When you find that there are more than 2 billion mobile apps and they have been downloaded around 130 billion times, you realize the importance of mobile apps. Even though the conventional websites are important, it is increasingly becoming important to have mobile-friendly websites or mobile apps for your brand to gain recognition and popularity. That’s the reason for the growing popularity to outsource mobile app development services to competent firms with ample experience and expertise. There are many points to be considered by the developers while designing a website that would be mobile-friendly.
1) Keep The Inputs Minimal
Since more users are accessing the websites through their mobiles, it is important to keep the inputs minimal. You can provide the user more options to choose from rather than having to text-input them. This is because typing using the mobile is error-prone and takes longer time. If your website is session-based, this could be a major problem to handle. Experienced companies that offer offshore mobile app development services either design the pages with minimal text inputs or use a separate mobile-friendly website with minimal or no user input.
2) Mobiles do Not Support Hover
Many designers use the ‘Hover’ option to display text, pop-ups or links to the users which will not work while accessing the site through a mobile device. So either does not use the ‘hover’ option or consider developing a different responsive mobile website and redirecting to it when accessed from a mobile device.
3) The Fat-finger Problem
While websites never have to bother about a fat-finger, the mobile devices need to consider this issue seriously. The issue is when a person clicks or touches on links that are too closer, the click may be wrongly rendered. If the user has a fat-finger, there needs to be ample spacing provided between links in a mobile website. While managing offshore web design and development, the designer has to make sure that such issues do not happen. A good solution for this is using icons on the webpage instead of text links.
4) Heavy Media
Mobiles usually run on data that’s not as advanced and fast as the high-speed broadband internet. Moreover, when there are too many heavy elements such as large images, animations, videos etc to be loaded into the page, it might take much longer for the page to load. Sometimes, the page may not even load in which case the customer may never come back to check your website.
5) Can be Distracted Easily
Another challenge for those providing Offshore Web Design Solutions is that mobile phones are prone to distractions. When the user is accessing a website or page using the mobile, a call, a text message, a WhatsApp message or any other notification could easily distract the user to switch his/her attention to that notification or call. If you want your user to come back to your site soon, your content needs to be as compelling.
6) Navigation Can be Cumbersome
On a desktop, website navigation might seem very easy and simple even if you have categorized menus. But on a mobile, with limited screen size, the size of the web page can be crucial to keep the customer engaged. Mobile sites can be extremely difficult to navigate if you have too many menu options. Instead, a single-page website with more icons to navigate to other pages will be more desirable.