The key aspect around planning is to understand how your mobile users might differ from your traditional users in terms of what formation they are seeking or how they might interact with the website.

One client reported a 400% increase in the use of their store locator from mobile users during the Xmas holiday period. When you think about this, it makes perfect sense – people are away from home and use their phone to find what they’re after.

To this end you can review your analytic data to gain an understanding of what and where your mobile users are going and doing onsite. This helps with setting up navigation and tailoring content correctly. A few things to remember are, typically mobile users will spend less time on site and visit fewer pages on average so making it easy and intuitive to get around is imperative.

Mobile devices have some features desktops don’t. These can enhance the user’s experience, most notably the location awareness capability. Integrating features like this into store locators or map pages provides a great users experience.

Remember you’re designing for a medium where you use your fingers not a mouse for navigation. The smaller amount of real-estate or screen size is also an important factor also. With these considerations in mind below are some tips to help you optimise the experience while retaining website functionality.

1. Using collapsible menus or a burger menu style navigation
2. Uses the phones location aware capabilities (GPS)
3. Optimise imagery for size
4. Consider how much content is within a page and what the user will read/view. Use tabs to manage this if the content is too much.
5. Consider implementing phone usage behaviours for instance swiping the display for elements like multiple product images or pinch and pull to zoom and scale down.

Having a responsive website that caters for all device users is simply the standard expectation your customers and potential customers have in today’s market.

If you don’t have a mobile optimised website, now’s the time to act and invest in a presence that communicates your branding and offer effectively to the online community.
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Further reading in the “Mobile Optimised Website” Series.
Part 1 – The numbers don’t lie
Part 2 – 4 reasons why you should have one
Part 3 – Technology options and delivery
Part 4 – Features, focus and things you should consider

Andy Brown
www.strategus.co.nz