With the rapid growth of mobile device usage, the importance for businesses to be mobile-friendly has become vital. Going hand-in-hand with a great Mobile Site is great Mobile User Experience (UX).
Recent statistics have shown that businesses with better Mobile Sites get 140% more revenue than having a bad Mobile Site. But how can you improve your mobile site UX?
There are many steps you can undertake to provide a good mobile experience, Google identifies three pillars of successful mobile sites; speed, content and design. Within design, commerce/conversions and form entry are the most important factors when considering UX.
In order to boost your mobile site conversions, be it at the checkout for your product they are purchasing or a site action valuable to your business, users should be taken to a relevant landing page which is clear and easy to navigate. A clear landing page will provide easier UX, whilst aiding the conversion journey. If you are unsure about how to improve the navigation on the landing page, a Usability Scanner App gives ideas on how to improve your mobile site.
Barriers to Conversions
There are many barriers to conversions on mobile sites. For example, 40% of people find the screen size is too small and 40% of people cannot trust credit card security on mobile checkouts. With this, mobile users often perform research to convert later on a different device. To ensure users can easily convert at a later time, your site should offer a simple way to return to this journey. This could be an option to email the product to the user, to save the page for later or to add your phone number to their contacts.
Commerce and Conversions
We already know that mobile users may convert at a different time, or on a different device, but what can you do to make the conversion journey simple for users?
Simplifying the checkout process for users is one way to push users towards converting. For checkout processes, navigation bars are a good tool to let users know what to expect in the next step. Pagination should be used for these checkout steps if there are more than two steps in the conversion flow.
How many sites have you been on that require you to create login details to buy a product? Annoying! Some businesses do not give users the option to checkout as a guest, which can cause users to not convert. Although you are unable to collect user information, offering a guest checkout option will help users to feel more comfortable converting.
When a user is nearing the conversion, there should be little or no other things on the screen. Distractions should be reduced near to the conversion stage to keep users engaged. When a user gets to the final conversion screen, the page should not display anything if it is not relevant to final step. This will help to ensure that the user successfully converts on your mobile site.
Form Optimisation
Whilst using your site on a small screen, it is important that users can clearly navigate and complete a form. You should look to remove any fields labelled as ‘Optional’, use an auto-fill tool (such as Google Place API) and use In-Line Validation (which indicates in the filling-in process if there are any errors). Dropdowns in a form should be used as a last resort.
Within a form field, the keypads offered affect UX. When completing a field for contact number, offer the user a keypad of numbers only. These can be changed by editing the Mobile Input Types by inserting a piece of HTML code to specify which keyboard to show.
<form>
Quantity (between 1 and 5):
<input type=”number” name=”quantity” min=”1″ max=”5″>
</form>
To summarise, businesses with great mobile sites see up to 140% increase in revenue. Commerce/conversions can be boosted by simplifying the checkout process for users. Forms on your mobile site should be optimised to the bare minimum needed. UX on a mobile site is vital to get the maximum conversions for your business.
All information taken from Google Partners Academy on Air Livestream.