If you own or manage a website, it is highly likely that users will access it using mobile devices. The volume of traffic that comes via mobile may vary depending on your industry or niche, but all websites have a percentage of visitors that use mobile. In fact, in many situations, the number of people accessing a particular site from a mobile device is greater than the number of users that accesses it from a desktop computer. This is why you have to get the user experience (UX) of your website right for mobile platforms. Here are some tips.
Design for Mobile
You need to have a specific strategy for mobile devices. This is because visitors using a mobile device to access your website act differently from visitors who use a desktop. Research from Google says, for example, that users are more goal-orientated when they are on a mobile.
There are also user interface (UI) considerations to think about when looking at the difference between how your site looks on desktop and mobile. These UI elements often have an impact on UX. For example, dividers might break up content well on a desktop device, but they just take up valuable space on mobile.
Think About the User
Every other part of the design process flows from this point, so you need to think about how users access your website:
· Where are they? Are they on a bus, in a car on the way to your shop, at home with a tablet, or somewhere else?
· What do they want to achieve? When they are on your website using a mobile device, what are they looking to get out of it? User goals could include reading an article, making a purchase, finding a telephone number, etc.
You then need to make the website fit in with those actions. For example, if the user's primary motivation for accessing your site is to find directions to your business location, make sure those directions are easy to find.
Make the Text Readable
You are providing a poor UX if the user has to pinch, zoom, tap, or do anything else in order to make the text large enough to read. So make the text big enough to read with simple font sizes.
Call to Action
A lot of thought is often put into the placement of calls to action on desktop websites. This is why they are usually positioned above the fold. All too often, however, this attention to detail is abandoned on a mobile site. The result is a call to action that only becomes visible if the user scrolls. So, put the call to action above the fold.
Menus and Search
Mobile users are now sophisticated enough to know that a set of three vertical dots or three horizontal lines means that there is a menu. It is therefore not necessary to get in the way of the user by spelling out the menu in full—if they want something from the menu, they will go there.
But make it easy to find anything on your site. One way to do that is to include a search facility as part of the menu.
This article shows that you have to think very differently when considering the user experience on your desktop site and the user experience on your mobile site. One of the easiest ways to get it right is to implement the ideas mentioned here and then test them. If you’ve got part of it wrong, change it and test again.
