I had a bit of a wake up call this month. I was looking at the analytics across the sites I work on, and the phone traffic has crossed half. Half. On some of them it is more than half. And most of these sites were designed on a big monitor, for a big monitor, back when a phone visitor was a rounding error.
For years I treated mobile as the secondary thing. The desktop site was the real site, and the phone version was the compromise you made for the people on the go. That thinking is now completely backwards, and my numbers are telling me so every single day.
The thing I finally did
I stopped designing on my computer and started checking everything on my phone first. Sounds obvious. It was not, because it is genuinely uncomfortable to see how bad your own work looks on a small screen when you never look at it there.
So I went page by page with my actual phone in my actual hand and asked simple questions:
- Can I read this without zooming
- Can I tap the buttons without missing
- How long does this take to load on a normal connection, not office wifi
- Can I actually finish the thing I came to do, buy, book, contact, all of it, with two thumbs
The answers were humbling. Slow pages, tiny tap targets, forms that were miserable on a phone.
What I am testing now
I am fixing the worst offenders first and measuring as I go. Bigger tap targets. Faster loading, because a phone on a normal connection is not patient. Forms cut down to the fewest fields possible, because typing on glass is a pain. And I am watching whether the phone bounce rate drops as I fix each thing.
The bigger shift
I think we are past the point where mobile is a version of your site. Mobile is your site, and the desktop is the bonus. I am late to fully believing that, but the data dragged me here. From now on I am testing every page the way most of my visitors actually experience it: on a phone, on a normal connection, in one hand, probably a little distracted. If it works there, it works.
Write a comment