Your mobile website: Keep it fast, easy and user-friendly

Start with the consumer’s needs when you’re designing for hand-held devices.

The mobile age is here. Tiny LCD screens in our hands, our social network at our fingertips at all times. Is your mobile site ready?

Androids, iPhones and Palm Pres number in the millions. Many people do more on their phones than they do on their computers—e-mail, text, pay bills, look up directions, tweet, take photos, listen to music—and talk.

Bank executive Arah Erickson believes mobile sites improve customer usability and satisfaction.

“Our primary goal is to increase customer convenience,” says Erickson, senior vice president of retail mobile banking for Wells Fargo. “Go to a site that wasn’t optimized for mobile: It takes many scrolls and clicks, some images won’t show, and it takes a long time for pages to load.

“Customers could go in, and their first experience would be slow and ineffective. They would like to pay this bill on the bus … but it wasn’t convenient, and it didn’t make their life easier.”

Mobile phone technology isn’t developed enough to ditch the mobile site. Which brings us back to the question of your company’s requirements.

If you’re unsure whether your company needs a mobile site—especially when phones can handle regular websites—you’re not alone. Everyone has a different answer.

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