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Going mobile? Smart decision. Analysts keep saying that companies expect a huge increase in mobile interactions with their customers over the next few years. But designing for mobile isn’t like designing for today’s website. Here are just a few tips to save your on-the-go users endless downloads, needless frustration–and to keep them coming back for more.

Think Simple Yet Engaging
I mean, really simple. Remember your users are dealing with those confounded mobile device interfaces on top of your mobile website interface. Most devices can’t handle large downloads, either. So use simple layouts with very concise yet very clear navigation, optimized images and video, brief text, and limited options.

Choose & Prioritize Your Content Wisely
You can’t gear all of your content for mobile, so select your mobile content strategically. Google categorizes mobile users into three behavior types:

• Repetitive now (e.g. checking stock quotes, sports scores, etc. regularly)
• Urgent now (e.g. looking up directions to an airport)
• Bored now (e.g. playing games or reading entertainment headlines to kill time).

Identifying content that supports those three behaviors is a good start toward a mobile communication and content strategy.

Keep Consistency with Your Regular Website
Even tiny mobile screens have room for look and feel. Tie in the look and feel of your main website with your mobile site so users know they’re in the right place and attribute their positive mobile experience to your brand.

Redirect Mobile Traffic to Your Mobile Site & Promote Your Mobile Site
Unfortunately, you probably won’t work out a deal with wireless carriers such as Verizon and AT&T to include your link as a default destination in their mobile web browsers. So your users will use their mobile device to visit your main website (the one they see on their PC). Fortunately, you can save them the pain of downloading your huge home page to their tiny screen. Technology can detect whether users are visiting your main website through a mobile device and automatically send them to your mobile site.

To draw in users who are unaware you have a mobile presence, promote your mobile site vigorously, especially on your regular website. Some nice examples include CNN.com and Delta.com.

Many user experience professionals shy away from marketing. In many ways, who can blame them? We’ve observed customers ignore banner ads, watched pop-up ads annoy and confuse customers, and read rants by usability pioneers about the evil that ads wield on web design. We have seen attempts at applying a traditional “broadcast” model of marketing fail in interactive mediums.

But good marketing is more than ads—a whole lot more. Several concepts in marketing jive quite well with user experience.

Integrated Marketing Communications

Relationship Marketing

Customer Relationship Management

The Good: The Communication Experience Is the Marketing
By emphasizing consistency, customization, and credibility, these concepts echo a few characteristics of what I’ve described as customer-centered communication.

These concepts additionally

• Lead us to view a customer’s interaction with a brand holistically instead of isolated in certain channels.
• Challenge us to effectively apply customer data such as demographics and buying history to improve communications.
• Encourage us to think about building long-term relationships with customers.

The Potentially Bad: User Experience Opportunities
The potentially bad side of these concepts is, of course, their execution. (Remember those banner ads.) Here are a few ways user experience professionals can help avoid the bad.

Don’t Interrupt Me: Placement and Content
Because user experience professionals understand how and why customers actually use the channels, we know when and where marketing communication is most appropriate. We also can inform its content.

Example: A well-placed, relevant, and undisruptive BP banner ad on CNN.com that engaged even a skeptic like me. It shares a similar topic with the article, visually stands out on the simple page, and expands instead of taking the user away from the page.

Don’t Just Tell Me—Show Me
Telling is reporting that you hiked 25 miles on the Appalachian Trail last weekend. Showing is describing the weather, the scenery, the sounds, the animals you encountered, the soreness in your muscles. Telling makes you aware of what happened. Showing engages you in the experience. I think showing is critical to making brand attributes clear and to developing trusting, long-term relationships with customers. User experience professionals can help brands “show” in interactive mediums.

Example: Betty Crocker has been demonstrating brand attributes such as practical, friendly cooking expertise since the 1920s through recipes, cooking tips, cooking shows, promotions for discounted cookware, and more. (Below is a 1951 print ad with tips and a recipe.) These efforts continue successfully today on the Betty Crocker website and its RSS feeds.

Help Me Help Myself: Applying Customer Data
User experience professionals can make the most of customer data across customer self-service channels and applications such as store kiosks, web applications, automated phone systems, and more. We know how to leverage that data to make self-service customized and therefore more valuable and easier to use.

Quiet the Noise: Optimizing for Specific Channels
Of course, we can make marketing communications highly usable and accessible in specific channels.

It was the best of times; it was the worst of hairstyles. It was the age of cornrows and bows; it was the age of perms and braces. It was the epoch of skater dudes; it was the epoch of tennis queens. It was, in fact, 1989 at Midlothian High School—go Trojans!

You see, Creative Director Wade Forst (proudly sporting the Bo Derek do in his senior tux) and I just discovered we share more than a perfect 10 employer. We also share the same home town—the village (yes, village) of Midlothian, VA. We even shared the same neighborhood for a few years…and the same street…and the same crib. (Well, I used it 3 years after he did).

The Disney ride is right. It’s a small world after all. And, thanks to the web, it’s all the smaller. With just a few searches and clicks, we discovered even Midlothian has quite the online presence:

• The Midlothian Alumni page on Facebook.com: More than 300 members.
• Midlothian High School website: Check out those pep rally pics—the Trojan spirit lives!
• Midlothian, VA on Wikipedia: Claims to fame include coal mining and Aimee Mann.
• Village of Midlothian: It really is a village!
• Ukrop’s: Hands-down the best grocery store in the universe.
• Crab Louie’s: Yummy seafood in a historic tavern.

Big oops! Melissa Read, Ph.D. and I talked today about the 300-page iPhone bill a blogger received and then shared with the world to encourage e-billing. As a former Cingular employee, I cringed to hear this story–and not just for environmental reasons. Receiving a 300-page bill not only kills a lot of trees, it kills the customer experience.

I hope this publicity doesn’t overshadow Cingular/AT&Ts other industry-leading efforts to provide outstanding customer care. When I worked for Cingular, I led a revamp of the online and in-store welcome experience, especially the Cingular Service Summary and welcome collateral for all customers. Changes to the bill itself may be in order, too.

Even without a major redesign of the bill itself, AT&T could address this issue a few ways. Most people are interested in bill details only when there is a problem–not all the time. Some thoughts…

• Clarify messaging to new customers about their bill format.
• Make the default billing setting for customers online, with the option to change to print.
• For print bill recipients
• Make the default setting a summary, with the option for detailed billing or an occasional request for a detailed hard copy.
• Communicate to customers that bill details are always available online, and make details easy to find.
• If a detailed billing customer’s bill is going to exceed a certain page number, then notify the customer with an option to receive it by e-mail or online instead.
• Consider providing print details only for charges that exceed the customer’s normal amount. For instance, detail only the text messages exceeding the plan’s included number.

Okay, maybe communication never truly left … but our awareness of it has grown keen as we shape effective customer experiences in interactive media. Recently, Donovan (Director of User Experience) gave a presentation about web 2.0’s impact on the landscape of user (customer) experience. He convincingly described how web 2.0 capabilities evolved as a response to user needs and allow the web to become, among other things, the communication medium people envisioned 10 years ago.

In this changed landscape of customer experience, what is communication exactly? How do we ensure customers not only get our messages but also find them relevant and convincing? How do we coordinate messages across multiple channels to deepen our relationships with customers?

As a start toward answering such questions, I just published “Rediscovering Communication” for the online magazine UXmatters. Please add your insights as we journey through this exciting landscape together.