During the “Developing The Tablet’s Identity: How to Differentiate Your Tablet Experience From Your Mobile Experience” panel, executives from Edmunds.com and a former employee from Totes Isotoner Corporation spoke about how tablets and smartphones need to be approached from different angles. The session was moderated by Amy Romagnoli, head of mobile commerce business at Barclaycard, Wilmington, DE.

“We’ve seen some publishers and destinations hit that 50 percent mark — we’re not there but I would estimate that we’re going to get there in 2013,” said Stephen Gandee, vice president of mobile and emerging technologies at Edmunds.com, Santa Monica, CA.

Mobile cars
Edmunds.com gets 17 million unique visitors per month, with 30 percent coming from mobile devices.

The company’s mobile site brings in two million unique visitors per month. Although there are a smaller number of app users, the number of page views are equal across both platforms.

Per the executive, one-tenth of the company’s app users are consuming the same number of page views that mobile Web users access.

People tend to spend more time on tablets versus smartphones because of the better browsing experiences. Additionally, there is more engagement with app users.

“You have to go through the effort in downloading an app,” Mr. Gandee said.

“You either stumble upon it or someone marketed it and told you about it, so it is somewhat logical that they will get higher engagement, but it is something to think about as you’re looking at KPIs and success metrics.”

Couch surfers
When designing for tablets, it is important to keep context in mind. For example, the device tends to be primarily used at home and should include touch-sensitive features that take advantage of the size of the device.

“You need a clear strategy on what your product is going to do for your customers and how are you going to get better,” Mr. Gandee said.

To tailor experiences, it is important to think about the unique capabilities of each device.

To combat this issue, marketers are increasingly looking at responsive design as a catch-all. However, some believe that responsive design also presents numerous problems, such as site load speed.

“When you get into responsive design, you add a whole bunch of latency onto the loading of the page –that is why you have to use responsive design responsibly,” said Chris Reighley, former director of ecommerce at Totes Isotoner Corporation, Cincinnati, OH.

Final Take
Lauren Johnson is associate reporter on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York