS will sniff out whether or not the user is on a computer or mobile device, and if you’ve designed a CSS stylesheet for mobile devices, that’s the one a mobile device will see. So if you want to go to BMW.com, and you’re on a mobile device, you go to… BMW.com. The site will know you’re on your phone, and deliver you a page that looks something like this (ironically, BMW’s .mobi site). Obviously the big benefit here is that people already know your .com name… why would you risk a leak in traffic by forcing them to acknowledge another site? Just let them come to the page they always come to and deliver it differently.

#2. Technology has already leapfrogged the mobile stylesheet concept. From the BMW.mobi example, you can see what sites look like when the developers cater to mobile device browsers and build a mobile-specific CSS stylesheet. Small, bare, and unimpressive. With the larger screens available on newer mobile devices and faster data connections being generated, wouldn’t it be great if phones actually showed you the real Internet instead of this tiny mobile stuff? Rejoice, my friends: it already happened. The Apple iPhone uses the Mac’s native Safari browser, and does not declare itself as a mobile device to the websites it surfs, but rather, as a typical desktop computer. So considering my previous point, you actually don’t have to do anything to your site in order for an iPhone user to experience it properly… meaning again that if you wanted to go to BMW.com on your phone, you just go to BMW.com. Except on the iPhone, instead of the mobile version of BMW.com, you’d actually get the BMW.com you’re used to seeing. And make no mistake - the iPhone has been responsible for preposterously high levels of Internet usage amongst mobile devices since its inception, and that’s not going to end. Eventually, all the popular Blackberry/PDA-type devices will make the same transition, and we’ll have little concern for this whole mobile-specific issue.

So there you go: short term solution, tweak your own website… long term solution, it’ll work itself out. The only issue with my points made here - from an automotive retail perspective - is that most of the dealer website vendors build horrific websites that don’t stand a chance in hell of being tweaked to fit a mobile stylesheet. Plus, half of the vendors wouldn’t know CSS if it hit them in the face. So if you were to approach your vendor about creating a mobile stylesheet, you may very well be met with a lot of resistance. But it’s like I always say - these companies serve you, not the other way around. If you don’t like the answer you hear from your vendor when you ask them about a mobile stylesheet or mobile version of your dealer site, pack up your contract and move to a website developer that actually knows what they’re doing.

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Talk About Bad Form… Reynolds & Reynolds Dealer Sites

by Mitch on March 4, 2008

As a Consultant, it’s part of my initial review to submit a few test leads through a dealer’s web site. Obviously, the goal is to see how the lead is handled once it hits the sales staff… but when a dealer’s site fails to even generate the lead, you really have to ask yourself what’s going on there.

To find examples of such an issue, just look up your closest dealer pushing a Reynolds & Reynolds dealer web site. The contact forms on R&R sites are - and have always been - the worst in the industry. How any dealer could put up with such trash is truly perplexing to me.

Honestly, if a Consultant gets turned off in the midst of trying to submit a test lead, what kind of behavior would you expect from customers? It’s only through past trial and error that I now know how to “properly” submit a Service request on a Reynolds & Reynolds dealer site, and no matter what department you’re requesting information from, the forms look like they were created by an entire legal team (not so much a crack legal team as a legal team on crack).

Let’s take a look at a Tarrytown NY Honda dealer example so we can really dive into this torture.

Tarrytown Honda Bad Service Form

For starters, this form showcases one of Reynolds’ signature marks: grouped data passing below the fold. For more than a decade now, web designers have followed the mantra of placing important user interface items within the top half of the page, so that the site does not have to rely on a user’s interest level being high enough that they would scroll down for more information. We’re talking about homepage articles and ads here, not forms. To think that a simple request form would take up 600+ pixels of vertical space is preposterous… you’re begging your customers to lose interest in such a long and tedious-looking form.

And what makes Reynolds & Reynolds’ forms so long? The fact that they want users to submit all kinds of useless information. This is the kind of form that would be designed by a Sales Manager. “Oh yeah, I want their home address too. That would be good.” You don’t create user interfaces based on what you want from the user - you create them by walking the fine line between what you require to work the lead and what a user will stand to submit without hesitation. Asking Service customers for their home address in an appointment form is pointless for many reasons, the biggest being that Service leads almost always result in a successful appointment, at which time you’ll have plenty of opportunities to get their address information.

But these two gripes are just the appetizers, and to be fair, there are a few web vendors who suffer from both of these deficiencies. But I promise, this next bit is signature Reynolds.

See those two errors that occured? The first one’s for mileage. “Please Enter A Valid Mileage”. Well, my speedometer says 28,000, and that’s what I wrote… seems pretty valid to me. I guess it’s too much to ask for Reynolds to put a specific error message adjacent to that field which states, “Only numbers are allowed.” If they did that, it would be easier for the user to recognize that a comma dividing the thousands is an illegal character. Not that any mileage form should be that strict, but at least tell the user what they did wrong.

The second error is for an invalid appointment date. Really? I suppose it’s quite likely that my appointment would be invalid, considering the fact that nothing in the form tells me what days the dealership is open, what the department hours are, or what kind of format I’m supposed to use for the date (I’ll tell you: it’s 01/01/2001, and nothing else will suffice). Let me tell you something Rey Rey: you won’t be building web sites long enough for “08″ to roll around the next time, so a four-digit year is not something you should be concerned about. There are other form fields in the HTML language besides “input”… give them a try some time if you’re going to be that anal retentive about formats.

Forcing your customers to utilize these contact forms is classic shoot-yourself-in-the-foot business as far as I can see. It’s like spending $50k in advertising to get customers to your lot, and then when they get there, telling them they have to go in through the A/C duct instead of the main doors.

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