Thumbs Up for Mobile

The small screen is overtaking and conquering the web. People use their phones to access the web more often than they use their desktops. The challenge UX designers face comes down to this question, “How do we make everything accessible when users primarily use their thumbs to access a small screen of 360x640?”

The three things that I want to talk about are empathy, vision, and consistency when it comes to designing websites or apps. I will touch on the desktop design and how it should gracefully shift into the mobile version and vice versa. How do we delight the user with small design touches? What are the missed opportunities of improving the mobile experience? I will also go over design patterns for mobile and how most users hold their phones.

1. Know the user (empathy) - The only way to succeed and make sense of any data is to know who you are designing for. Where are they going and how do they get there?

2. Set the UX vision - What do we want the users to do? Read? Buy? Contact us? These are the questions the vision should answer and all the designs should follow.

3. Consistency - When we introduce a new element or color to the user, we need to keep it consistent throughout the site. For example, if our hover color is red and our decline payment is also red, will this confuse our users? The same goes for layouts: if utility and secondary navigation items are always on the right, we need to keep that consistent as well.