The world becomes more interconnected every day, thanks to mobile devices. Data from Statista shows the number of mobile internet users worldwide could hit an estimated 6.7 billion by 2028. Mobile devices account for 53.59% of total online traffic, compared with 44.59% for desktops and 1.82% for tablets.
This makes a mobile-first UX design more important now than ever before. Why? A mobile-first approach can improve the load time of a website, offering improved accessibility to all visitors and, ultimately, a more satisfying and convenient user experience.
If you’re a qualified or aspiring UX designer looking to build a mobile-first website, we’ve written this article just for you. Read on to learn how to implement this increasingly popular design concept. Let’s get on with it.
Why Mobile-First UX Design Matters
Taking a mobile-first approach to design means that you design for the smaller mobile screens first. Then, you adapt it to bigger screens like tablets and computers.
It’s unlike the traditional “mobile-friendly” approach, where you initially design your site for large screens and scale down later.
Believe it or not, the order in which you create your designs matters. There are two concepts that come into play here:
- Progressive Advancement: This involves designing a low-functionality basic version for smaller screens and then moving to advanced functionality for desktop versions. It includes upgrading the basic version—an advancement.
- Graceful Degradation: This involves designing the more advanced version (for desktops) first and then making it compatible with mobile devices. This requires cutting on some features and functionality—a degradation of the original.
The progressive advancement approach is preferred because it doesn’t involve wasting time on features that may never be adopted for mobile devices.
Considerations for Mobile User Behavior
As you try to grasp your mobile users’ needs, research their behavior to optimize their experiences.
Typically, people can’t get enough of their smartphones. Research indicates that 56.9% of Americans are actually addicted to these devices. But some more than others.
80.42% of Gen Zers tend to check their mobile devices within as little as 5 minutes after receiving a notification. On the other hand, millennials are less likely to do the same.
Understanding these statistics is crucial to delivering a better mobile-first user experience.
For instance, if Gen Z is your target audience, mobile push notifications could help you boost UX. After all, this pool is likely to click on them immediately.
But how can this improve user experience? Well, your users can quickly access the valuable content they crave.
7 Steps to Perfecting Mobile-First UX Design
Here are the seven pivotal steps to crafting a seamless and engaging mobile-first user experience.
1. Understand Your Mobile Audience
Starting with user research methods, you’ll want to dig into your mobile audience’s diverse needs and tailor your mobile-first design to satisfy their core needs. Understanding your target market can guide you in creating your site’s user segments.
Some of the basic questions you’ll want to answer during this step include:
- Who are my users?
- What do they need?
- How can I provide it?
For example, let’s assume you’re creating a website for a dental clinic. Users will likely want to know:
- Where the clinic is
- Its operating hours
- Available dental services
- Contact information
Be sure to include these details on your landing page. Also, you can add a CTA prompting users to call since they’ll be using their mobile devices.
2. Prioritize Essential Features
Decluttering your mobile site’s interface by displaying only the most important features helps users better interact with your mobile-first website.
A recent study shows that many web users deem browser clutter a big challenge, especially elements like multiple tabs and interactive elements. Imagine how bad the situation is for mobile users with limited screens.
Minimalism is the key to creating a great mobile user interface (UI). To do that, you can incorporate visual cues, like icons, to help guide users through the interface.
And, while ads might be common on websites for desktop, it’s a good idea to minimize them on your mobile design to reduce visual clutter and eliminate the risk of users accidentally clicking on them.
Check out the example below that shows the difference between a minimal mobile-friendly website by Calm and a cluttered website by Shein.
3. Use a Responsive and Adaptive Design
You should prioritize a responsive and adaptive design to enable mobile users to access your site from all devices. But keep this in mind: although these two design methods enhance mobile user experience, they are not the same.
A responsive design scales your website’s layout and content to suit the various screen sizes. Contrarily, an adaptive design requires creating a unique layout for every device accessing your site.
Therefore, with a responsive design, everyone can seamlessly use your website. This is regardless of whether their mobile screen size is 4.5″, 5.5″, or 7.6″.
With an adaptive design, you’ll need multiple versions of your site for different users, depending on their mobile screen sizes.
Ultimately, an adaptive and responsive design allows you to deliver a cohesive user experience across many devices.
The end goal? To meet all your mobile users’ varied needs.
4. Optimize Touch Controls
With a desktop, UX/UI designers have a large variety of interactions to choose from, but not all translate to mobile devices.
The hover state, for example, is a common interaction for devices with a mouse or trackpad. However, there is no direct equivalent for mobile users.
When designing your elements and interactions, a good practice is to focus on touch gestures.
These are movements that website visitors use their hands to make to interact with your site.
Examples of touch gestures include:
- Tapping
- Double tapping
- Swiping
- Long pressing
- Dragging
- Pinching
- Rotating
- Zooming
All these gestures are handy in different situations. For example, zooming out enables users to enlarge page content to analyze images or view the site’s more intricate details.
On the other hand, swiping allows mobile users to check out more content or options from a list.
Here’s an illustration of common touch gestures for mobile-first UI design.
5. Ensure Fast Load Times
Fast site load times are a must, no matter what device is used to access your site. However, mobile users often rely on mobile network speeds, which can be significantly slower than the fiber optic speeds of Wi-Fi-only devices.
How slow is too slow? According to Backlinko, the median speed for the top ten pages on Google SERP is 1.65 seconds. Anything slower than that may be too slow.
If you want to guarantee fast load times when creating your mobile-first website, optimize your content. There are a few tools that can help:
- Google PageSpeed Insights: It analyzes a site’s content and loading speed. It offers specific suggestions to make your pages faster on mobile.
- GTmetrix: It tests your pages’ performance and analyzes loading speed. It also provides useful insights on optimizing the latter.
- TinyImage or Compressor.io: These two online platforms compress images without a discernible loss in quality.
- Cloudflare: It speeds up the distribution of website resources to users from the closest server location to cut page load time.
6. Test Extensively Across Devices
Website usability testing across multiple devices helps you experience your site from users’ perspectives. This enables you to confirm that your mobile-first UX design is indeed seamless across all platforms.
Today, the sheer diversity of devices people use to consume content online is striking. Sure, mobile phones, including smartphones, hold the top spots in 2023. But others, such as tablets, smart home devices, feature phones, and game consoles, also have many fans.
Here are a few general categories of devices that you’ll want to include when testing your designs:
- Smartphones: Start with small devices like the iPhone SE, which boasts a 4.7-inch display. Also, test for larger ones like the Samsung Galaxy Note series, which often surpass 6.7 inches.
- Tablets: The tablet category is large, with devices like the 7.9-inch iPad Mini to the 12.9-inch iPad Pro.
- Phablets: These devices blur the line between phones and tablets and often range from 6 to 7.9 inches.
- Wearables: From the Apple Watch’s 1.57-inch and 1.78-inch displays to other smartwatches with varying sizes, this category requires special attention.
- Foldables: A newer category, with devices like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 that offer a 6.23-inch cover display and a 7.6-inch main display.
We also suggest testing your mobile-first website on various operating systems, including iOS and Android. Don’t ignore less popular options like HarmonyOS to broaden your accessibility and coverage.
7. Stay Updated with Design Trends and Feedback
Understanding mobile UX design trends and feedback can help you leverage different advancements to deliver an exemplary mobile-first user experience.
Remember, the mobile UX design sphere is constantly evolving. If you stay on top of trends, you can know the aspects to prioritize when building your site. This allows you to provide what users really want.
And with feedback, you can make improvements. For example, did you know that UX designers now use social proof to improve user engagement? When you embed Google reviews and video testimonials on your website, users trust your brand more.
That delivers a pleasant user experience as you help customers make important decisions, like whether to invest in a product.
Another rising trend in UX design is content recommendation. This is where a website shows users blogs or articles they may like based on their content preferences.
It enriches customers’ experiences by providing easy access to more valuable information. This content recommendation blog on Attrock can help you learn more about the process.
Below is an example of a website (Semrush.com) recommending similar content at the end of a blog post.
Ready to Build Your Mobile-First Website?
Mobile-first UX design is essential to deliver a unified mobile user experience on all devices. Applying these seven points could help you create your mobile-first website to guarantee user engagement and retention.
If you’d like to improve your UX design skill set, it’s never too late. You can start with Designlab’s intensive online program, UX Academy, to dive into various mobile-first UX design concepts.
