Understanding the Customer Journey: Enova’s Device Lab

By: Ashley Cafaro, Digital Designer, and
Stuart Hopkins, Front End Developer

There are seven billion mobile devices on earth. That’s almost one mobile device for every single person on the planet. And though final estimates are pending due to a lack of penetration in key areas, it seems that while telephones took somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 years to become mainstream, it took smartphones just four!

This en masse adoption of new technology has online service providers scrambling to provide customers with the best possible mobile experience — a larger task than simply miniaturizing a website.

As Enova saw its mobile traffic continue to increase at a rapid rate, it became clear that we needed to get a better understanding of how our websites actually rendered. Website emulators — programs that simulate the way your website will appear on a mobile device — can help to a certain point, but the best way to proof your work is to view it on the actual device. So where do you start in a world that has 7 billion mobile devices?

We used Google analytics to research the top devices customers used to view our websites. We then combined the data into an overall top ten list for each of our brands, before finally purchasing each device. Overall the top devices are as follows:

Once the devices had been purchased and the device lab assembled, it was a matter of creating a page where designers and developers could post the pages they wanted to test and then access them on each device. After logging in to a dedicated device lab page on your own computer, you can enter the URL of the page you want to test, and access the page on each of the devices. This system has been created with a focus on simplicity, and allows each tester to access the test pages without entering any URLs on each device.

Overall, the device lab has had 480+ entries on 11 different devices. Assuming it takes around 30 seconds to enter a URL, we’ve already saved ourselves 44 hours of work!

But ultimately the device lab is about improving the customer experience, and so far it has been a massive success. Our criteria for checking each page consists of the following:

• Is the page/email responsive?
• Is the text large enough?
• Do all the links work properly?
• Are the images scaling properly?
• Are all legal requirements displayed and placed correctly?
• Is there a clear call to action to view before scrolling down on the page?

By implementing the device lab, we have streamlined our process in a variety of ways and improved the user experience across all our brands on myriad devices. Thanks to the ways the lab has simplified our process, we’ve seen an increase in clicks, average visit duration and even an improved deliverability rate on our emails.

REFERENCES:

Dorrier, J. (Feb 18, 2014). There are 7 billion mobile devices on earth, almost one for each person. Retrieved Jan 28, 2014 from http://singularityhub.com/2014/02/18/there-are-7-billion-mobile-devices-on-earth-almost-one-for-each-person/