Best Practices for Mobile Web Design
By: Michael Grecco
Obviously, we use our mobile devices everyday. We have access to tons of information right in the palm of our hands, and we can search for just about anything within seconds. Companies and web designers have a method to how they make their websites look, in order to make it appealing to the eye as well as ease of access for the user.
What works best?
Search Engine Land outlines some common yet impactful ideas that make can make a website, especially a mobile website, easy to use and navigate. An obvious choice are menus. Within these menus, you want to highlight certain aspects of your website that mobile users are going to benefit from the most. However, Search Engine Land notes to not “overwhelm the user”. Rather, use expandable menus to keep things concise and tidy.
Giving the user the option to use a filter on a mobile website is crucial. Not only does it help them narrow down their search to see what they actually want to see, it gets them to where they want to go much faster than scrolling through pages and pages of information they do not want to see.
Search Engine Land makes note of using bold and italic texts, to make certain words stand out and to grab the user’s attention. Numbered and bulleted lists are “a great way to convey a large amount of information quickly”.
Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion, published by Nathalie Nahai, touches on some other topics that can make a potential user visit your website. A topic that might go under the radar is simply language. Nahai’s book mentions that “English remains the dominant language online, with over 870 million English-speaking users”. Given that not everyone understands English, it is important that your website has a translation device / service. This can widen your audience and stretch out to even more potential users.
Another topic from Nahai’s book is the use of motion within your mobile website. Nahai mentions how you “can capitalize on your viewer’s sensitivity to motion by designing compelling pieces that provoke them into watching more.” It is safe to assume that most mobile users are more intrigued by the photos / videos embedded within a website, rather than its text. For example, if a mobile website is offering vacation rentals in Hawaii, the user would not only want some information regarding it, but to see some photos / videos to get a visual sense of what they could experience themselves.
Katie Dutcher for Web Ascender published an article with “8 Crucial Design Tips for Mobile Websites”. Just how Search Engine Land touched on how text size is crucial, since this is dealing with the mobile web, the button sizes need to be adjusted. Users are using their fingers instead of a mouse. When designing a mobile website, keep in mind the size of the navigation buttons and how it can affect the user’s experience.
Another one of Dutcher’s 8 design tips is to optimize your images. Mobile phones do not have enough processing power as a typical desktop computer or a PC. Using large images and / or high-definition images can cause the whole website to be slow and laggy. Being on a mobile device, you want your user to have access to a fast and reliable website.
An article from Oberlo published by Thomas Law explains the importance of mobile websites, especially with technology growing stronger and faster throughout the years. Within Law’s article, he mentions how in 2019, “smartphones were responsible for 52.6% of global website traffic”. Law also notes how “59% of shoppers say that being able to shop from their smartphones is important when deciding which retailer or brand to buy from”. Retailers realize that online shopping is becoming more popular, so they want to create a functional website for their customers.
Sources:
https://searchengineland.com/designing-content-mobile-first-index-280071#table
https://www.webascender.com/blog/8-crucial-design-tips-for-mobile-websites/
https://www.oberlo.com/blog/mobile-website-design
Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion by Nathalie Nahai