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Using it one-handed
The businesses with the most customers arriving on a phone have all landed on the same handful of decisions. Your customer learnt every one of them before they got to you.
About 10 minutes
The short version
Think about which businesses have the most customers arriving on a phone. The shopping. The food delivery. The travel. The banking. The video. Between them they have more people on more phones than anybody else on earth, which means they can test a decision on a scale nobody else can, and they have been doing it for years.
They have all separately ended up in roughly the same place, and not out of house style or fashion. It is what is left after showing an enormous number of people two versions of the same screen and keeping whichever one they got through.
Which matters to your business for one reason. Your customer has been on the receiving end of all of it, every day, for years.
They picked the habits up without noticing, they cannot switch them off, and they bring every one of them to your website. Where, in the ordinary course of things, they meet the opposite of each one.
What they have been taught
What a website gives them
Your customer notices none of this, and that is exactly what makes it expensive. Nobody stands in a car park thinking that a website uses a different set of conventions to the rest of their phone. They think it is heavy going, they could not tell you why, and they press back.
The obvious objection is that those businesses have budgets you do not, which is true and beside the point. Nobody is suggesting you build what they built. The expensive part was working out what people do with their hands, and that part has already been paid for by somebody else and is sitting in plain sight on the phone in your pocket.
What is left is where you put things, and where you put things costs nothing.
A website is also still a website, and there is nothing to be gained by dressing one up as something it is not. Your customer has one set of habits for the thing in their hand, and you can either work with them or against them.
Hold your phone the way you actually hold it. One hand, on the way somewhere, the other hand carrying something. Your thumb pivots from the bottom corner, so everything low and towards the middle is a flick away, and the far top corner is at the very end of the reach. Getting there means a stretch, or a small shuffle of the grip, or the other hand.
That top corner is where almost every website in the world keeps its menu. Often the phone number as well, and the one button the whole page was built to get people to press. It is also the one place none of the businesses in the last section puts anything they need you to reach.
They can reach it. That is not the claim. The claim is that reaching is a small deliberate act rather than an automatic one, and your website charges the visitor for it every single time.
A control at the top of the page is only ever at the top of the page. Once somebody has read two screens' worth it is not on the screen at all, and getting back to it means scrolling away from the sentence that was about to convince them.
So the moment a visitor decides they want to ring you is usually the moment they are furthest from the means of doing it.
The way to get in touch
At every scroll position. Not only at the very top and again in the footer.
The way to get around
The four or five places people actually go. Not twenty, and not behind a symbol in a corner.
The choice they are making right now
The service, the suburb, the photos, the price. Whatever this part of the page is asking them to pick.
Anything they will use twice
If a control gets tapped more than once, it should not have to be found more than once.
This is a pattern with limits, and they are worth being honest about. It works where a site has a handful of destinations and one obvious thing you want people to do. Put twenty pages into a bar along the bottom and you have made a different mess in a more reachable place.
The rule underneath it is not put a bar at the bottom. It is that whatever somebody needs most often should be nearest the thumb, and should still be there once they have scrolled.
Which things those are on a particular site is a longer conversation, and it is the one the first piece here is about: websites built around how people actually use their phones.
Somebody is halfway down the page about your service and a question occurs to them. It is never a big one. Do you come out this far. Roughly what does that run to. Are you open Saturday morning.
On most websites, answering it costs them the page they were on. Tap, wait, read one line, press back, wait again, then find their place in something they were already halfway through. Do that twice and they have stopped reading your page and started navigating your website, which is a much less useful activity to have somebody doing.
The alternative is that the answer arrives where they already are. A panel slides up from the bottom of the screen with the thing they asked for in it. The page they were reading stays visible behind it. When they are done it slides back down and they are exactly where they left off.
Nothing loaded, and nothing to find again. And because it comes up from the bottom, the answer and the way to dismiss it both arrive under the thumb that asked for them.
Go and check a delivery time or a booking date on one of the big ones and watch what happens: you will not leave the page you are on. That is not a technical achievement. It is a decision somebody made about where an answer should appear.
Which suburbs do you cover?
A list, on the page they were already reading. Not a separate page with a map on it that they then have to come back from.
Roughly what does this cost?
Even a range, even with conditions on it. The question is being asked whether you answer it or not.
Are you open on Saturday?
Including the honest version. It goes to voicemail and gets returned first thing is a better answer than silence.
Can I just send you a message?
Three boxes and a send button. That does not need a page of its own, and it should not cost them the one they were on.
What goes in that last one, and what should come out of it, is its own piece: nobody wants a contact form.
If the browser's back arrow is the main way people get around your website, the website is not doing the getting around. Back is a rescue rather than a route: somebody pressing it is undoing a decision they just made, and a visit made of undone decisions ends early.
Aiming is the expensive part of using a phone. The pad of a thumb covers considerably more of the screen than a small arrow or the words next page, and it is being aimed by somebody walking, or holding something, or half watching the television.
A push sideways needs no aim at all. Anywhere on the card will do, at any angle, and the person doing it does not have to check where their thumb landed. It is the cheapest way there is to move somebody through something, which is why the businesses in the first section moved almost everything anybody browses onto it.
For most local businesses it is the same handful. Photos of finished work. Reviews. The services. The prices. Those are the parts of a website people compare rather than read, and comparing is precisely what a sideways push is for.
A grid of small thumbnails asks for four accurate taps and gives back four page loads. A row of cards that moves under the thumb gives the same four things for no accuracy at all.
None of which is an argument against long pages. People scroll quite happily, for as long as they can tell scrolling is getting them somewhere. This is about the handful of things they compare.
One detail here matters more than the rest of it put together. If a row of cards ends flush against the edge of the screen, most people never find out there is anything past the first one. Leave a sliver of the next card showing and the row explains itself, with no arrows, no dots and nothing to read.
Anything that slides up should drag back down to close. Somebody who pulled a panel up with a flick expects to push it away with one, and sending them hunting for a small cross instead is this whole piece in miniature: a habit they arrived with, and a website quietly doing it another way.
About five minutes, and one condition decides all of it: do them standing up, walking, phone in one hand and something in the other. Sat at a desk with both hands free, every website in the world passes. Nothing here is ticked off or scored, and there is nothing to send anybody.
There is nothing to teach anybody here.
They already know how.Do the reach test, and fix only what it turns up. It is the cheapest of the four things in this piece and it is the one that costs a business the most, because the control it usually catches is the phone number.
Which is worth saying plainly, because this subject attracts people selling rebuilds. Moving a button to where the hand already is. Leaving a sliver of the next photo showing. Answering a small question without loading a page. Those are afternoons rather than projects, and on most sites they can be done to the site that is already there.
Plenty of websites already do half of it without anybody having planned to. So if somebody quotes you a whole new build off the back of an article about where the buttons go, that is a quote for something else with this piece stapled to the front of it.
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