Building smooth mobile experience
Artem Rudenko
CEO, Founder
Users expect your mobile website to be as fast and user-friendly as your native app. This is important to get right because most sites receive more mobile traffic 
than desktop traffic. If you have a poor mobile experience, you could lose a significant portion of your user base.
The fundamentals of good mobile UX
So how do you go about achieving a good mobile user experience? The most fundamental ingredient is to implement a responsive layout that makes the site’s content look good on all screen sizes. The variety of screen sizes is vast, which makes it challenging to create a perfectly responsive website. It may look great on the most popular sizes, but when you open it on a less common, rarely seen device, you may be surprised by its broken appearance.
Next, you should focus on making it easy to navigate the site by using large clickable elements and minimizing nested menus. It’s also important to avoid using elements that are difficult to interact with via touch. The key is to find a good balance between usability and aesthetics.
Performance on mobile devices
Website optimization is critical for a good mobile UX, since mobile devices have slower processors, less memory, and a slower connection (if using wireless data). To reduce bandwidth requirements, you should compress images, lazy load assets, and download only what you need for the first screen (see: Extract critical CSS and Critical rendering path ).
To truly optimize your site, you’ll need to measure if your changes are having any meaningful effect by leveraging performance analysis tools like:
- Google Lighthouse
- WebPageTest
- PageSpeed Insights.
It’s crucial to collect metrics regularly and notify your team about any issues found. This way, you can identify regressions introduced by the website updates.
Accessibility and reliability
One of the most important accessibility features is the tolerance to network’s instability and lack of performance. When using a mobile device on wireless data (e.g. 5G), the network may be unstable. Ideally, your mobile web app should handle network instability gracefully, displaying network errors appropriately or even supporting an offline mode.
Other aspects of accessibility are aimed at respecting user’s preferences. You should take the user’s preferences into account and enable features like:
- Dark theme – some people feel more comfortable and perceive websites better when using a dark theme. Offering a dark theme can significantly improve the website's conversion rate.
- Text zooming – pay special attention to the fonts on your website. Even if you need to use small font sizes, ensure that users can easily enlarge them.
- Voice input – voice input technologies are advancing rapidly, making it common for users to type with their voice instead of their fingers. Ensure that all long text input fields support voice input.
Conclusion
Good mobile UX is not just about responsive layout, but a comprehensive focus on performance, user interface, and accessibility. Be strict on the details and compare your product to best practices. And most importantly, be attentive to your users and constantly gather feedback to improve the mobile experience.
