Keynote Confirms Long Tablet Sessions for Consumers

When designing new apps for tablets, banks are anticipating longer user sessions for more leisurely activities, a strategy that new research from Keynote suggests is spot on.

In new data released on Monday, the research firm found that 29% of respondents spend at least one to two hours browsing the Internet from their smartphone while 37% of tablet users logged that much time as well. The top activity on a smartphone was accessing local information such as maps and event locations. The top activity on a tablet was accessing news and entertainment information. About half of tablet users do banking on their tablets while 56% of smartphone users complete banking on their smartphones. However, tablet users were much more likely to purchase something or book travel on their tablets.

These findings meld with prevailing trends by banks to put more research, articles about finance and elements of gaming on tablets, while designing mobile apps for faster sessions such as transfers or balance queries. Banks anticipate people are more likely to spend a greater amount of time on tablets, because tablets are used more often at home-and for "fun" purposes such as reading novels or playing games.

Regardless of channels, consumers have grown to expect fast performance. Participants in the nationwide mobile survey listed web pages being slow to load as the top frustration. Websites not being optimized for a smartphone and loading errors/couldn't open a page tied for second as the biggest frustration.

User expectations varied some by device. Sixty percent of tablet users expected to wait less than three seconds to get to a website while 48% of PC web users wanted download speeds faster than two seconds. Two-thirds of smartphone users want a site to load in less than four seconds.

Keynote Competitive Research, a unit of Keynote Systems (KEYN), collected responses from 5,388 participants in an online survey in the first half of 2012. Of the respondents, 3,145 were smartphone users and 1,976 were tablet users.

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