Designing with Your Customers in Mind

Designing a mobile site for customer engagement is the pathway to creating more business. It’s important to understand the steps involved in creating that kind of success.

Purpose of Your Site

Some make the purpose of their website the last thing they think about when it should be the first. There is nothing more frustrating than realizing that the design of the site and reason for the site are at cross purposes. Each business is different but they all need to decide:

• Who to target and what are their needs
• How the customer will contact the business
• What information they want to capture from the customer

Something as simple as being able contact the business or even socially sharing it needs to be ironed out from the start

Color Scheme and Font

When you’re creating a free website or using a free template, for example, you may not have the luxury of manipulating the code to change the look and flow of the content. That’s one of the major disadvantages of going that route. From a usability perspective, a simple thing like whether to have a black background with light font or vice versa can mean the difference between a pleasant user experience and possible eye strain. Working with smaller real estate means making font size and color scheme come together to make a site more pleasant to read and less troublesome.

Test Again and Again

Assuming you know what your project will look like or how it’s going to react can provide a false sense of security. While you may not completely skip testing, it may not cover as many angles as necessary. Having intuitive and speedy navigation with clear call to action indicators can mean the difference in getting the sale or missing it by a tiny margin. A user who needs your services and has his wallet open will want to get in touch immediately, not hunt for a way to contact you.

Another test would be to find if the site has too much text. You’re dealing with a smaller screen and the temptation is to present as much information as possible. Designing for mobile doesn’t afford that luxury, so finding creative, usable and elegant ways to convey the same message in shorter phrases or with icons is going to be a challenge—but not too much of a challenge for the right designer.

Design to Attract Users

This may seem like an obvious choice because there doesn’t seem to be any other purpose to designing a mobile site. The truth is that’s the reason why so many people take this step for granted. Designing to attract visitors means you’ve done some research ahead of time. Understanding your users’ mobile patterns is one of the first steps to take. Understanding how users interact with your content and whether they interact in a rushed or relaxed fashion will help you know how to target your audience in a time efficient way.

The decision to design a mobile site or an app will also help you. How often the content is updated, the level of complex data calculations as well as personalization can help you better weigh your options and what’s best for the customer. A good number of these criteria can be understood with the help of analytics from sites like Google Analytics. You will need to put in some effort to get to the specifics but what it tells you can be invaluable.

Your mobile site is another way to supplement your reach and extend your brand. At the end of the day, you need to be clear and about your objectives as well as your plans to achieve them if you’re going to have any hope of success.