The growth of smartphone ownership and the need for businesses to have a mobile-optimised site is now more or less a given for any online trading enterprise now that the vast majority of users literally carry the internet in their pockets, yet there are still businesses out there who are failing to keep up with that need and consequently putting themselves at a disadvantage.

In the days when the internet was new and exciting, most users were prepared to spend time trying to find their way around websites with poor navigation and slow loading times because they were amazed by this novel technology that only a few years before would have been considered the work of science fiction.

It’s a different story today though; users are now far more knowledgeable and confident and with it has come higher expectations of websites in general but even more so when they are viewing them on their smartphones and because they are an ‘on the move’ audience, they no longer have the time or the inclination to have to scroll down too far or be made to scroll sideways.

They expect navigation to be an extremely simple affair; they look for and only read information pertinent to them: anything else is just superfluous and a waste of effort. Users also tend to favour shorter search phrases for mobile and many prefer predictive search which is a good enough reason to try and ensure your keywords and search phrases are amongst the most popular ones.

When it comes to performing any action on their mobiles, asking users to enter anything other than an email address is generally way too much trouble for them so things like forms for example are best designed so users can choose their answers from an option menu which significantly minimizes user input and anything that achieves that will certainly be appreciated by users themselves.

Speed is a big part of the internet; users are only happy when websites load instantly and navigation takes little or no time at all and everything else functions quickly, and they expect all this to happen with the minimum of effort on their part, and because they are consumers as well as users, it’s up to businesses to meet those expectations if they want to remain competitive.

Until next time.

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