Background
HSN (Home Shopping Netwok) is an interactive multi-channel retailer located in the United States. They offer products through television programming on the HSN television networks, HSN.com, HSN mobile applications, and brick and mortar stores.
The Challenge
In order to reduce complexity, improve delivery time, and optimize SEO, HSN needed to leverage a legitimate device detection solution. Prior to using 51Degrees, HSN maintained two separate websites – one for desktop/tablet devices and the other for handset devices.
In support of the two distinct websites, HSN used basic detection via a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to re-direct handset devices to the appropriate website. While this worked functionally, it did require maintaining two separate physical website solutions even though most of the backend services and data was common across all platforms.
The Solution
The senior engineering team evaluated professionally maintained device detection vendors and decided the 51Degrees product would suit their requirements. HSN no longer needed two separate websites for different devices and could use Device Detection to serve correctly-sized content according to the device.
Additionally, it was easy to implement and integrate. A single senior software engineer added the solution to the main website within just a few hours. HSN found the application logic to leverage 51Degrees was very simple and required little or no training.
About Device Detection
Device detection empowers a web page to understand a great deal of information about the device that is visiting the site prior to making a decision about the content to send to it. This could include information on browser type and capability, processing power of the device, and screen resolution, to name but three out of thousands of categories.
Device detection is an important facet of personalization but does not require a user to register or share personal preferences. Armed with this information, websites can send content that is not only optimized for detailed device specifications but also contextualises the likely environment of the user, delivering a better user experience.
If you wish to benefit from 51Degrees Device Detection, ask us about a free trial today.