I had a meeting with a client recently to review their website, and it turns out that people visit on their phones twice as often as on desktop. Twice as many. And this isn’t unusual, I have other examples where mobile traffic is in the 80-90% range.
But when looking over the website, the habit is to step through it on a desktop or laptop. We must stop doing that! What’s the specific danger?
A brief history
When the term responsive design was coined and started becoming known in late 2010, it revolutionised the web design industry. Now you could build one website for both desktop and mobile, and that hadn’t always been the case prior to to that.
And then we all got a bit lazy – once frameworks were in place it kind of became assumed that whatever you did on desktop would just collapse for the smaller screen. And that was kinda mostly true seeing as how most visitors were still on desktops.
But it’s not like that any more.
Do you provide good customer service?
If you believe that you provide good customer service and a good customer experience – if that’s important to you – then you need to stop looking at your website on a desktop until after your mobile version is as good as it can be.
Mobile isn’t an afterthought. It’s your primary customer experience.
Now this all sounds great in principle. I’m sure you thinking, “yeah, of course. We already know that Jason!”
And you probably do in theory, but how about in practice?
The default behaviour when I’m doing a review with a client is to put the website on a larger screen so we can all see it together. But this is not how most of your customers see it. Resist that default behaviour. Work on changing that habit.
Watch the video for a simple way how.