Importance of Responsive Web Design in Mobile Payments
What is Responsive Web Design?
You’ve probably heard the term responsive web design and perhaps you’ve wondered why it is important. Responsive web design is the ability for your website design to seemingly adjust and fit on various screens, such as the desktop, laptop, tablet and various mobile phones.
Initially, web designers and coders only had to worry about the same look & feel across multiple desktop browsers (Chrome, Safari, IE, Firefox, etc.) With the large scale adoption of tablets such as the iPad and mobile phones, the need to design across multiple platforms is now a necessity.
Today, mobile devices account for more than 50% of the web traffic, yet most businesses still have the desktop only version of their website. How does one go from a desktop website to one that would be mobile and tablet friendly?
The old approach was to maintain two websites:
- Desktop
- Mobile
The web server would detect which device was being used to access the website and redirect the user to either the desktop version or the mobile version. In most instances, because of time and budget constraints, many businesses had a lighter version on the mobile. Meaning, the desktop version contained 100% of the content, while the mobile version had less. Not all the content was migrated onto the mobile website.
Add to this, the pain of trying to maintain two separate codebases, just to cater to your ever changing consumer reading platforms. Surely there had to be a better way.
Enter Responsive Web Design.
Responsive Web Design (RWD) is a methodology to code a website, such that not only does it look consistent across multiple browsers, but also across multiple devices. Automatically. Single code base - multiple viewing options.
The design methodology is much more than just fitting a website onto different screen sizes. RWD factors in many variables, such as:
- Click -vs- Touch
- Scrolling
- Image optimization
- Pixel Resolution (eg: Retina displays)
- Image resizing
- Menu controls
- Future device designs
- Google’s recommendation (Google loves responsive web design)
- Zooming/Pinching
- Form fields
- User Interaction
- User Experience
Users like to experience uniformity. By incorporating a responsive web design for your business, you can be assured, whether your customer is accessing from the desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile phone, the outlay is the same, thus providing a smooth user experience.
Responsive Web Design in Mobile Payments
If you fail to incorporate responsive web design for mobile payments, expect shopping cart abandonment numbers to be high. Most businesses either rely on their existing websites to operate on the mobile, or are convinced they need a totally separate site design and experience for the mobile (thus maintaining two code base).
Responsive web design is now pretty much the defacto methodology of addressing the desktop, tablet and mobile experience.
In simpler words, responsive web design is device agnostic, enabling you to save time, money and hassle of dealing with different code sets.
Needless to say, mobile optimization factors must always be considered for your mobile commerce sales. Read our earlier articles on how to implement a mobile commerce strategy to increase conversion rates for mobile commerce on your website.
If you would like to learn more about how sign2pay can help your ecommerce business get more sales and increase conversions, request a demo or contact us for more information.
