How To - Best Way To Reach Multi-Screen Users

Episode 11
What’s the Best Way to Reach Multi-Screen Users
Hello and welcome to episode 11 of the .
I’m owner and founder of , a Digital Media Branding Company in the upper Midwest.
So, what is the best way to reach multi-screen users assuming that our goal is to increase engagement with your brand’s products, content or information?
There are several options out there for you to deliver your web content to multi-screen users. Picking the right path to take however may not be intuitively obvious.
Let’s start by clarifying the terms multi-screen users.
When we talk about multi-screen users we are referring to all of us who more and more access the web from our smartphones or tablet devices.
This of course would not mean that we’ve abandoned our computers but rather that we fall into today’s norm which is using multiple devices or screen sizes to consume content.
Personally, I can think of at least one time this week where I watched a video on my phone and viewed it again later while I was at my office.
In episode 10 of the , I referenced a recent study called the Multi-Screen World.
There were two important points in this study. There were probably more than two, but two for sure that stood out to me.
The first point – People are connected all the time, particularly when they are sitting down to watch television.
It’s common practice for both my wife and I to bring out iPads over to the couch as we sit down to watch a show.
The second point – 90% of people move between devices to accomplish a single task.
Again, I can relate to this because I almost always check my email while waiting for my coffee at the drive thru. 
OK – I want you to think about this for a moment.
When you visit a website from a large company like say MSN, BestBuy or ; is your experience the same on your desktop as it is on your smartphone or tablet?
Hopefully the answer is Yes.
While how you interact with the content may be different based on the screen size, your experience with that brand should be what you’d expect which is to get to the content or information that you were after. This then creates the experience that will hopefully get you to want to come back and interact with that brand again.
The main emphasis here is the engagement. Some of these companies understand the need to increase the engagement and have tailored their interactive platforms to give their customers the experience they expect when accessing from various devices. 
At we call the tailored engagement experience – Building An .
So let’s assume that you are ready take your interactive platform to multi-screen users.
What are your options?
How do you get started?
How do you get the most bang-for-your-buck when you move forward with this type of strategy?
We’ll cover all of this and more, next.
There are three different approaches toward delivering your content to the multi-screen user. We’ll be covering each here shortly.
It is important that you know and understand that each business may have their own very specific reasons as to why they preferred one to another. In other words, there is no single cookie-cutter type of solution that will fit all businesses.
My goal here is to give you enough information to allow you to be successful regardless of which solution you’ve selected for your business.
So keep this in mind, they key to your success here will be in your ability to tailor the user experience across devices in a way that addresses the customer needs.
We covered how to determine what that customer need is by device in the Episode 10.
If you missed it, it will be worth your time to go through it, as the information we covered in episode 10 will help you establish your foundation for this type of project.
Ok, so now lets go over the three different approaches toward delivering your content to multi-screen users.
The first approach we’ll discuss is .
What is ?
Responsive allows you to optimize your site’s experience based on screen-size without the need to create multiple websites.
So a responsive website will adjust the size of your images, content layout and content visibility based on the size of screen you are using to access the site.
It is worth noting that it is not simply shrinking the size of your website. It is changing the way the content is being delivered in a way that will not affect the user experience.
What I mean by this is that if the site were simply shrinking, the text and buttons would then also shrink making it difficult for users to navigate through your site or read the text.
A Responsive Website will shrink the images to make sure they fit, but it will adjust the size of the text so that you can still read it and change the buttons so that you can use them on say a smartphone.
Responsive sites are also able to use gestures to navigate through the site. Gestures are the way that you currently use the native apps on your smartphone like dragging, swiping and so on.
Other advantage to a Responsive site include:
Having a single website to maintain.
Having a single URL for any one particular piece of content, this is important because it makes it easier for users to interact, share and link to your content. 
And, with a single website, there is no need to redirect to a mobile version of your site or have the need to promote sub-domains or other directories. This in some cases will help reduce load time.
So far it sounds like moving forward with a responsive website is the way to go, right?
For many companies it will be the better option but in order to create a great experience around your Responsive site’s content you will need to have device specific strategies.  This means that you will need to design your web content with your end user in mind. More specifically design the content in a way that will allow the smartphone user to interact with your site in a way that will allow him/her get to what they need or want quickly. Then do the same for the tablet user, the desktop user and the smart TV user.
What on earth does all of that mean?
In my day-to-day job I get to see all types of companies and a lot of them are jumping in to responsive websites without thinking it through.
What I am saying here is that for me as a user, it is annoying to visit a responsive website from my phone where the whole screen is covered by navigation buttons and in some cases it may take two full swipes to get to the site’s content.
So the more you make your user work to get to your content the less likely they will recommend it or enjoy the experience.
In the navigation example, thinking it through would have allowed for the navigation to turn into a drop-down type of list consuming one row of content rather than making the user swipe…
So keep that in mind as you select who will be and how that may work against your goals.
The second approach toward delivering your content to the multi-screen user is to dynamically serve different HTML on the same URL.
So your website would have to be programmed to automatically detect what type of device was accessing it and present a custom page, based on that specific device, on the same web address a.k.a. URL.
It is possible to design these types of pages for any kind of device – mobile phones, tablets, desktop computers and even smart TVs.
This type of solution is probably best suited for companies who have a technical resource on hand or maybe some type of retained services agreement with a digital media company because the customized style sheets have to be maintained on a per-device basis.
The big advantage however is the ability to specifically target the device and deliver the specific content they expect wrapped around a completely tailored experience for that type of user. 
The third approach toward delivering your content to the multi-screen user is to simply separate the mobile URLs a.k.a. web addresses.
You may have noticed that there are some companies that use .MOBI instead of .COM or others that use subdomains like m.mediaonq.com or mobile.mediaonq.com. And then there are others who use directories to deliver their mobile content. An example would be /mobile.
With these types of options you would then build a separate site for your mobile traffic. This second site would be completely independent of your original desktop version of your website.
The way it works is that a small piece of code is added to the site’s home page which allows the web browser – IE, Safari, Firefox, Chrome or whatever browser you are using to automatically detect if the user is on a mobile device and then automatically redirects them to the mobile optimized version of your website.
A dedicated mobile version of your site allows you to tailor the mobile user experience making it a popular preference for many companies.
One of the most popular mobile frameworks is jQueryMobile – this frameworks allows you to build mobile websites that act and respond like native apps on mobile devices. jQueryMobile offers a wide variety of powerful option that allow you to tap into the smartphone resources like the photo, map and microphone options.
So if you need or want that extra functionality of say directions to your location directly from your mobile website, this is your best option.
So now that we have a better understanding of why it is important to target the multi-screen user and what our options are to deliver our content to them let’s discuss some real-world examples of the adaptive user experience.
This new, well sort of new multi-screen user has changed the way businesses need to look at their interactive platform.
Today’s users visit websites on a variety of devices so we need to think about the layout, visibility and context related content in a way that will allow us to adapt to our customers.
We need to deliver the right experience based on their device or screen size in order to generate engagement with our brand’s content, product or information.
Let’s go over a few examples of great, multi-screen user experiences.
We’ll start with The Home Depot.
What does the Home Depot site do well?
A few things actually, the most obvious is the fact that their site is optimized for mobile.
They’ve also made their store locator option the priority.
They offer a consistent look and feel to their brand across all devices.
And it is easy to navigate across any screen size.
Let’s look at an ecommerce type of website, 1-800flowers.com.
They offer a mobile friendly checkout experience.
They’ve also included a click-to-call option from their smartphone layout version.
The content is laid out in a way that makes it easy to find a gift quickly.
The site’s navigation is also easy to use across all screen sizes.
And the last site we’ll discuss is Starbucks.com
This site also made the store locator the hero in their design.
Starbucks offers a terrific touch-friendly experience across all devices making it easy to navigate and get to what you want quickly and effortlessly.
I may be a little bias here but out of the three sites, their multi-device experience stood out for me.
What are your thoughts around the multi-screen user experience?
Do you have a multi-screen experience that you’d like to share?
How are businesses in your market adjusting to multi-screen user?
Please visit and share your thoughts.
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Join me next time where we’ll continue to explore the building blocks that support .
I’m , owner and founder of .

Thank you for listening.