Does Your Slate Mobile Branding Display Consistently on Every Device?
A prospective student is browsing your website on her phone, ready to request more information. She taps the link, and suddenly she's on a page with a plain grey header across the top: it has your university's name but no logo, no brand colors, just generic styling. What happened to the hamburger menu? Did she make a mistake? The form fields are right there, but it's not the brand experience she was having a moment ago. She's confused. Is this really your form?
More than 1 in 10 undergraduate/shared instances of Slate have an inconsistent mobile branding experience, with Slate's 'default grey' template applied instead of the school's own custom branding.
This finding comes as part of Predicate Higher Ed's new benchmarking series examining current inquiry form practices, analyzing the RFI forms of more than 750 Slate schools.
Why Inconsistent Branding Happens
When institutions configure their branding in Slate, Technolutions provides the option to enable separate, custom mobile branding via a configuration key (see the Knowledge Base). Custom branding is not applied automatically:
By default, the mobile branding that is implemented is using the Slate ‘default grey’ mobile template. This minimalist template ensures that Slates content is rendered consistently across all mobile platforms.
Instead, the setting for Mobile Template, available under Database > Configuration Keys > Branding, Privacy & Ping > Mobile Template, must be updated manually to have a specific branding file such as /shared/build.xslt applied on mobile devices.
If no selection is made, Slate will serve the 'default grey' branding by default for mobile devices.
Marketing and admissions teams may not realize this is happening for some prospective students if they preview their Slate forms, applications, or portals using browser developer tools on desktop, or if they test on a single device/browser where Slate determined the desktop branding should be served instead.
In our analysis, 1 in 10 schools still had the default template appearing on at least one modern device/browser combination.
It's important to understand that checking manually on one specific device isn't enough, as Slate may determine the custom branding files can be loaded under some circumstances but not others. For example, in testing, we encountered a much higher rate of default branding being applied using Chrome or Safari on iPhones, while Firefox on android devices often loaded custom branding for the same pages.
Making the Update, and Testing, Testing, Testing
Our recommendation is to use dedicated testing tools like Sauce Labs or BrowserStack rather than relying on a single user testing on their personal device.
Customizing branding in Slate requires careful testing to ensure cross-browser compatibility. As Technolutions notes in their documentation, institutions' use of JavaScript for their standard mobile styling can often conflict with Slate functionality. If you encounter 'Default Grey' on your Slate pages and you want to make a change, the safest approach is to apply the configuration key in your Test environment first, then complete broad testing across devices/browsers before enabling the key in production.
While 'default grey' is a safe fallback experience that ensures prospective students are able to view and interact with your Slate pages successfully, most institutions in 2025 will want to take the opportunity to apply a custom branding experience consistently across all devices, ensuring that visitors never pause to wonder whether they left the institutional website.
Have questions about branding in Slate or looking for assistance with making your Slate forms, portals, or applications visually consistent with a new redesign of your institutional website? Contact us at info@predicatehighered.com to learn how we can help.
