Mobile Design

SOME FACTS

• 45% of all searches are now done on mobile.
  
• Tablets out selling desktops on eBay.
  
• Flash (animation used on a lots of websites including the BBC) does not play on Apple i.e Ipad or Iphone
• Forrester Research is already predicting tablet sales in the U.S. will overtake netbook sales by 2012, and desktop sales by 2015.
  
• Smartphone sales will hit 420 million units by the end of 2011.
  
• Apple appears to bigger player of smartphones but Android and Nokia still have bigger market share.
  
• Tablets & Smartphones work in landscape & Portrait mode

Flash & Apple

As you may or may not know, Iphones & Ipads presently do not have ‘Flash’ support.

What does this mean ?
Well simply put a lot of sites use flash for simple animation.

How does it effect me ?
Well if your site uses flash, then Ipad & Iphones do not show these elements. Some times this can be an advert, menu, banner, images or in some extreme cases the whole website.

What do we do to fix this ?
There are other techniques that can be used. One is Jquery, this uses similar technology to allow for simple animation.

A side issue is that presently Flash is not good for Google.

List Rule

• Listing items
• Clean fonts
• No complicated backgrounds

Smartphones need design consideration. There is a lot less room on the screen to play with, which means that labelling & navigation needs to be very clear and ideally less than 3 words.

Also you need to make sure the user feels comfortable, meaning that links and buttons need to be clear and easy to press when they are small.

The picture shows ebay, on the desktop it takes one screen, on the mobile 4 – 6

Mobile Site Benefits

• Website can be set to automatically recognizes mobile device
• Phone number goes to dialer
• Contact us page can go straight to GPS and phones map software.
• WordPress users plugin is free
• Mobile technology and information on the move is going to become bigger.

Portrait & Landscape

Mobile phones and tablets have the ability to turn through 90degrees. This means that the web designer needs to make sure the site can ‘Resize’ on the fly. In most cases the phone or phone takes care of the resizing, but a wide website with lots of details is going to struggle.

As you can see in the picture this site looks good both ways. Some sites are built with banners, menu or the logo to tall so that the user has to scroll a lot before getting to information.

Clutter

On mobiles because of the limited space ‘less is more’. There are lots of consideration but here are some of thoughts

• Make sure the site can resize
• Make sure the text can resize
• Images, size in terms of file size need to be kept small
• If you do have lots of pages group them well, wikipedia is a huge website but still has a good user experience

Here you can see a nice clean that also works well on mobile

Need to know more?
Have your site checked for Mobile / Tablet compatibility

Talk to Andy on 01733 341525