Limitations of Mobile friendly websites and how to avoid them

by Guna Nadar - 5/25/2015 9044 Views

Thinking out of the box and stay updated to the changes

The last few years has seen a surge in mobile web designing. The implications have increased further after Google came up with the April 21^st update that aims to penalize websites that haven’t been turned responsive. However, one must understand that mobile web designing isn’t just about a website or an application but a range of options and choices to be made. Responsive website designing can be tricky and comes with many limitations. However, there are also ways of getting over and presenting your audience a qualitative and profitable experience.

No ‘hover’ functionality

Until now, developers haven’t been able to integrate the ‘mouse hover’ experience on mobile websites and we don’t see it coming in the recent future either. This can pose challenges in designing pages that have a lot of dynamic content / links. The best solution will be to go for nested sub-sections and child pages. Gesture response (swipe, shake and touch) too can be ably integrated into the mobile website to stick close to the desktop website experience.

Slow / error-prone typing

Mobile typing is always slow and quite prone to errors. Lengthy forms can be a problem in this case. The situation is typically common to subscriptions, banking websites and other platforms that require a lot of information and fields to be filled up. The only way out to make mobile websites user-friendly is to keep forms and fields to the minimum. Ask for as little information as you can. Another complimenting solution would be to integrate social logins that extracts data from the social accounts of the user.

Minimum context

Smaller devices have resulted in reduced contexts to great extents. This makes is more difficult for end users to get a complete overview of pages. The smaller the screen, the lengthier is the information. For users tying to gets news updates, go through blogs or brand information, going through the context can be quite time consuming. Also, if there are images and other graphics embedded into the content, the loading time increases and so does the page length. Popular solutions to this include fixed headers as one scrolls down, sub-parts of the content, etc. overall, web designers need to creak the content into readable bits. Also, only a quality piece of content would inspire the reader to go through the complete story/information.

Inaccurate clicks

Users interact with mobile device using touch and scrolling. However, using fingertips to click on links can be erroneous. The popular “fat finger problem’ can leads to accidental clicks and unwanted results. For mobile friendly web designers, the solution would be to manage the proximity and size of all clickable elements. No two links must be placed side by side, whatever be the screen dimensions. Control bars and navigation too should be manually handled when developing a responsive website

Slow connections

Mobile users are constantly in ‘the move’ but this can be challenging when it comes to internet connectivity. While it’s true that website owners have no power over network connections, slow loading pages can also be accounted by heavy pages, full of graphics and dynamic content. The way out would be to lower your website’s download footprint. Light pages can load themselves even on slower connections. Dispose everything that the mobile user’s isn’t necessarily looking for, including flash graphics, animations, videos, heavy page backgrounds, etc.

Slow hardware

Smart phones have proved to be revolutionary devices but they haven’t still been able to overpower the traditional desktop in terms of hardware. As a result, page initializations in mobile device can be really slow in some devices. The solution lies in good programming skills. Deferred java scripting and a liberal usage of hardware and accelerated CSS can solve the problem to a great extent.

While these are the common problems, the list isn’t exhaustive. New devices are coming out every day and innovation is posing new challenges or the UI teams of web design and development services. However, this is also coupled up with new solutions to manage responsiveness. Thinking out of the box and staying updated to the changes is the only way to please the audience.

Category :

SEO News

Tags :

Mobile Friendly, Limitations of Websites, Responsi

About Guna Nadar

Brief Info about Guna Nadar +

I mostly write technical aspects and not much into creative writing. For the past decade I worked along with top notch SEO & Internet Marketing professionals which naturally lured me into the world of Search Engines. When I am not writing I read from comics to philosophy.Antiques, Fishing, hunting are my passions. Currently I am working on Google Penalty protection and .... more info about the author