Designing for Mobile

I recently started up a couple of bigger projects and it’s got me thinking about my processes. You see, for years I have been telling my clients about how crucial mobile is. Mobile traffic will very soon outrank desktop traffic if it hasn’t already. It’s your number one opportunity for more sales and reaching higher conversion rates. The mobile experience is often the first experience a customer has with your brand. Clients are beginning to realize this and are eager to adopt it.

The problem?… I haven’t.

While I do understand the key role mobile plays, I find myself thinking about – and designing for – desktop first. It’s not strange if you think about it, I have been designing for desktop browsers for nearly 20 years.

So here’s my challenge to myself: start with designing for mobile on these projects and see what happens. I’ll make sure to report back to you on my experience! I’d also love to get your wisdom on this – especially designers (product, UX, UI) – what your experience was when you made this transition.

Notes on the subject from Ani Mohan in his Next Generation Web presentation at Google Conversions 2017 in Dublin via Luke Wroblekski

• The Web has been around for about 25 years. In 1996, we had 360M people using it on desktop computers. Today it is at 3.6B, mostly on smartphones. This is the largest platform that’s ever been built.
• Discovery on the Web starts with a link, so loading speed matters for creating a great first impression. 53% of users will abandon a mobile page if it takes more then 3 seconds to load. 7% reduction in conversions for every 1-second delay in loading times.
• AMP is an open-source simplified version of landing pages that optimizes for fast initial load times. AMP pages are 4x faster, have < 1 sec median load times, and use 10x less data than typical Web landing pages.
• There’s more than quick landing pages needed for the Web. To increase engagement: Add to home screen (easy way to launch a site), push notifications (to tell people when to come back & why), reliable performance (pages need to work regardless of connectivity).
• Poor connectivity on mobile can cause Web pages to fail. Service Workers can cache content and when people are offline, you can use local content instead of going to server for content.
• Mobile Web conversions are 66% lower than the desktop. Many reasons for this, but one is typing is hard. One-tap checkout helps solve this. The browser stores payment info and sites can ask for it at the moment of checkout.
• Housing.com saw a 38% conversion increase when Web pages were boosted 30% in page speed.

In case you missed it (it’s nearly two years old), I recommend you reading ‘What’s the cost of sharing’.