Since mobile-friendly websites and responsive web design are now among the hottest topics in web world, it’s obvious that your company an
d clients move into the mobile space. The world has gone mobile now and everyone is accessing the internet from their mobile devices only. In such a scenario, you must address a mobile strategy.
When designing mobile friendly website, you must think about the design process for various mobile devices and their limits. For example, iPad or any other tablet can manage a full site whereas smartphones has limited space to explore the website. The bottom line is that you need to pursue a well-rounded approach and provide a completely different user experience.
There are several things that are common to just about all projects involving design for mobile-friendly website.
Here are 10 tips that may help you.
1. Be Concise
What is your goal behind designing a mobile website? That is fetching users when they need as quickly as possible, with least possible swipes, taps, and attention required. If you find a screen that can be removed, remove it – there must be nothing extra in a mobile site.
2. Keep it simple as ABC
As a developer, designer, or a website owner, you should not forget that simplicity is an implicit requirement for a mobile-friendly website. To retain the friendliness in your mobile site, you must avoid too much content. Usability aspects of the mobile website also require a simplified method to design, layout, and navigation. It’s always a good idea to keep file size and load times down.
Your visitors will run away if you place too much information on one screen page. You must plan something for the interface and navigation so that any visitor can easily walk through the pages of your site, without any pressure on attention.
3. Practice Responsive Web Design
Checking your website in a few web browsers and launching no longer do the job. You need to follow a well-rounded method and optimize your site for a vast landscape of desktop and mobile browsers.
Utilizing the cutting-edge techniques such as HTML5, CSS3, and web fonts will result in a successful mobile site that can be accessed on any mobile device.
4. Define the Context
You need to define what is necessary in your business that must be first popped up when people visit your site in their mobile devices. You don’t take the same actions on your mobile device as on the desktop when browsing a site; therefore, you have to be careful when choosing features and content for your website.
You need to think from the visitors’ point of view and understand what they’ll look for. It can be a feature of direct communication between you and visitors, such as a click-to-call, a phone number, a feature of online booking, etc. Besides, you should avoid lengthy bios and omit content load on a mobile version.
5. Structuralize the things
If you have a lot of information to be presented your mobile site, organize the things in a digestible way, i.e., a collapsible navigation. A single single-column structure eases the navigation and eliminates the glitches.
6. Keep it short
Typing is often painful in the world of tablets and smartphones. Hence, you shouldn’t allow too much text input for users. Requisites like sign up form should be kept short as more number of fields reduces user satisfaction and interest.
7. Make it interactive
A mobile site has to be interactive, especially when a user takes any action while browsing through the site. For example, a button must change visually when a person clicks, as it indicates that something is in progress.
For example, iPhone turns white-colored link into fully blue when you click on a particular link. This visual feedback is common to most people and you’d be advised to make the most of it.
8. Define your brand
When you are putting all the things into consideration, you shouldn’t forget defining your brand. Make sure your brand is instantly recognizable when you showcase it with logo, colors and style. There’s always a way of wisely using them into the design, without messing up usability.
9. Don’t mess up
Don’t make your mobile site fuzzy, instead keep it clear. You might want to redirect visitors to the full version in case the full information is needed.
10. Ensure Mobile Compatibility
Test your mobile website with various mobile devices, including tablets and smartphones, on various operating systems and screen resolutions. You can also take a help of web-based emulators to test your mobile site.
If you take on all, or even most, of these rules of thumb you’ll make design for mobile quite easier on yourself.
