A few weeks ago I listened to a very interesting presentation/marketing session by Mattias Beijmo about strategy for the web. It was especially one example ge gavethat has been stuck on my mind since then.

If you go to a car dealer to look for new tires, you would be quite upset if you were met by a salesman who held up sign and shouted “BUY THIS NEW CAR”. You would not consider that a very pleasant experience. Still, when browsing the web this is often what happens a lot too us. Entering the front page of a website we are meet with the best deal that company have regardless if we are looking for it or not.

This changed a lot of my thinking with my current project and we will do things a lot differently from now on. And I’m finding this “behavior” in more web situations. I’ve been using my iPad a lot lately and in my last post you could read a bit about the worst user experiences you can have when companies do not have a tablet strategy. One thing that is really beginning to bother me is the pop-ups for app downloads which more and more websited have. This message pops-up when you are browsing to their site:

“Do you want to download our app? Cancel/Yes”

We get this message before we even enter a site and regardless on why we got there, adding to that most apps do not have the information that we are looking for when we arrive to a website which means that I had to go through the process of downloading an app that did not have the info I was looking for. Therefore I have to go back to the website, to once again get the same pop-up, decline it and start browsing the non-mobile adapted site for the info I was looking for. Quite an unsettling experience, especially if the app I downloaded was marketed on the iPad but not even adapted for it.

Key take-away: If you do not want to develop a mobile adapted website, only suggest app downloads in the cases you know that your app contains what the visitor is looking for.