Designing Usable Mobile Websites

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Peak Newsability - 20 April 2011

Are you in the mobile website game? Many organisations don't want to play, but times are changing and changing fast. During the year 2015 the Asia-Pacific region is projected to see nearly 500 million NEW smartphones, and Google ex-CEO Eric Schmidt has declared that the pace of mobile growth has outstretched even Google's own predictions.

It's time to get on board... and if you are on board, how confident are you that your site provides an ideal mobile experience? We've been keeping an eye on the mobile space here at Peak, and while there are already some good mobile-optimised sites out there, we're pretty sure there are many more on the way.

We want to help.

PDFDesigning usable mobile websites - a practical guide (PDF 1.7MB)

So, we've gone ahead and put together a guide for your consumption! The Peak Usability whitepaper Designing usable mobile websites (PDF, 1.7MB) is now available for download for our intrepid websites users only. This high-level guide outlines how to approach critical topics in mobile site design, including:

  • Where to start
  • The types of research you'll want to do to inform your design
  • How to choose target platforms for development
  • Key usability guidelines for crafting your mobile website
    • Designing for a goal
    • Page layout
    • Visual and interaction design
    • Site navigation
  • Mobile heuristic checklist for evaluating design efforts
  • Lots of externals links to further reading

We hope this guide will assist you as you start thinking about a move into the mobile web space, or tweaking your existing mobile site to be more usable and user friendly.

As always, there's no silver bullet - this document contains guidelines, things to keep in mind. Your best bet for designing usable, useful, and engaging experiences is to follow successful design practices and involve users in the design process. There are definitely fun and interesting ways of researching, prototyping, and testing mobile sites... But we'll get into them another time.

New products launched

Our range of services is ever-expanding. Like you, we must constantly review the needs of our "users". Here is a snapshot of some new products and some perhaps lesser known services that Peak offers. We're so much more than just web gurus.

Pre-paid consulting packages

There's only seventy shopping days left until EOFY.

Peak offers three tiers of consulting packages, offering a reduced consulting rate when you pre-purchase 50 hours or more. The benefits of pre-purchasing consulting time are significant:

  • Consulting time can be used at any time throughout the year. Avoid the end of year financial rush to spend your budget. Effectively carry over unspent budget into the next financial year so you don’t lose it.
  • You are not locked in to a particular service. You can use a number of services throughout the year and reallocate hours to different activities or projects if your needs change.
  • Save money and get access to discounted rates when pre-purchasing more hours.

Call us to book your pre-paid package now. 07 3838 9593.

Call centre IVR menu design

More frustrating than a bad website, is a poorly-designed telephone menu... "Press 1 to be frustrated. Press 2 to be really frustrated.". Don't risk losing any more customers.

We have helped our clients to design an optimal phone menu structure and test it with real users. Call us to find out more. You'll be answered by a person, not a machine.

Product design review

Usability evaluation and research has been contributing to better product design and streamlining processes since the creation of the wheel. Our user experience consultants have evaluated a diverse range of products from kettles, through mobile phones to home dialysis machines.

The fundamental benefit of a product usability review comes down the mighty dollar. Sales can improve through design of a better product (think iPhone) and costs can be reduced by streamlining the touchpoints in a process. Have a chat to Dan Seward to learn how we can help you achieve peak usability for your products.

Visual and interaction design

Wouldn't you like an application or web design that was near perfect from Day 1? Our interaction design services put you ahead of the game by optimising the visual elements for the user. We understand how users think and what they expect, and we can design software forms and application interfaces to take advantage of this. If you've ever observed one of our usability testing sessions you'll appreciate how your very own customers can do the most surprising things. Contact us to find out more.

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Usability tip

Bulleted lists keep pages on target

At Peak, we commonly test information-heavy sites for findability of particular pieces of data. We all know that people scan pages to find information of interest, which can be assisted by good headers. But sometimes just locating information isn't enough - heavy paragraphs of text can be hard to process. Sometimes it's simpler to digest a list of dot points.

Bullets are great for:

  • Increasing scanability.
  • Communicating fundamental ideas.
  • Reducing cognitive load.
  • Summarizing copy / content.
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