10 Ways Web Sites Fail the Mobile User
A desktop is not a tablet is not a mobile phone. Many web sites fail the mobile user at least 10 ways because those teams have not yet assimilated the differences.
If you fire up a tablet and pull some corporation sites randomly, you will find mobile mistakes like these.
1. Pictures are incorrectly sized. The device has to resize them for display, and the user waits.
2. Page structure stays the same four or three column format. The user navigates your page, if they bother, by swiping to a spot, magnifying, positioning, positioning a couple times because of the late resource loads (images, video, ads), reading, shrinking, swiping to another spot. Grrr says the user.
3. Fluid layout wastes time. The little icons, pictures and links slide to their positions, until the next object instantiates, and then everything is pushed around again.
4. Buttons shrink with the page. The buttons shrink with the page meaning the 120 pixel button on a 1200 pixel screen becomes 60 pixels on a 600 pixel, and 30 unreadable pixels on mobile. I am severely myopic, and even I can not read then buttons then.
5. Input text boxes also shrink. Entry of text requires not my fat fingers, but a stylus, an tiny stylus and a small stick to steady my hand so I can touch the tiny keyboard that pops up. Why so small, and why not have big select boxes?
6. Pull down navigation menus are a nice looking technique, but bad on any platform. Slows a user up because they cannot "Know with a single glance". However, downright ridiculous to try to use on screens smaller than a desktop.
7. Links or buttons too close together. The focus area on many sites, even when magnified, is smaller than what a stylus can hit(even when held by a severe myopic, with his eye to the screen, his tablet flat on the table, his elbows and hand forming a tripod).
8. Site loads too much content. The developer might be on a 20 Gig per second fiber connection, but the cell setup Bucky their Biggest Buyer has runs at a tenth of a meg per second. That beautiful high resolution picture of a kitten, while pleasing to some AIs, just irritated Bucky, it cost him way too many heart beats waiting for low value information to trickle onto his device.
9. SON of site loads too much content. Video, pictures, galleries make the site slower loading and yes irritating enough to kill loading of the page. Good design gives a link and lets the user choose if they want to burn the bandwidth.
10. The site is making the mobile user uncomfortable. He likes the company but the site is giving out that weird "these people are behind in the times" vibe by ignoring the fact mobile is different. The mobile user switches to a less frustrating site.
Here is a set of solution steps.
1. Proceed with the certainty mobile is important to your organization. Know your site must support mobile. Pew Internet Life in their "Mobile Technology Fact Sheet" reported these statistics for January 2014.
• 90% of American adults have a cell phone
• 58% of American adults have a smartphone
• 32% of American adults own an e-reader
• 42% of American adults own a tablet computer.
The same report states 34% of cell internet users go online mostly using their phones.
2. Get the numbers. Determine what the time and cost will be to convert your present site to support mobile with your current methods of creating and maintaining your site.
3. Remember 60 percent. A secret in the information technology industry is that 60% of all projects fail in terms of schedule misses, cost over runs, and benefits not delivered. If the time and cost numbers are associated with the word "Development", become very very cautious.
4. Get the right approach. Look for solutions that can deliver to you the features and functionality custom to your industry and organization, but at the same time shield your organization from the complexity, time commitment, costs, and risks of web development.
When thinking through your approach, please consider our engineered e-commerce solutions. Check out the Byrtus Product Family of Web Site Generators. Our customers report to us productivity advantages of 75 times or more over their competitors, and significant increases in end user satisfaction.