UX: Mobile First Design

UX, The Fine Line Between Engaging and Enraging: Mobile First Design

Welcome to part three of our UX-focused blog series. Having previously explored website engagement and user-centric design, we’ll continue to unravel the importance of UX by establishing why you need to introduce a mobile-first design approach.

We’ll delve into how you can optimise your website for mobile devices and discuss how you could be losing valuable traffic and conversions if your site isn’t mobile-friendly.

Stats, Stats, Stats

Did you know that in 2011, only 6.1% of website traffic came from mobile devices? A relatively low percentage, right?

Well, by 2015, that figure had risen to 37.2%; fast forward to November 2023, and traffic from mobile devices now accounts for 56.2% of total web traffic.

Long story short, the rise of mobile internet usage is staggering and it won’t be slowing down anytime soon.

This makes it more important than ever to ensure that your website is mobile friendly, and with over 59% of all Google searches originating from mobile devices, your site needs to offer the same efficient user experience to those on mobile as it does on desktop.

Keep Mobile in Mind

Google considers the mobile performance of a website as a major ranking factor, meaning that if your website performs poorly on mobile devices, your SEO and Google rankings will be adversely affected.

For businesses that rely on their website for lead generation and brand awareness, this double whammy can have a serious effect on traffic; not only will you lose visibility in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), but the users who do find your website will quickly bounce.

To combat these issues, it is vital that your website is designed with mobile performance not only in mind, but at the forefront of UX/UI design.

How to Optimise for Mobile

Optimising your website for mobile devices involves addressing various technical aspects. The items listed below are some of the most important areas to address to ensure that your website is fast, smooth and user-friendly on mobile devices.

Responsive Design

Use custom CSS to make sure your website layout adjusts dynamically to different screen sizes and orientations.   

Implementing a custom CSS allows for a more responsive design. This means that your site can quickly adapt to different displays, providing an optimal viewing experience for your users.

Optimise Images

Ensure that your images are in the right format. For standard images and photographs, use JPEG, and for simple graphics, consider PNG. For icons or logos, SVG files offer an efficient and scalable file type.

Images should also be compressed to reduce file size and improve load times. Compression tools such as TinyPNG make image compression easy and effective.

Mobile-Friendly Navigation

Simplify navigation for mobile users. Utilise mobile-friendly navigation patterns, such as hamburger menus or bottom navigation, to make it easy for users to find information without overwhelming the screen.

Touch-Friendly Elements

Elements on your site, such as buttons, menus and links, should be easily tappable.

It is also important to remember to make sure that there is enough space between elements to allow easy access and prevent accidental clicks.

Mobile Optimised Forms

Simplify your forms for mobile. This means minimising the required number of fields and including ‘auto-fill’ features to make the process seamless for users.

Arguably, the most important factor when it comes to mobile optimisation is testing.

Conduct usability tests on your website, identify pain points and gather feedback from users, also remember that although you’ll be developing your site on a desktop, to perform your testing on different mobile devices to gain the most accurate results.

Time for Businesses to Optimise

As we’ve shown, the importance of user experience for mobile devices is essential to having a successful website, especially for businesses.

As smartphone use and mobile browsing continue to grow exponentially, businesses, particularly those that rely on E-commerce, cannot afford to overlook the importance of providing an excellent mobile UX, and the figures only serve to highlight this.

Now that you understand the importance of UX and, crucially, mobile UX, you can begin to enhance your website performance by optimising the key areas we have highlighted throughout this blog series.

In fact, if you have missed previous instalments, you can find them here –

Part 1: A UX STORY, TOLD BY ENGAGEMENT AND BOUNCE RATES

Part 2: 5 TIPS FOR USER CENTRIC WEB DESIGN

If you want support creating a user-friendly website for your business, contact our team to discover how our experts can elevate your digital performance.