Becker Professional Education - Mobile Web

Please access our "Do You Need a Mobile Website? - Development Best Practices" here (PDF download)

For more than 50 years, Becker Professional Education, a global leader in exam review and continuing education, has helped nearly half a million accounting, finance and project management professionals advance their careers and achieve success.

Opportunity

Becker Professional Education, a long time Duo client, saw the number visitors accessing their CPA website via mobile devices nearly quadruple from 2009 to 2010. Because of this dramatic jump they needed their website to be immediately accessible on mobile devices to make executing purchases easy. Urchin and Google Analytics tools showed the main pages visited on their site when mobile visitors made a purchase were pages for course descriptions and enrollment. These pages made up only 10% of their total website and they wanted to additionally configure these key pages for mobile web browsing. At the time their site was not easy to view from a mobile device and there was no solution in place.

Further supporting the decision to go mobile with their website were recent studies on mobile trends confirming an overall rapid increase in the number of people who access the web through their mobile devices. Statistics released by Bango showed a 600% increase in traffic to mobile websites in 2009 and stated retail sites were a main segment of this growing trend. This was not a fluke, and money was being left on the table.

Solution

Becker Professional Education came to Duo Consulting for assistance in creating the user experience and content strategy for their mobile site. Special mobile content pages were created in their existing content management system from five selected areas of their website to allow for streamlined content and continued addition of content over time. The mobile website was coded to detect which mobile device is accessing the content and provide the best viewing experience. Cross browser testing was done on the iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, Android and Blackberry to make sure the content and design displayed properly on each device. The layout featured buttons that were easy to press and eliminated time-consuming drill downs that get in the way of finding information quickly.

Results

Becker Professional Education now has a website optimized for the mobile experience that makes it easier for current and prospective students to find what they are looking for from their mobile devices with minimal navigation.

The client was so excited with the presentation of their key objectives on the CPA mobile site that they asked us to implement another mobile site for their CFA students, Stalla.com.

We learned clients clearly benefit from better communication with their demographic through mobile devices and enabled greater ease in completing mobile transactions. At 10% of the cost of their original web site Becker Professional Education now has a unique mobile presence. They are now considering taking their other businesses mobile and we are confident many of our other clients can benefit from going mobile as well.