One size doesn’t fit all - developing for web and mobile
One of the reasons it can be really beneficial to enlist the support of an experienced digital agency to build a new website is the understanding of what works (and doesn’t work) across an ever increasing range of devices and platforms. At Juniper we’ve worked on a wide range of platforms and been involved in building websites, digital products, web applications and mobile apps. All across a wide variation of devices giving us a deep knowledge on what considerations need to be made when building a digital presence.
The approach is different for all businesses, depending on the target audience, expected capabilities of the end users and role of the digital solution being developed, among other factors.
How well your digital solution performs on the device that a person is accessing it on can make or break whether that sale is successful or the information you’re needing to share gets across. A website with poor responsive accessibility could quickly turn a user away, here are some obvious examples:
A website or application that doesn’t scale to the screen and has a shopping cart in the top right. Meaning that the user doesn’t realise they need to horizontally scroll on a mobile phone screen, preventing them from completing the purchasing process.
A website or application that has an accordion containing large amounts of content - which on a small screen makes it incredibly difficult to open and close the individual tabs.
A mobile application that doesn’t respond to screen size and text is therefore too large on some screens and too small on others.
Differing devices
It’s important to consider what your target audience is most likely to be viewing your website or web application on. Is it for example to sell a product or service to a very commercial audience, who may tend to favour using a laptop or personal computer? Or maybe you’re selling something which is more likely to be purchased or researched by people sitting at home using their mobile phone, tablet or a combination of devices.
Researching this information will answer your first, critical question - what types of devices do you need to prioritise user experience for? Depending upon your budget, you can then choose how you approach your digital solution.
Browser compatibility
If your digital solution is a web application or website, you’ll also need to consider which browsers you’re going to ensure it’s compatible with. Although there are standard major browsers (Edge, Chrome, Safari, Firefox) this isn’t the full list of browsers that your users may access your website or application on.
Depending upon your audience, you may need to consider some of the other browsers and how these handle a fluid page layout may influence your overall design.
If you have an existing website or application in place, hopefully you’ve also got access to some Google Analytics - so it' should be easy to identify what browsers are important to your users. However if you don’t have this data available, it’s worth doing a little market research to figure it out.
Compromises for smaller screens
In some cases, it makes sense to consider dropping some content on smaller screens. If we take a website for a company delivering a specific service as an example; often testimonials will be displayed on a website to show credibility. However, if you consider someone using a mobile phone to access that same website, they need to get to the key information quickly and without lots of scrolling. It’s often the case therefore, that content which is considered lower priority is hidden on a smaller screen to improve the user experience.
This isn’t always necessary - it depends entirely upon how much content there is on a web page to begin with and also how valuable that content is deemed to be.
Thorough end to end testing
The biggest piece of advice that we can offer, is ensure that your digital solution is tested; end to end on a variety of devices with different performance capabilities, screen sizes and capabilities. To be clear - this doesn’t mean you need to buy lots of different mobile phones! There are lots of handy tools online which allow you to mimic the behaviour of your digital solution on different browsers and devices (http://www.browserstack.com as an example).
If you’re using an off the shelf solution to build something (e.g. we use Squarespace to build most of our websites) don’t take it for granted that everything will just work. Do that check yourself (or get someone else to do it!) just to be sure that your user is getting the best possible experience.
We here at Juniper have vast experience of leading the development and delivery of digital solutions, if you have a project which you would like some support with please do get in touch.
