09 Sep Mobile Usability – Customer satisfaction by optimizing your website

Your customers are the first priority for you as a company. No matter what you do – every step should be aimed at their satisfaction. This is how you build trust, bind customers to your company in the long term and get them to recommend your products to others – for example in the form of valuable ratings. The increase in customer satisfaction depends on many different criteria. One aspect that now seems almost self-evident is optimizing your website for mobile devices. Why this is so important and which areas you should pay attention to, we would therefore like to explain this week in more detail.

Usability as the equivalent of customer friendliness

The English word „usability“ is used to describe the user-friendliness of a website. If a prospective customer finds his way around a website quickly and without problems, the probability is higher that he will become a customer in the end. Customers feel welcome and well looked after on a website that is clearly laid out and offers all relevant information. What the customer friendliness in a store is – that is, courteous and helpful employees, that is usability on websites.

Therefore, it is basically essential to put a lot of emphasis on the design of the website and to pay attention to the various aspects that can increase usability. Pages should load quickly and be clearly and uniformly designed (keyword: recognition value). Furthermore, various elements are expected at certain positions. For example, the logo is usually located at the top left, the menu in the middle and in online stores the shopping cart is usually placed on the right.

Other starting points for mobile usability

If you now look at the usability aspect with regard to mobile devices, it quickly becomes clear that usability is enormously important here as well, but is based on completely new requirements. This is largely due to the much smaller display and the rotated aspect ratio used to display the content. While the logo, menu and shopping cart can still be displayed side by side on a laptop, this would not make sense on a smartphone simply because of the readability.

In addition, the user does not use a mouse as a control element, but interacts with the various elements via touch. As a result, hover content, for example, which appears or changes when the mouse is moved over it, is no longer displayed.

Mobile use of the content should also be considered. Often these are consumed while walking or while waiting for the next train and so on. Content must therefore be made even clearer and should load quickly even with a poorer Internet connection.

To underline the relevance of this necessary adaptation, two indicators can be examined more closely. On the one hand, smartphone use has been increasing steadily in recent years, and in Germany alone there were around 58 million users in 2019. ^[1] On the other hand, there were updates from Google in 2015 and 2018 („mobile friendliness“ update, „mobile-first“ indexing), which make optimization virtually unavoidable. Websites and apps that are optimized for mobile use have been preferred by Google since then and are positioned higher in the search results.

How you can increase mobile usability

Based on this Google ranking factor alone, optimization for mobile devices has become a mandatory step to ensure the long-term success of your business. In the following it should therefore be clarified which aspects you have to consider and what you can implement concretely.

Many customers still use a laptop or computer in addition to their mobile devices. So they see your website in different forms, which is why you should refrain from a visual separation of the different formats. No matter what size and presentation your website has to have recognition value. For example, always use the same fonts (keyword: typography) and the same color scheme.

In general, the design should also make sense on mobile devices – i.e. on smaller screens – and reflect the relevant content. It can therefore help not to break down the desktop display to the size of the smartphone, but to think about a new design. Rethink texts and consider how they can be shortened. Also question the added value of your images. Because while they can make the design on the desktop look more relaxed, they may cause unnecessary and annoying scrolling on small devices.

In addition, images can enormously increase the loading time of a page, which can lead to aborts even more often on mobile devices than on a laptop. So think about loading images only when they are really relevant, for example, when the user has arrived at the appropriate location.

Formats and elements that work on a large screen often have to be rethought for smaller ones. Flash and JavaScript do not work on mobile devices and should be replaced by standard HTML tags – also because of the loading time. As described above, it is also no longer possible to display logo, menu and other elements next to each other. A possible solution is the so-called burger menu. The symbol with the three lines on top of each other is very common and most users know that behind it the different categories can be found. Also on an appropriate size as well as on sufficient distance between the elements much value should be put. If the touch control does not work properly, users are often frustrated and leave the website again. Just like the elements, the text must be legible to avoid tedious zooming in and out.

Make it as easy as possible for users on small screens. Create a visual hierarchy with different colors, shapes and contrasts. Headings and subheadings can also help. Customers can find all relevant information within seconds and customer satisfaction can be increased.

Conclusion

In order to increase customer satisfaction and consequently the success of your company, you cannot avoid optimizing your website nowadays. Google, too, ensures that mobile content is preferred and many companies are therefore forced to take action. The optimization can take place at different aspects and basically follows a central idea: The easier and faster users find their way around the website and find relevant content, the better!

^[1] Statista: Anzahl der Nutzer von Smartphones in Deutschland bis 2019