Mobile usability of websites

Web is pervasive and the way we access to web is constantly changing and change is happening for the better. People are increasingly using smartphones to access sites than desktops and laptops as once they did. So keeping our websites mobile friendly is essential.

Mobile usability of websites

If you are new to web development how to make websites responsive will give a better idea.
Early 2018, Google has announced that websites which are mobile friendly will be ranked for better results in search engine. So it is always better to make sure you have optimized mobile performance to be there in the show!

Mobile usability and Responsiveness

Websites and content management systems should also be mobile oriented and make users feel ease while accessing. Mobile usability on the whole is a broad concept which includes responsiveness of the site and both are not the same. Responsive site means how well our sites adapt to the width and orientation of the mobile devices without users zoom-in the screen or horizontally scrolling across the website. These behaviors are reported to be pain points of users and make them to be frustrated.
Mobile usability is about designing for mobiles and planning content strategy for mobile experience and very importantly optimizing assets for faster delivery and performance no matter how big our site is.

How to make our websites Mobile usable and friendly

Viewport configuration

‘meta’ view port tag is used for setting width range across which our websites pan and adapt to. This tag instructs the browsers to render page dimensions to adapt to width and orientation of the mobile devices. Upon missing this tag media queries will not work and styles will be inherited from that of desktop’s.

Not found errors

For better usability it is always advisable to make sure that all assets are available to the users and not found errors cannot be tolerated. Google mobile friendly test checks whether all assets including images and style sheet and script files are loaded correctly else the test results will throw error.
Google crawl report in Webmaster console lists all Not found assets. We can also use third-party Link checker by entering the URL.

Flash support

Mobile browsers do not support flash. Flash has become a thing of past. With help of CSS3 and JavaScript we can create beautiful animations which are actually enhancing the user experience. Avoid using Flash
CSS provides very sleek and smooth animations. Make sure they are browser compatible.Add vendor prefixes like -moz,-ms,-webkit wherever applicable.

Page speed

Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse for optimizing our web pages so that it is quickly loaded in mobile devices. 

Easy to navigate

Web sites should have easy steps to navigate within the site. Users should be able to reach homepage within a single click from any pages deep within the site. Web sites having payment procedure should not have hiccups in the process and should go for deeper testing across all browsers and devices.

Font sizes

Font sizes of the page should be legible to read. Choosing font sizes and font family which have wider compatibility is a better choice. When choosing custom font families make sure they are supported widely and broken fonts are definitely bring down user’s reliability.

Clickable elements should not be placed close to each other

All mobile users especially novice will feel confused if touch elements are too close that on which elements they actually choose. Designers should keep in mind that the neighboring links should have a decent white-space in order to give user clarity of tapping elements.

Searchable site

1) Search options should be available to users placed in the right position as per the layout of the site.Generally, search option is provided in the right of the menu bar at the top.
2) Web Users will appreciate if the search results have appropriate filters and autocomplete options.
3) Crafting visually pleasing 404 pages are a nice way to tell the users that they didn't find what she was searching for.

Creating offline pages

When the server goes offline, caching the page and creating an offline page can give user a better experience instead of a blank page staring infront of you. More insights on this here.

Menu navigation in websites for mobile devices

We may have noted that there a lot of websites especially an e-commerce stores have mega menus for their desktop sites, whereas in mobile special concentration should be given to redesign it according to mobile preferences. Instead of scrolling a long menu we may lists the specific menus and lists the secondary menus upon user’s discretion. You may also read menu in bootstrap 4

Convertible Forms

Forms are ought to be efficiently designed keeping in mind user’s time and need of the forms.
Designers should think whether it is going to be a multi-step form or a single one. Using real time form validation will be more effective.
Always instruct the user’s prior regarding data to be filled. Be clear and simple in instructions.
It is strongly suggested to use auto fill fields. Filling the form inputs like name and address with pre-populated data enhances the speed of the process.

Google mobile friendly test

Google provides a chance to conduct a mobile friendly test for free using their tool. Keeping in my mind the importance of mobile performance, the mobile friendly test is designed. Google-bot will access our site and analyze the metrics and results the observations.
We may enter the full URL of the site in Google mobile friendly test and get the results.

Accelerated mobile page is an open source project initiated by Google for creating fast loading mobile pages.

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