How to Design for the Mobile user Segment, in four short steps?

Keep it simple. This is the keyword we focus on in this blogpost. People that are browsing around the web mostly tend to look for an answer, or get something done. Instead of making everything flashy, full of animations and in general just hard for mobile users, go blank!

 

1. Mobile Users Are Different
As mentioned above, a mobile user does not want to get held back by beautiful design, or animations. Especially don’t make a user wait for an animation to finish, before he can continue his task, or you may up ending with an unfinished animation on his side, and a user that already is looking for another website which can help his task.
Here you can have a look at a – while imaginative and clean  – rather bad execution of animations. (try swaping the menupoints)

2. Going Blank
What do we mean? Don’t go for an overloaded Design, try to solve it simple, and clean. Try a white background possibly? Go for a black and white, two or even three tone color-scheme instead of a colorful palette.
Look at this marvelous minimalistic architecture example. This could be the definition of going blank. Incase you need some help, or have some questions, feel free to send us an email!

3. Touching The Screen, Not Clicking
Always keep in mind that people will be interacting with your webpage trough touches and swipes, not clicks. Be sure that your menu is touch friendly. So many menus are not at all considering touch users.
Here is one of the nicest mobile menu navigations I could find for mobile users. It perfectly pops up in the middle of the screen, making it rather easy to touch the correct menupoint.

4. Size Does Matter
Everyone has a different size of screen and hands. So assuming the visitor has a giant Iphone or Android, and the menu is at the top of the screen – how do they get there? You can now think of a few solutions, or put the menu to the correct place. The bottom or center of the screen. We prefer the bottom.

 

To finish this I would like to add that there always are exceptions to the rule. But in general we think that you are on the safe side if you consider these few steps as a guideline to your design. Especially if you are designing for Architects and Engineers, try to keep fancy stuff away, unless they were requested in the first place.