Web Design for Small Screens – User Experience at the Top

While many industry experts believe the rumour that Google only prefers responsive websites, this statement is partially true. Google gives greater credibility to websites that ensure good user experience – responsive or not. The success of your web design still hinges on the content that you offer on the site. However, to highlight that content and to make it presentable, navigation plays a crucial role.

Whether your target audience is accessing your website from a smartphone, mobile devices or the usual PCs, website navigation is something that shapes user experience. A well-thought out navigation compliments your content and enhances users’ understanding of what the website is all about. A few years back, mobile web was an uncharted territory and not many web designers were really looking forward to designing for the small screens. However, now times have changed and website design is more about being accessible to the target audience and conveying the message through impactful content, irrespective of the device they use.

So, what is it that you can do to make your website navigation adaptable to even the small screens on your smartphones? As per Google’s guidelines, responsive web design surely is the best practice for designing a flexible website that can adapt to any device, yet it may not be what the users want. Keeping user experience as the ultimate goal, Google says that webmasters can use different HTML to serve their content for small screen devices. This makes one thing very clear that Google doesn’t want everybody to go responsive; rather, it wants website designers to create sites that meet the users’ requirements.

Given below are few tips on designing websites that support smartphones and feature phones –

1.    Please the users, not the bots – Obsessing over responsive design may not pay off well if you are trying to reach users of feature mobile phones. It is important to identify user target audience and the type of phones they use. Designing your website as per the type of phones used by the targets would help in ensuring superior user experience.

2.    If not responsive, you can go for dynamic serving or separate URLs – When designing for feature phones, responsive websites do not perform well. So you can opt for either dynamic serving or separate URLs for feature phone mobile users. Separate URLs work well in smartphones as well.

3.    Stick to the conventional website structure that people are used to – When you experiment with your mobile web design, users tend to feel lost and confused on the site. It is important to eliminate complexity and stick to the site structure that users are familiar with.

Thus, instead of going by what the ‘experts’ say, it is best to find out what the users want, and design your mobile website accordingly.