How To Design A Website For Better Mobile User Experience

In 2018, more than 80% of the total internet usage was done from mobile devices. And the percentage is expected to reach new heights in the coming years. Majority of businesses have centered their web designing strategies on mobile internet users and those that haven't are also planning to soon get their website revamped for mobile users by the providers of cheapest web design in India. Offering an unmatched mobile user experience is no longer something that businesses could think of as optional. It is the ultimate truth and here are some ways in which web designers or businesses can embrace the mobile revolution and gain a competitive edge.

Convert Nav Bar Into Hamburger

Navigation bars are an important element in a desktop site but would you like to reserve an important part of the small mobile screen for this bar? The navigation bar on mobile screen can consume a lot of space and wouldn't even be that important. A great way to do so is by removing the navigation bar altogether and adding a hamburger menu instead. A hamburger menu takes up very few pixels on the mobile screen and drops down to show the icons present in the navigation bar. Moreover, the mobile users today have also gotten used to the hamburger menu and expect all mobile site owners to add it for seamless navigation.

Link Numbers For Click To Call

Unlike desktops or laptops that do not allow the ease to make phone calls at the click of a button, mobiles empower businesses with the facility. Mobiles are essentially created to allow phone calls and if a business cannot make use of this functionality, they are considered outdated, and even untrustworthy by many people. Adding a click to call functionality in your mobile website design by linking it with your mobile number would speed-up and simply interaction. Take the pain of juggling taps or copying numbers to make call by making the mobile number clickable for call.

Place All Important Elements Within Reach

Providing unmatched mobile experience requires a site that does not cause pain in the user's hand, especially the thumb. Placing each element on the site within the reach of the thumb could be a great start for that. A study by Steve Hoober, mobile user experience expert, even concluded that more than 75% of the mobile users use only one of their thumbs to interact with the buttons on their smartphone screen. Also, the hot spots on the mobile screen have changed with the increase in phone size. The center of the screen holds the highest touch accuracy while the area in all the four corners including the top and bottom of the screen requires a lot of efforts to be reached. So, including primary function in center and the secondary and tertiary functions in top bottom and corners is the ideal way to design a site for better mobile user experience.

Optimize All Elements

A mobile site should be optimized for the mobile users. This optimization should ensure that the site loads within a short span of time, thus making it optimized for speed. Speed is a ranking factor for many search engines and optimizing your mobile website for the same could also ensure that it ranks better on search engines. There are many elements in a mobile website that can be optimized to offer better mobile user experience. Here are a few:

• Forms: While typing has evolved drastically from the days of T9, people still not like to type a lot and rely largely on autocorrect and predictions. Asking them to type out long forms on mobile phones could dissuade them. Optimize all forms for mobile users. You can start by minimizing the number of fields in the form and even break the entire form into multiple steps.
• Images: Images are one of the heaviest elements on mobile site and can easily cause it to lag in loading. Make sure that the images are compressed so that they load instantly with the page.

• JavaScript & CSS: A coder can analyze the sites JavaScript and CSS codes to optimize them. A JavaScript that is too heavy might struggle to load and similar is the case with CSS. Bloated CSS might also cause your mobile website to lag. Optimize both these scripts to offer better user experience to all the mobile users.

Implement AMP

If your question is why to embrace Accelerated Mobile Pages, here's the answer. Accelerated Mobile Pages are the new age was to offer instant page loading to the audience. They keep the users engaged by displaying information in the blink of an eye. They come with an AMP tag that conveys the page would load instantly and grab more clicks. The click through rate increased and bounce rate decreased for many businesses that adopted the AMP approach. It displays all the useful information to the users while eliminating all the unnecessary elements. In fact, ad placement with AMP pages is also worth applauding.

Even Google updated its algorithms and added mobile-first approach as a ranking factor for websites. And with the number of mobile internet users increasing with each passing day, having a mobile website and offering excellent mobile user experience is imperative for businesses.