Optimizing/Designing for Mobile and Tablets

Yaakov Lyubetsky

November 19^th, 2012

Publishing on the WWW

Optimizing/Designing for Mobile and Tablets

            In our day and age there are people in the world that do not have access to clean food and water but have a cell phone.  With newly developed technology the price of smart phones has gone down significantly to the point where by 2015, about 85% of the population of Africa will have a mobile connection.  Mobile technology is currently one of the fastest growing technological markets.  A recent study by Viacom found that “96 percent of tablet owners access the web from their devices in their living rooms”.  This means that people are willing to use tablets and mobile devices even when personal computers are available nearby.  So developing a site solely for the web greatly diminishes the impact you make and the presence you create.  The logical conclusion would be just to design a single site that can function well on all platforms and screens, but unfortunately there are many unforeseen problems that arise only with mobile.  The simplest solution to those pitfalls is to create a second mobile/tablet site that has a similar aesthetic but a different user experience than one they would get from the web.

            I think one of the best pieces of advice that I ever received that could really be applied to anything within the design field, but is especially important to designing for mobile is think like Dieter Rams.  Dieter was a German designer at Braun that single handedly changed the direction of the field of Industrial Design with his simple and graphic designs.  His contemporary today would be Steve Jobs.  They both focused heavily on designing an experience that was simple, intuitive, and as streamlined as possible.  Mobile devices have a much smaller surface area with which the user can interact, so it’s important not to clutter the screen with useless or unnecessary information.  On mobile devices people are not expecting the beautiful aesthetics and quantity of content that they have access to on the web.  Instead they usually have some purpose or goal, and with every extra ‘click’ (or finger swipe) that it takes to reach this goal, the user gets more frustrated.   So design a site that is simple with an intuitive progression as you travel throughout.

            Another key aspect to consider when designing for mobile is to severely minimize the amount of text that a user must enter per visit to the site.  Something that we take for granted with personal computers is that we have two hands and a full keyboard to our disposal.  On and tablet you have at most one hand, or just a few fingers.  And with mobile you have at best two or three fingers.  This means that it becomes a mental and physical pain to try to type for long periods of time on mobile devices.  A clever way that many sites implement to get around this is by including predetermined options from a list of the most common phrases.  Or just creating check boxes and radio buttons to completely avoid typing altogether.  This relates back to creating a site that is as simple and as streamlined as possible.  Every time the user has to stop and type, they are not progressing forward to their final goal.  Granted sometimes it is impossible to avoid typing, but it’s an important aspect of designing for mobile that differentiates from designing for the web.

            Those first two ways of optimizing seem more or less straightforward but something that often is forgotten about is connection speed.  Though mobile networks are constantly getting faster and faster, at this time personal networks send and receive information much faster than possible on mobile networks.  Trying to load a high-quality .tiff photograph would not take very long on a personal computer, but on mobile it would take what feels like an eternity.  This idea of using smaller sized and lessened quality images goes hand and hand with designing a simple site.  Most simple sites would not need many images to convey the information they need, and thus they are both easy to navigate and load in a reasonable time.  To go along with loading time, you should have a very good reason to use flash in your mobile sites.  Many phones and tablets still either do not support flash at all, or do support it with very limited capabilities.  There is no need to slow down your load time with something that most users won’t even be able to access.  If you are using flash with moving images, you may just have to load a few key images one by one to convey your intent without complex animations.

            There was a recent study done in Google’s Mobile Ads blog that found that “sites optimized for smartphone users make prospects 67 percent more likely to buy an item or carry out other desired transactions.  Meanwhile, 61 percent said issues with mobile site performance lead them to other websites to find what they’re looking for”.  Clearly optimizing websites for mobile is key to keeping the customers/followers that you have gained.  It creates a strong and reliable brand identity because you are consistent throughout all the platforms.  Optimizing is not actually that difficult or time consuming, but could help bring your site or brand to the next level with your customers/users.