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Top 5 Mobile Website Design Trends of 2011

The mobile website landscape offers unique challenges, for which, mobile web designers have discovered adventurous and creative solutions. In an increasingly mobile-connected world, we're seeing some new trends develop in mobile web design - trends that take a step away from the simplistic and minimalist designs of only a few years ago. It's an exciting time for mobile website designers, taking this platform away from simply offering a mobile solution, to now truly playing a part in peoples lives by offering them mobile convenience.

Get in touch with Redengine to learn more about how you can benefit from having a mobile-optimized website for your customers. Without further ado, here are Redengine's Top 5 mobile website design trends for 2011:

1) Fingertip Optimization

More and more mobile websites are being built for your fingertips. Whether that is clicking through a menu, an image, a search field or something else, these elements are being built large enough for easy and quick finger-clicking. Over the past year or so, we've seen a dramatic change in menu sizes, a movement away from vertical menus, and a lot more image navigation.

Designers have been leaning towards large horizontal menus, that are occasionally stacked to save room. If a website requires very few menu items, we've seen a strong trend towards image navagation. This change has dramatically improved customer experience on mobile devices.

2) More Videos & Images

Since the inception of mobile friendly websites, we've seen a trend towards the reduction of images and video, to help increase loading times and save customers money on their phone bills. Lately however, with the widespread availability of unlimited data plans, this is no longer a concern for mobile website designers. It was exactly this that allowed the US to overtake Western Europe to lead the market in mobile media use¹. In Japan, it is estimated that over 75 percent of mobile subscribers are on unlimited plans, with nearly 95% of these smartphones being 3G¹. And now with a 4G network growing in popularity, it's no wonder we're seeing more and more image sliders, video galleries, and dynamic content on mobile websites.

3) App-Like Designs

It's clear that by the success of smartphones that consumers are a big fan of touchscreens. Mobile website designers have taken this layout, and adapted menu items into and "app-like" buttons. This is a very popular trend in mobile website design at the moment, and we see no signs of it stopping now.

4) Interconnectivity

Businesses want to connect with their smartphone customers. Generally, smartphone users are pretty tech-savvy - whether you're simply perusing a mobile website, or "checking-in" on Foursquare, businesses want another way to get in touch or a marketing message across. Offering links to their Facebook or Twitter sites is the way to do this.

Many mobile websites are also providing incentives to encourage their visitors to "become fans" or "follow" them.

5) Smarter M-Commerce Sites

Mobile customers are buying. m-commerce, which stands for mobile-commerce, is only in its infancy, but already many business are seeing some fantastic gains. eBay is a classic example, if you're bidding on an item, but can't be sitting in front of a computer when the auction expires, having a mobile platform is a natural solution - this functionality helped eBay sell over $2 billion worth of merchandise in 2010. Amazon.com is also reaping the benefits with over $1 billion in products sold in only twelve months. Mobile website designers are building m-commerce platforms that are as user-friendly as possible to help optimize the mobile buying experience. In the past, purchasing an item through your mobile device meant filling out endless forms and surfing through multiple pages. Now, once registered, buying an item is only a few fingertaps away.

Sources:

¹ - http://mobithinking.com/stats-corner/global-mobile-statistics-2011-all-quality-mobile-marketing-research-mobile-web-stats-su#unlimiteddata

All mobile screenshots were taken from mobileawesomeness.com