Overview
HSN, Inc. is an interactive multi-channel retailer located in the United States, trading on the NASDAQ. It operates through two segments, HSN and Cornerstone. The HSN segment offers products through television programming on the HSN television networks, HSN.com, HSN mobile applications, and brick and mortar stores.
Challenge
In order to reduce complexity, improve delivery time, and optimize SEO, HSN needed to leverage a legitimate device detection solution. Prior to using 51 Degrees, 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 back end services and data was common across all platforms.
Maintaining two sites increased the time and complexity for enhancements and bug fixes and this configuration complicated SEO.
Why choose 51Degrees?
The senior engineering team evaluated professionally maintained device detection vendors and decided 51Degrees product would suit their requirements, was also 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 of thousands of categories.
Device detection is an important facet of personalisation but does not require a user to register or share personal preferences. Armed with this information websites can send content that is not only optimised for detailed device specifications but also contextualises the likely environment of the user, delivering a better user experience.