Responsive design is an approach to web designing that relies on fluidity and adapting the layout of a website depending on the device being used. It’s been around for nearly ten years, but with recent advancements in technology, it hasn’t lost its relevance as one of the best ways to optimize your conversions. “Design tips for increasing website conversions” is a blog post that discusses the importance of responsive design. The article also provides a list of design tips to increase conversions. “Responsive design” is more than a term in mobile marketing and SEO. It’s a standard that turned everything you know about web design. According to a Prosper Mobile Insights Survey, 9 out of 10 smartphone users engage in financial activity on their smartphones. This includes more than half of those who purchase online using their phones. Although desktop computers still have more excellent conversion rates, tablets aren’t far behind. What’s intriguing is that, even though smartphone conversion rates are still at 2%, the smaller the screen, the more money customers spend on average.
One thing to bear in mind is that most websites are still not mobile-friendly. Consumers will get more comfortable purchasing a range of devices as responsive design becomes increasingly integrated with excellent web design principles. In addition, businesses will become used to catering to customers via several channels specific to those devices. WebUndies.com is a beautiful example of this. This family-owned underwear, sleepwear, and loungewear store revealed that mobile commerce sales accounted for $168,000, or 5.4 percent, of its total sales of 3.1 million. If that sounds like a bit of traffic to optimize for, consider that the shop has seen a 169 percent boost in traffic. WebUndies has a responsive design as well as a tablet-friendly catalog. It’s no wonder that WebUndies’ mobile traffic has grown year after year, given the amount of attention they pay to their customers on their phones.
What is responsive design, and how does it work?
Responsive design is a fluid, adaptable layout that fits a wide range of screen sizes, resolutions, and devices. Responsive design relies on a core code that aligns and positions itself to flow inside the limits of the device itself, rather than having distinct specific design pieces designed for a mobile site. Consider the following example of a rental cabin:
As you can see, the layout adapts to the device it’s being viewed on, presenting information in a manner that makes sense. But, in terms of conversion, the real issue is: what do I maintain and what do I get rid of?
1. Keep these conversion parameters in mind.
Keep everything that makes it easy for mobile clients to discover what they want quickly. This includes maps and instructions, company hours, and a tap-to-call feature that connects customers to a representative. The Red CrossTM mobile site is an excellent example of integrating mobile capabilities naturally. You might, for example, use your finger to donate through SMS, phone, or credit card. Users may take control of their actions with this level of freedom. A responsive design that focuses on conversions also takes advantage of characteristics that aren’t limited to the touch screen. Because you’re working with a much smaller screen, you’ll want to make the most of the visual, audio, and media capabilities. Reading plain text is tedious and challenging on a mobile phone, but viewing a video or listening to a podcast is simple and enjoyable.
2. Aspects that should be eliminated.
Building a landing page is similar to optimizing a mobile-responsive design for conversion optimization. You must trim the fat, which means removing everything that might cause visitors to click away or get distracted from doing the action you want. The ad to rent the cabin on Flathead Lake was eliminated in favor of additional photographs and language, as you can see in the cabin example above. Because it’s more difficult to see white text on a black backdrop on a smartphone, improved usability standards were adopted for the smartphone version, which has more legible black text on a white background. However, mobile responsive design involves more than simply deleting advertisements and modifying layouts. You must also consider what should be removed for a better user experience. Tria was able to improve its mobile site to sell laser hair removal goods in the following way: There are various things we may learn from such a design:
- The mobile-optimized website offers photos in a scrollable slideshow style rather than one huge view and multiple thumbnails for better touch-based navigation.
- Expandable content – instead of requiring mobile visitors to browse through waves of material, one-touch exposes a page full of advantages usually seen on the left to desktop readers. The mobile site, plus signs open tabs, are displayed in blue on the desktop version.
- On the mobile site, where more high-end purchase items are further reinforced with social evidence, ratings and reviews are front-and-center.
- Price and payment choices are more extensive – the price and the ability to pay in installments are much more comprehensive, so there’s no need to Google “how much does it cost?” or “How am I going to pay for it?”
- Free shipping is more visible on mobile devices; customers receive the complimentary shipping notification right away, coupled with a vast, conspicuous icon that allows them to browse their shopping basket.
- Tria makes extensive use of a substantial call-to-action button that spans the whole width of the screen, eliminating the need for pinching, squeezing, or zooming to view the add to cart button.
Tria has simplified, streamlined, and concentrated on what was most critical for the most excellent possible user experience, accessibility, and simplicity of use in this case.
3. What would you shave off?
Another example of a mobile responsive design, this time for the World Wildlife Foundation’s Earth Hour campaign:
The tablet version merely rearranges the site’s pieces, but the smartphone version stacks them and removes bandwidth-hungry features like the dim light bulb and countdown clock. In addition, the most recent news is removed from the primary emphasis area, making the call-to-action clear and concise. However, not every website eliminates eye candy. For example, take a look at the website Food Sense. Food Sense chose to preserve their amazing photographs and cut down the text on a device where the sight of a meal might be the deciding factor in whether or not someone clicks through to learn more:
The sidebar navigation on the tablet has been relocated to the top so that browsers can see the whole fruit salad. The icons have been eliminated for smartphone users and replaced with simple text-based navigation and a greater focus on individual photographs. It should be evident from these examples that designing a mobile responsive design requires more than simply a juggling act of design components.
4. Conversion rates have increased by 400%.
Electric Pulp, a design agency, recently revamped apparel shop O’neill’s website to make it mobile-friendly. They followed all of the best practices for mobile design, including a fluid layout. This collapsible menu could be accessed with a single touch, with bigger text sizes, more expansive tap areas, and better pictures. They next carried out a series of experiments. They didn’t use the standard A/B split testing. Instead, they focused on pure order volume and revenue and non-mobile traffic conversions. Their findings were as follows:
Mobile responsive design is sometimes necessary for practical reasons. Shiseido Americas learned in January, when they created a mobile site for its high-end cosmetics brand Nars that they couldn’t keep three different versions of their previous site up to date (for desktop, tablet, and smartphone). Instead, they could keep up with new gadget releases they weren’t expecting, like the iPad Mini, by switching to a more fluid design. Rather than merely rearranging pieces on the current site, Shiseido generated graphics and other materials specifically for Mars mobile design. So far, the findings have paid off in a variety of ways. They could boost smartphone checkout conversions by 54% and tablet checkout conversions by 24%. Furthermore, the new strategy improved the team’s workflow and productivity by ensuring that all device approaches employ the appropriate assets to persuade the consumer to act.
5. There are several best practices for mobile forms in responsive design.
Form fields were inconceivable in the early days of WAP since they were so difficult to fill out. Thankfully, standards have evolved, and user interface designers have offered a comprehensive set of recommendations for maximizing the efficacy of button touches. The following are some of the best practices for creating and optimizing mobile forms, according to UX Booth:
- Compared to typical left-aligned labels, vertical-align labels (top) are more effective.
- They are getting rid of any data that isn’t essential. As a result, many users’ connections may be dropped, resulting in data loss, making lengthy forms impossible to finish.
- When applicable, combining form fields (such as country/state/province option) or ensuring the most popular choices show first on the list, including default selections when it makes sense. Users can browse rapidly and take action without spending a lot of time or bandwidth due to this.
Hertz is a beautiful example of a simple mobile form.
6. How to make a responsive design of your own?
“Showing samples and outcomes is well and dandy,” you may be thinking, “but how can you construct your mobile responsive design?” Fortunately, several tools are available to assist you in streamlining and simplifying the process. Skeleton is one such example. Skeleton is a standard development kit based on the famous 960 grid system. It also provides extensions for WordPress, Drupal, and Github, all prominent content management and sharing techniques.
Conclusion
Starting with a fluid style can save you time, money, and effort when adapting your site to multiple devices. Instead, you’ll be able to focus on writing robust code that can be used across devices now and in the future. Discovering which elements are most essential to your visitors is the most critical thing you can do to enhance conversions via a mobile responsive design. You may accomplish this by overlaying a heatmap over their focus regions to see where they tend to fall. An intelligent mobile responsive design that focuses on conversions will remove unnecessary navigation and design components, concentrating on a clean, straightforward design that loads quickly and demands action. I’ve also developed an infographic to tell you how to acquire more purchases from your mobile visitors to help the business expand quicker. To see a bigger version of the picture below, click on it:
Related Tags
- how to design a high converting website
- web design for conversions
- designing for conversion
- conversion rate optimization
- converting website traffic to sales