A mobile-friendly website design prioritises the mobile browsing experience over the desktop edition, rather than treating it as an afterthought. This is essential to improve the user experience of your website.
This guide will help you design a mobile-friendly website that will keep users engaged and interested in using your website. Keep reading to find out about the different tips that you can use to achieve this.
Design For Mobile First
This is one of the most important tips that you will come across when looking to design a mobile-friendly website. Users browse on their mobile devices a lot more than they do on desktops, so designing your website with mobile devices as a priority will yield positive results.
Websites that are designed for mobile first prioritise simplicity and usability right from the start. Simplicity is what most mobile users look for from mobile websites and apps, so this will improve user experience by giving users what they want.
Once the website is designed for a mobile app, it will be easier to design it for desktop. There will be more space to work with and fewer limitations on the designers. It will be easier to make a simple feature more complicated, than to simplify a complex feature. So designing for mobile first will make the designer’s job easier too.
Simplicity
Too many design elements (for example, buttons, pictures, and videos) will slow down the website’s loading time and draw attention away from what’s important. Simplicity will help you create a mobile-friendly website as users want to have a much speedier time on mobile than on desktop, so having clear and concise content will give users what they want. Keeping the website simple will make it feel more inviting.
Optimize The Website For Portrait Mode
Mobile devices can view websites in both portrait and landscape modes, but users mostly use portrait mode when they are browsing websites. Making it easier for users to do this will make their experience with the website more user-friendly and engaging.
There are ways to make the single column layout work for you in mobile website design. Social media apps have trained smartphone users to scroll for long periods of time, mobile website designers can use whitespace and padding to spread content out to make it clearer and more concise. This keeps the content readable and engages the user.
Size Of Font And Design Elements
The size of the font and design elements such as buttons are important on mobile devices. Users don’t want to zoom in repeatedly to read the information being displayed. If they need to do this repeatedly, they will leave the website.
Use popular mobile versions of websites to see what works best for mobile users. Don’t make the font too small, but it shouldn’t be too big. Look at other mobile-friendly websites and try to find the right font and design element size.
Simplify Menus
The menus on desktop websites have a lot of space. They can take up the top of the screen and have a lot of drop-down menu choices while not interfering with the user’s experience. Menus that provide an overview of the website can be used on mobile-friendly websites. Users can then narrow down their search results by using categories, filters, or the search function.
Mobile websites use hamburger menus which are shown using 3 horizontal lines stacked together. Using these menus keep the website simple for mobile users and does not interfere with the information being displayed.
Don’t Complicate Forms
Since the screen is larger and typing with a keyboard is simpler, users may be more likely to fill out a long form on the desktop version of the website. Shorter forms with broad text fields and buttons are needed for mobile devices. If you’re asking people to join your mailing list, for example, you shouldn’t ask for anything other than their first name and email address.
If users need to fill out a form on a mobile website, then make those forms short and easy to fill out.
Viewing Experience On Different Operating Systems And Devices
You need to test the viewing experience of your mobile website on different operating systems and mobile devices to ensure everything works and looks like it should. Testing on different systems and devices will help you improve the mobile website and optimize the user experience. There are many mobile app design agencies that can be used to test your mobile website. These mobile app design services offer more to their clients as well, such as helping create mobile-friendly websites that users will enjoy.
Optimize Image Sizes
When it comes to mobile devices, the aim is to make photos that are as small as possible while still looking high-quality on whatever screen they’re being viewed on. This is important due to the fact that mobile devices’ bandwidth is much lower than that of desktop computers, resulting in longer loading times if image sizes are too big.
Load times are a big part of creating mobile-friendly websites, users don’t want to waste time waiting for information to load. If the load times are too long, the user will leave the website. If you speed up the load times, then this will contribute to a positive image for your website. If you use mobile app design firms, then you will understand the importance of fast load times on websites, especially mobile websites.
Responsive Designs
Responsive design allows website developers to create websites that are viewable on devices of different sizes while also reducing the amount of work required when creating a website. When a small business website employs responsive design, the page can detect the user’s screen orientation and scale and change the layout accordingly to improve user experience.
Responsive websites are common now and websites that aren’t responsive are avoided as they don’t provide a mobile-friendly experience.
