Building a Mobile Site? 5 Common Slip-Ups Which Cost Companies Dearly
In a mobile first world, companies follow the best practices to build their mobile site, yet fail to make the most of having a mobile site. A closer look at the site reveals the truth – many minor slip-ups, all of which add up to undo the efforts gone into building the site. This blog focuses on some of those less realized issues which can make a big difference to the success of your mobile site.
Too Many Pop-Ups
If pops-ups are bad idea for e-commerce, they indeed are a bane for mobile sites. The one thing that mobile users appreciate the most is ease of view and use, and pop-ups, with their immensely distracting potential, do everything to make mobile viewing anything but easy.
Tips:
Mobile users can, at the most, put up with one pop-up and so having one pop-up makes sense. Further, don’t use pop ups in mobile sites to sell something or lure your visitor. Instead, use it to guide visitors along when they have been idle for several minutes or protect their security. They would read it as friendly gesture.
Lack of Filters
One big plus of online shopping is that it gives the buyer an option to filter items they are looking for by size, brand, price ranges, etc. It saves time and makes the search effortless. If your site does not have the right filters it drives away the motivation to shop online.
Tips
There’s no well-defined practice for great mobile site product filters. Different categories of products will require finely different filters; and you need to take a call on what attributes are important about each type of product based on what customers want from them.
Poor Checkout Experience
Desktop experience is never the same as mobile, and this is particularly true for the checkout process. Replicating a desktop checkout process onto mobiles can frustrate the mobile buyer to the point of abandoning the cart. Companies should build checkout from ground up for mobile, taking advantage of mobile-specific features.
Tips:
These are by no means the very finest mobile checkouts in the world. However some best practices are to desist from forced registration; security reassurance (about card details); progress indicators, bare minimum form filling, easy exit etc.
Weak Navigation
Navigating through several categories and product lines on mobile should be as easy as navigating through a site with a couple of product lines. In their haste to go mobile, companies overlook this key requirement and end up pushing away potential sales.
Tips
To deliver a great navigation experience, you need to do a bit of careful planning. Limit your main navigation buttons to five or less. If you wish to give visitors the desktop feel add nested menu. Use scrolling navigation with crucial elements at the top. Reduce the number of taps required to reduce chances of mistake.
Lack of Optimization
In the age of diverse devices, not optimizing your site for all available devices is a sin. Without optimization, you would fail to make a positive statement with users, causing your brand identity to take a beating. The tragedy is most companies overlook this critical requirement and end up committing hara-kiri. By the time they realize the mistake, lot of money and time is lost.
Tips
Some key point you need to keep in mind are: don’t block CSS, JavaScript, or images; don’t use flash; make the responsive website, care for the fat finger, ensure page speed, optimize search fields etc.
getSmartCoders has wide experience in designing highly functional websites and mobile sites for its customers. If you wish to make your online presence felt, come to us.