The long-heralded mobile web is  finally coming of age.  No longer relegated to a second screen experience, mobile devices are commonly the first option for consumers around the world.  In Ireland, Smartphone penetration is currently approaching 50% of the population and consumers are becoming increasingly reliant on their phones, with 61% accessing the Internet every day and most never leaving home without it.  If your website still isn’t optimised to provide a mobile experience, you’re missing out on the huge opportunity that this presents.  In fact, according to a recent study by Google, 67% of users said that a mobile friendly site makes them more likely to buy a product or use a service, with 52% declaring that a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company.

Whether your website is focussed on marketing, e-commerce or customer service it’s vital that there is a consistently good experience across all devices from desktop to tablets to the myriad of Smartphone screen sizes available.  Our solution, for many clients, had been to take a mobile-first approach to producing a responsive design (using HTML5) that gives a fluid experience on any device a consumer is using.  These days if a site’s not built for mobile, with a responsive web design,  it will leave users feeling frustrated and they can transfer this negative emotion to your brand, leaving your site to find your competitors who have taken a mobile-first approach.

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I have been asked this a lot and it is usually followed up by “I want everything above the fold”. Where the fold starts can be a tough question to answer because it depends on your user’s browser, what toolbars they have enabled, size of the window they have open, screen resolution and monitor size.

Finding the fold

The first step should be to look at your analytics. Site analytic tools like Google Analytics capture screen resolutions used by your actual users. Using this data you can decide on an acceptable page fold for your website design.  Google also offers a useful service that visually demonstrates where the fold appears for users, this data is based on the window size of visitors to Google websites.

Everything above the fold

Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold so its critical that your most important information is here. Start by prioritising your content and ordering it on the page according to that priority. Spacing, size and colour can also be used to help emphasise important information.  Word of caution, If everything is shouting, nothing is heard, so stick to your priorities.  Everything doesn’t have to be above the fold though, web users do scroll but they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold. So, ensure any important items below the fold are visually eye catching and make sure people know the page doesn’t stop at the page fold by using imagery and text that continues below the page fold to persuade users to scroll.

Sources:

Jacob Nielsen, 2010, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html

Offset 2012 was an inspiring and tiring weekend. It was exhilarating listening to top creatives from the fields of art, design, advertising and filmmaking talk about their work and their craft.
While the speakers spoke about many diverse subjects, there were a few key themes that emerged from the weekend. So here are 3 things I learned from Offset 2012.

1. Recharge your Creativity.

Many speakers from Erik Kessels to Paula Scher spoke about the need to recharge your creative batteries, that creatives needed other creative outlets whether they are hobbies or side projects to provide inspiration for their regular work. These side projects didn’t have to be big or clever, just something that you loved doing, so that when you return to your regular work your passion remains.

2. Change your tools.

The second theme that emerged was that there was a danger in relying on the same tricks or tools in your work. It might be uncomfortable but that creatives had to try new ways of expressing themselves. If we always use the same tools we’ll always solve problems the same way.

3. Be Happy

This theme was best expressed by Stefan Sagmeister’s brilliant presentation but all the speakers touched on it to some degree. Do more of what you love and less of what you don’t, now we all don’t have that luxury but we all want to do good work and if we as advertisers, can convince our clients that in Andrew Essex’s words that ‘creativity is a business imperative’ then we might find ourselves a lot happier.

Let us know what you thought of Offset 2012 in the comments below.

Contributed by Lizzie Kinross, Copywriter

Pat wanted to give us all a workshop. He was VERY keen. He’d been to UX London, to 3 days of workshops in ‘Inspirational Learning for User Experience Designers’, and wanted to share what he’d learnt. While it didn’t sound wildly exciting, it had to be better than the tricky brief I was working on, so I went along for a nosey.

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