The Yottaa team is getting back to normal as Inbound 2014 has come to a close. Thanks a lot to Hubspot, all the speakers, and most of all the attendees who came in from out of town.

A major focus of the conference was the current and future state of the mobile web. Even though, as Spencer Scott of Fiksu quipped, “For the past several years we have declared each year the year of mobile…it’s almost become cliche,” that’s not going to change until organizations broadly adopt practices that actually solve the problem. And despite being overstated the data on mobile remains remarkable:

• In June 2014, 621 billion hours were spent on mobile
• This year, mobile eCommerce annual revenue will exceed $50 billion
• By 2018, that figure is expected to reach $100 billion
• 51% of total web time is now on mobile

Basically, every year from now on will be “the year of mobile,” until the end-user experience on these devices reaches parity with desktop. Right now, we’re far from there.

So what does a company base its winning mobile strategy on? We have our own ideas of course, but there were two highly-related themes from INBOUND14 that were ubiquitous:

1. It’s all about user experience (not about technology)

2. “Mobile” as a concept is giving way to a more general concept of “user experience” that covers all user contexts, online and offline

Notice that this year, discussions didn’t hinge on concepts like “mobile first” development or responsive design. For leading companies, those debates have given way to holistic thinking about user experience. As we wrote earlier this week, author Tom Webster concluded as much after speaking with over 50 companies while researching his book on mobile. These organizations realize that without a winning strategy for end user experience across all channels, any “mobile” strategy will end up dead in the water. Another blog this week touched on this by way of a debate on native versus we applications. And as always with UX, performance factored into the conversation, as Dharmesh Shah noted in his keynote.

In a world with increasing competition for attention and decreasing attention spans, performance remains the cornerstone to a good experience. Even if UX strategy shouldn’t be driven by technology, it must be enabled by it. We would love to see more technology-focused sessions next year, especially given that the marketers and marketing departments using Hubspot are increasingly playing a double role as technologists.

Thanks again to everyone we met and learned from this week, and see you all back here in 2015!