Last week at the mCommerce Summit in New York there were quite a few interesting speakers (including yours truly). One of the best speakers was Steve Yankovich, vice president of eBay Mobile.

Steve had great insight (backed by rigorous primary research) into the difference in usage between an iPad browsing experience (lean-back) and a PC browsing experience (lean forward).

Lean-forward

A PC is a lean forward experience. He also called this the “research” mode. You get on your PC when you’ve got real work to do, e.g. real shopping, real research, paying a bill, etc.

Lean-back

An iPad on the other hand is a lean back experience (the lean back on the sofa device). He called this the “don’t make me work” mode. You’re sitting back, probably with a cocktail, and your expectation is to be entertained. “Entertain me!”. He actually quipped that after 8pm at night when a lot people have had a few drinks their checkout conversion rates sky rocket and suggested that if anybody had any ideas how to get somebody to drink more before using their app to contact him

The eBay experiences built on the PC vs iPad app are very different. An eBay iPad app is large-print, surf-oriented, entertainment-oriented experiences. As if to drive the point home he highlighted that if you visit eBay.com on the iPad you are taken to the PC version of the site. The bounce rate (the number of people who leave the page straight away) is 5x higher on an iPad. His rationale for this is that even though the iPad has great screen resolution, the user’s lean-back expectation says that if you make me pinch and zoom to do anything I’m outta here.

Great stuff that will make me think twice before redirecting iPad users to a regular website ever again.

Patrick at 5thfinger.com