UX and them: Optimising the mobile user experience
How quickly does your webpage load on mobile devices? Five seconds? Ten seconds? Once it does load, does it looks beautiful? Perhaps the layout adapts perfectly, with well-proportioned images and nicely aligned text cascading down your screen. But wait – your users! – where did they go?! If they’re in a hurry, in transit, or needing information fast (like most mobile users) they’re already gone.
It’s like a barista taking 45 minutes to make your coffee. It might look and taste great, but by the time it’s ready, you’ve gone elsewhere for your caffeine fix. It’s a modern-day philosophical conundrum: If your website looks amazing, but nobody sees it – is there any point?
Think beyond responsive design
These days, everyone’s on the responsive bandwagon. We all recognise the importance of connecting with mobile users. However, many marketers simply order a responsive website, put their feet up and breathe a big sigh of relief. Conversions go up, and ‘mobile website’ is ticked off their to-do list. Unfortunately, they are turning their backs on a large section of the market.
Performance is king
Responsive design is just one aspect of the mobile user experience. Yes, it’s important to have resizable images, nicely aligned text, and buttons that work. But user experience – and therefore website effectiveness – involves much more than just adapting visuals to different screen sizes.
The big-picture goal is performance. Your website isn’t there just to look pretty – it needs to achieve views, clicks and shares. Tell your digital agency you want a responsive website, and they’ll make sure your site displays and functions across a wide range of devices – smartphones, tablets, phablets, etc. But set performance as your goal, and the strategy may be different.
For mobile users, perhaps not all the pictures need to load. Perhaps the e-commerce page should load before the blog. Maybe it’s best to restructure CSS, use media queries, or serve a separate mobile website using an m.* subdomain. Many factors affect the performance of your website; not just the responsiveness of its design.
The one-second rule
A large part of performance is speed. Your website needs to load in one second. Does that sound fast? It’s not. Especially when you take into account not only bandwidth and connection speed, but also the time taken by mobile devices to process the data. If you want clicks, buys and shares, your website needs to work for everyone – and quickly. But not everyone has 4G. In fact, fewer than 3% of people worldwide have 4G connections, many of them only half of the time, and the rest of us – well, we’re stuck plodding along at snail’s pace with 3G.
That’s just one example of how a performance consideration (speed) is equally as important as responsive design… because a great user experience depends on both. Woody Allen once said that 80% of success is just showing up, and this certainly applies to your website. But at the end of the day, your website needs to deliver real results – and style doesn’t count if it doesn’t get seen.
