Your mobile website is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal for reaching customers and maximizing your online conversion potential. We’ve talked about how important it is to have a mobile-friendly website that is lightning fast, but that’s just what gets users in the door. Ultimately, users are looking to do something once they arrive on your site — whether it’s scheduling an appointment/service, purchasing a product, or simply learning more about your business. The most important thing you can do for your users, then, is to make those actions as smooth and easy to perform as possible. But where do you even start? And what should you test to make sure your site is built for conversions on mobile?
Mobile Conversion Checklist
To know if your site is conversion-friendly, you should test all of its major interaction points on a real mobile device (bonus tip: using browser tools like Chrome’s Inspector can also allow you to simulate the user experience on devices you may not have access to). Testing the functionality and ease-of-use of these features will help you determine if you’re providing a high-quality user experience, or if there is friction between users and their goals on your site. Some of the most important features to test on your mobile site include:
Call-to-Action Buttons
Make sure these are clear and easy to access and tap for both left- and right-handed users. Mobile devices also lack hover states, so it’s even more important that buttons look like buttons and not simply another design feature.
Phone Numbers
These should all be click-to-call. If you want a user even to consider calling a phone number displayed on your website, they need to be able to click the phone number directly to make the call, rather than copying it and entering into their phone manually.
Forms
Form fields should be large enough to tap into with a thumb (Apple recommends 44pt x 44pt). They should also be optimized for the information needed. For example, if it’s a field asking for a phone number, presenting a numeric keyboard when the user clicks into it provides a better mobile experience than making them shift between letters and numbers on a full alphanumeric one.
Also, while date pickers and dropdowns are go-to options for many forms, scrolling through 100+ items on a mobile device to find your country or birthday is needlessly complicated. Form optimization is a whole topic of its own, but what’s most important is to test your forms on mobile and not just assume they are fine because they work well on desktop.
Shopping and Checkout
If you have an e-commerce website, it’s important to test how the shopping and checkout flows work on mobile devices. You may find that the user interface works well for mouse pointers but is impossible to use with a thumb, or that the shopping cart is hard to navigate to/from on mobile. You should also consider streamlining typical e-commerce processes with built-in mobile OS features, such as autocomplete, Apple Pay and Google Pay, Face ID or fingerprint authentication, and more.
Online Scheduling
For healthcare and home services, offering an online scheduling option is a huge benefit to prospective clients and customers. However, if that scheduling feature looks or feels broken on mobile, it can be more harmful to your online credibility than not offering the feature at all.
Rather than building your own online scheduling tool, it’s more likely that you’ll choose to integrate an already-existing solution from an established vendor. This means that many of the decisions for how it operates on desktop and mobile have been made for you. Therefore, it’s extremely important that you choose an option with excellent mobile UX and configure it properly.
Chat Widgets & More
Especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more companies are incorporating communication tools into their websites. A business that may have done 80% of their customer engagement in person before COVID may now do 100% of their customer interaction online. While these chat tools can be an excellent way to connect businesses with their customers, they can also get in the way on mobile devices.
Just as with online scheduling tools, be sure to select a vendor whose chat widget provides a positive mobile experience. Configure the tool so that it is accessible on mobile without becoming visual clutter.
Looking to boost conversions online? The Symphony Agency can help.
Creating a great user experience is an art, but it’s also a science. We combine design principles with extensive user data and analytics to determine how to best optimize your website for conversions. Through rigorous testing, we can discover what touchpoints are causing your users the most trouble and create solutions that best meet the needs of your business. For more information about our services, contact our client experience team today!