smartphones

How People Use Smartphones

by David Lee King on February 20, 2013

My library’s Web Developer, Nathan Pauley, emailed this infographic to me, and it’s really cool! They studied smartphone use (or more accurately, it looks like they studied web and app use on smartphones, since they excluded email, sms messages, and voice calls from their infographic).

I’ve not clicked through to pay for the whole study, but this single page provides plenty of food for fodder:

  • 68% of smartphone use happens at home.
  • Love the different labels for stuff people do on their smartphones, like self-expression.

Two weird things:

  1. Self-expression – I guess this is where you’d put content creation? Posting to Tumblr or Instagram, for example? How do they tell the difference between a Facebook post that’s self-expression (writing a haiku, for example) vs a Facebook post that’s socializing?
  2. Socializing – why didn’t they just include email, sms messages, and normal voice phone stuff here?

Either way, take a peek, access the study (if it’s not too much – I haven’t clicked through), and give it some thought.

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Smartphones, Libraries, and your website

by David Lee King on April 5, 2012

I was just looking at March 2012 statistics on my library’s website. Here’s what I saw:

  • 39,161 visits to our website in March
  • 3486 visits via a mobile device.
  • that means slightly more than 11% visited via a mobile device
  • Those devices? Mainly iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches – 57.89%
  • That fits with the web browsers that visited our site – 14.11% were Safari (think ithingies here)

Now look at Pew’s newest Smartphone Update, released on March 1: 46% of American adults are smartphone owners as of Feb 2012. There was an increase of 11% in just 9 months.

And check this out – it’s not just wealthy people getting smartphones:

“Nearly every major demographic group—men and women, younger and middle-aged adults, urban and rural residents, the wealthy and the less well-off—experienced a notable uptick in smartphone penetration over the last year. Overall adoption levels are at 60% or more within several cohorts, such as college graduates, 18-35 year olds and those with an annual household income of $75,000 or more.”

So my question to you: are you designing for mobile? A mobile app, or a mobile website?

If you haven’t yet started building with mobile in mind, now is definitely the time to start – you are very close to alienating almost half your customers. They are interacting with their favorite sites online using their smartphone (think Facebook, Amazon, Youtube, etc.).

Wanna be one of those favorite sites too? Then you had better get that mobile site up and running FAST.

smartphone photo by Bigstock

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