Keys to mobile success

These days mobile devices account for a massive amount of internet traffic.  To ignore mobile when planning your users’ online experience would be a strategic mistake.

What follows are some keys areas identified that will help you to achieve mobile website success.

Perform well

Performance of the mobile website experience is probably the most important key to success. You need to consider performance constraints of a standard mobile device, and ensure you design and develop accordingly. You can’t just replicate the desktop design and hope for the best.

Do your research

Knowing customer behaviour is important so doing research is vital to the success of the mobile website experience. This can be done through interviews or surveys with new and existing customers. Another useful research tool is collection of analytics data through the use of an A/B split testing product on a design prototype.

Understanding why

Understanding why a person will visit your company’s site on their mobile device is vital. It means you can provide them with the relevant tools and information from the start of the user experience. Generally people use their mobile devices for 3 different types of needs:

• Need to know now - such as directions to an address, bus or train timetables, use of search engines etc.
• Need to know again - this might be sport scores, property searches, bank balance etc.
• Need to be entertained - accessing social media sites, browsing shopping sites etc.

Once you have identified the main needs of your customers you can design the mobile website accordingly. This may mean providing for all 3 types of needs from the Home page or focusing on one type of need specifically. This depends on your business strategy.

Move away from mobile specific websites

In the market today there are many different devices that are used to access the internet. Not only do we have phones, tablets and smart tvs but, depending on the manufacturer, each of these can have different specifications in terms of screen size, resolution and performance. The idea of trying to design a website for each of these different mediums is not cost effective.

A separate mobile website is also not good for business as it hurts your SEO, slows performance of the main site due to redirects to the mobile site and can also complicate social media sharing which is vital to every business.

Get adaptive

Responsive design techniques are very helpful in catering for the large variety of mobile devices out there, but given the need for a well performing site its not always the only answer. You need to think about more than just the front end CSS. The optimisation and management of images and resources depending on the device that they are being viewed from can go a long way to increase performance also.