#and they both have disabilities that affect them in vastly different ways and impact their relationship with realistic goals

[grinchwrapsupreme]

being super normal about White calling Billy "a dreamer"after the events of Maybe No Go

[leonawriter]

On Writing Fankids

Writing this because I now have two different fankids for the same pairing, in vastly different ways, and they’re very different people. So.

I don’t know how many points I’m going to make, and I don’t know how useful this is going to be, since Disclaimer: I’m not an expert on real children or medical practices, but I am trying to put effort in.

Most of this is composed of questions, because I don’t know who your fankid (or, OC-fankid) is, and the point is to make you think rather than just put ideas into your head by telling you what’s right and what’s wrong.

1 - How did they come to exist?

This is the FIRST question you should be asking when coming up with a fankid. What they look like and how cute they are is all well and good, but when you’re thinking of actually writing a story, that won’t help you.

If the parents are a cis male and cis female couple, then it’s easy to assume how they had a kid. That said, that’s not always necessarily the case, as some people may be infertile, or may simply choose to adopt. However, the answer to this becomes more complicated when fans get to wanting to give a gay couple children, as this usually means they want to give them biological children.

In the event of pairings where the parents are canonically not reproductively compatible (which includes gay, lesbian, nonbinary, and so on) there are still options, which include: a trans parent, which involves being able to write a trans person and not just overlooking how this would change their story; surrogacy, in which someone else carries the child to term for those who can’t, and the related idea of a sperm donor. 

In going into other biological options, there’s also the question of “how believable and realistic do you want this to be? how scientific? how much fantasy or sci-fi do you want here?” and if the answer is “I have fantasy and/or sci-fi in my setting” then you can use that.

That said, please don’t rule out the possibility of adoption. Adoption is the most common way for queer parents in the real world to get kids, and just because a kid isn’t biological doesn’t make them any less their parent’s child. Even/especially in a fantasy setting! And knowing if a kid was adopted, that’ll extend into how they see themself, as well as who the parent is and why they chose to adopt.

Related to that, if a kid is adopted, how aware of that are they? How were they adopted? Are they a canon character that was adopted, or an entirely new character? If they were too young to remember the adoption, how do their parents (or parent, if there was only one person adopting them) explain? If they were old enough, how do they see the person who took them in? How do they see their adopted siblings, if any exist, or any future siblings? What about any prospective additional parents, if they originally only had one, or if their parent/s is/are polyamorous? 

2 - How good are their parents at parenting?

Yes, you want your favourite pairing to be great parents, but no matter what people are going to have their own idiosyncrasies. How do the parents deal when the kid throws a tantrum? 

What if the child shows signs of being neurodivergent, are the parents any good at spotting those signs, and whether they are or not, how do they handle the difference from what they might have been expecting?

My advice here is to pay attention to the pairing in their normal canon and how they deal with situations and also how they handle children in canon, as well as then going to further sources that show what parenting is really like. Your fankid is going to be a baby, they’re going to be a screaming toddler, they’re going to have a personality and wants and they’re going to frustrate their parents a lot. If you want to put the effort in to write the family well, ask someone you know who has kids, even.

3 - What are their circumstances during their childhood?

The fun one about this is that depending on the context the child was created in, the answer can be different for children of the same pairing! 

In my case, I have Satoko and Fumiya. Satoko’s childhood (outside of her parents’ control) was traumatising, and left her as a quiet kid, despite how much she’s shown love later on. Fumiya, on the other hand, grows up in a loving environment from the start, and because of that he’s much more comfortable and confident, despite everything else that happens and so on.

This is where the child starts to develop their own personality. Think about how in the real world, children are shaped by their surroundings and the way that they grow up. Does your fankid learn that they can trust the people around them? How much attention are they given? Is that attention positive, negative, stifling? Do they feel neglected, or coddled? How easy is it for them to find food, or their favourite food? Are they surrounded by children of their own age, or mostly living around adults? Is their living situation, no matter whether their parents love them and take care of them or not, a dangerous one, and how aware of that are they?

Also important is the question of whether they even have both of their parents, or either of them. Maybe the situation here is complicated. Maybe they’re an orphan (sorry, parent pairing). Maybe they’re separated from their family, and they have to fend for themself. Maybe their parents are separated for any given reason. 

Any one of these things is also going to affect their mindset while growing up from being a baby through being a toddler, a pre-teen, and a teenager. If you want them to feel like a fully rounded out person, you have to think of them as such.

4 - What do they look like?

I’m well aware that this is the first thing that most people go with when creating fankids. I’m just saying that it’s not the most important thing you should be thinking of. 

Making a fankid shouldn’t be a mix-and-match game when you’re making biological kids. When you’re coming up with an adopted kid even less so. They aren’t a paper doll. Some children may look like a mix between their parents, while others will take on attributes from previous generations... although when looking at fictional characters you don’t own the IP of, assuming what genes a fankid’s grandparent might have passed on gets tricky. For this I’m focusing mostly on biological kids, but it should help for adopted as well in some parts.

One good rule of thumb here is to look at how genes actually work.

If nothing else, a simple starting idea would be to look at the general population and say “what is the most common eye colour here” and “what is the most common hair colour” and if your fankid is from that area, that’s probably the most dominant gene, over others.

When creating my own fankids mentioned above, my idea went that blue is an eye colour that tends to be dominant, and red hair tends to come through even just by making dark hair lighter. 

That said, hair and eye colour aren’t all you should be thinking about!

Other things that should be thinking about are: how tall are they? what shape are their eyes? Does the structure of their face take more after one parent than the other, no matter their eye/hair colour? Do they have any markings on their body (moles, birthmarks, etc), and if so are they shared with other family members? Are their features they share with family members who aren’t their parents (i.e, a sister, an uncle, a great-grandparent)? 

As they grow up, do they get taller or stay shorter than their parents? In terms of their body, do they become muscular, or not, and if so, why? Do they become fat, or thin? 

Does their health impact on the way that their body looks? This can mean both disability in terms of walking around with a cane, using a wheelchair, or any number of other things.

Do they change their body in any way? Do they choose to add tattoos, or is something done to them in some other way? Do they have any scars? Would they want to share those scars with other people, or would they choose to hide them away?

5 - How canon affects them, and how they affect canon.

Whether or not your fankid grows up before, during, or after canon events makes a difference. If it’s “before/during” then you’re going to have to think of the consequences of that on both them and their parents, but also everyone else. This isn’t just “add in a kid, aren’t they cute” this is an entire new character, with the capability to become a loose cannon and change canon events.

Things can change. That’s something you’ve got to think about, and accept, the moment you want to add this new character into things. Are you willing to change things, and if so, how far?

The kinds of changes can generally be divided into two categories: internal, and external.

Internal changes are the ways that the characters change mentally and emotionally in response to a child (their child, even) being present. In one of my stories, I change very little on an external level, but the focus is on the internal side of things, as the father of this child faces the idea that he might have lost his son, and how that makes him feel when going into a dangerous situation he may not come back from. Other characters might not see any difference, but the internal conflict is there.

External changes are the big ones, where the child being present - and, by extension, the child’s backstory and its knock-on effects - affect the present, and cause things to change in visible ways. This can mean anything from “the pairing’s child has wandered into a dangerous area filled with plot, and needs to be rescued” to “the plot has found the child” or even just “the parents have relationship issues to sort out, and that changes the plot.”

Things to think of here are - aside from “how old is this kid” as you might have come up with a kid that by this point is an adult as far as I know - how active is this kid? Are they happy to stay put and not affect things, or dot hey have insatiable curiosity and the need to do something? Do they stumble into the plot without being aware of it, do they go seek it out, or does it find them? How much danger does this put them in? If it does put them in danger, how do they deal with that, and how do their parents (or single parent) deal with that? If no danger at all, do they have fun, or are they stressed?

6 - Interactions with the rest of the cast.

Honestly, my main point here is, not everyone is going to react to a kid the same way. Just because they’re cute doesn’t mean everyone’s going to like them! And no, that doesn’t mean they’re evil. And sometimes, even the “evil” characters might handle kids better than some “good” characters. In fact, some “good” characters might do so badly with kids that they make them cry, and that doesn’t make them any less “good.” It just makes them bad at handling kids.

Otherwise, how does the kid fare with the other members of the cast, in general and specifically?

Is there anyone that they like in particular? If so, why? Did that person look nice, did they give them their favourite food? Did they do something special? What did they do to become friends?

Likewise, is there anyone they dislike in particular? What did they do to deserve that? Were they mean on purpose, or did they become disliked by means of an accident or miscommunication? Is it that this person raises their voice and the kid doesn’t like raised voices, or they don’t talk loudly enough?

Depending on the situation with the child’s parents, they might prefer people who are positive toward their parents, or who are negative toward their parents. Because let’s not forget those who don’t like being compared, and those who have parents who aren’t any good. For instance, is the child’s parent a villain in their setting? Are they thought of as a villain? Are they a criminal, or on the side of the law, and regardless of which that is, does the child agree with them, and how does that affect their relationships with others who agree or disagree with that parent?

If your fankid, for example, was mistreated by a certain set of people when they were younger, then how does that relate to later on in life, or the canon cast? My Satoko’s backstory involves medical abuse, which makes her wary of doctors scientists, and things that would remind her (even subconsciously) of that setting. Two of the characters in the cast are medically trained. Her interactions with them are going to be affected by that, even if she grows to like and trust them.

In conclusion: a fan kid can be a fun five minute thing, but if you only put five minutes’ thought into their design, their backstory, and their personality, then you’re only going to get the same view of them as a sketch compared to the time it takes to fully line and colour a work of art. 

If you want to write them, or create a full comic with them, you have to ask yourself questions about who they are, and also who you want them to be. If you want them to be a fully rounded person, then you have to put the time into it. And, really, that if this kid starts acting in ways you don’t expect, but that work, just... listen to that.

[lux-talks-a-lot]

You know, I would love to see more stories where POC’s culture has a bigger impact on issues in their life. Sometimes people seem a little afraid to write something like an Arab character who’s in a wheelchair and has mental health issues and autsim and is queer because they think they’re putting “too much diversity” which is not really the case. People like that exist and their stories should be told.

But sometimes even when these characters are written I feel like many creators shy away from having the charaecter’s culture affect them in regards to their disability/queerness/mental health/whatever. Like speaking as an arab person who is queer, has anxiety, is seeing a therapist, might be getting diagnosed with depression and adhd, my culture has a really big impact on these issues get dealt with. My mom is being introduced to all this stuff as something other than a handwaved “they’re just a weird kid” comment for the first time through both a language and culture barrier because we grew up in vastly different places and she doesn’t know and isn’t always willing to help me in these areas. I can’t tell my mom I’m talking to my therapist about maybe having adhd because she doesn’t know what it is and I know it’ll be a huge argument to have to prove to her if I have it so I’m avoiding it until I have a solid answer. Same with the depression.

My family is arab and Muslim and I’m queer. I can’t come out if I want to keep interacting with my family. And considering I’m still a minor, I don’t have full control over my life quite yet. Even if I could and wanted to come out, I have to translate that coming out into a language I’m not nearly as good at using and through a different cultural context because my parents grew up with a really different way of looking at things like sexuality and gender. It’d be a very difficult process to explain the word queer and why I use it and how I’m not gay but please don’t take that as an excuse to brush away the fact that I might not date a man. And you can forget the gender thing because arab culture has even stricter gender roles than western culture and I would get laughed at if I told my family “hey, I don’t have a gender!”

AND PEOPLE SHOULD WRITE CHARAECTERS LIKE THIS.

Write charaecters who are conflicted about their culture.

Write charaecters who have a harder time with things because of their culture.

Write parents that don’t know how to help their kid because they can barely understand the language.

Write these types of stories because as much I’m happy to see more representation on media I’ve never seen this type of struggle on a screen or in a book and I really wish I could.

Fuck the idea that you’re going overboard if you have character that breaks too many norms. Forget “straight, cis, ablebodied, nerotypical, white man.” Not everybody fits all or even most of those. Some people don’t meet any of those. And I wish there were more stories about them.

[kamandzak]

Excerpt | Window Nebulas

In this rewrite of a 2019 novel, Craig and Ellie, best friends since near-birth, are on the trip of a lifetime under vastly different circumstances than they originally planned. Ethan, a incredibly neurotic physical therapist and Personal Care Attendant, travels alongside them.

Context: A conversation between Ellie and her best friend, who was left severely disabled after rescuing a dog led to catastrophic results, finally comes to light after over a year of the two of them coping with their own guilt and pain.

The ellipsis denote where Craig’s ventilator punctuates the conversation.

Recommended listening: Never Say Never - The Fray

           From the passengers seat, Craig was changing before my very eyes and in a way of which I was unfamiliar. Shared glances between himself and Ethan concerned me as the unspoken words silently impacted the two men. A cursory glance in the rear-view mirror showed Ethan staring out the window gloomily and without the usual fascination at passing scenery. A cloud of unspoken and unexpressed feelings and emotions hung over the three of us, refusing to dissipate, begging to be addressed.

           Perhaps I was the trick.

           “Okay,” I began, voice small against the vast quiet. “It’s been nothing but silence since yesterday. Someone has to talk and it can’t be just me.” In the back seat, Ethan’s eyes remained glued to the passing fields, his hot breath fogging the window and creating foggy patches Mom used to refer to as Window Nebulas. In the front seat, Craig’s familiar silence continued to haunt me. “Or if it is just me, someone has to tell me what to talk about. I don’t know what sort of weird thoughts you both are having but it’s stressing me out.”

           “Are the thoughts… stressing you out…? Or is it me?”

At last we had words from Craig, thought the words were the complete opposite of what I ever expected to hear come from his mouth.

           “I…. What?”

           “Do I stress… you out?”

At that very moment it was as if Ethan didn’t even exist in the back seat. It was just the two of us, traveling the way we had always dreamed of doing. I was being rewound back years upon years to when we would argue over petty nonsense on the way to the closest outlet mall so I could agonize over jeans.

           Except this was anything but petty nonsense. This was a start to the conversation we both knew we needed but were too scared to have.

           “No.”

           “Please Ellie, don’t… lie to me if I am.”

           “Do I stress you out?” I threw back. “Does having me around constantly remind you of what like was like before everything went to shit?”

           “Yeah, you stress… me out.” The words hit me like a ton of bricks. “But not because… you remind me of… growing up healthy…. You stress me out… because when I got hit… you changed and… I think it’s my fault.”

Already tears had sprung, burning the backs of my eyeballs.

           “Of course I changed,” I managed. “But we both changed because some random guy valued his alcoholic buzz above anything else.”

           “But your schedule… changed and the way… you talked to me changed… and the way you looked… at me changed…. You still look at me… like the nurses did when… I first woke up. You… still look at me like… it’s a shame I have to… live like this for… the rest of my life… and it’s hard for me… to not feel ashamed… when my best friend looks… at me like I should be.”

I swerved off the highway and into the handicapped parking spot of a conveniently placed rest area, throwing the van into park before unbuckling my seatbelt and swiveling to face Craig. Air conditioning blasted in my direction, cooling my hot face and tears.

           “I’ve never been ashamed of you, Craig,” I managed slowly, thickly. “I’ve loved you forever and literally nothing will ever change what I think of you. What happened to you would stress anyone out and I’m certainly not doing you a favor by staying around. I couldn’t leave even if you wanted me to.”

           “But you know you… can if it gets… to be too much…, right.”

Something about the tone of Craig’s words told me he had been holding that sentence in his mind for months and my composure wavered as I held myself back. In reality, I wanted to reach out and strangle him into understanding my point of view but each time I contemplated expressing my thoughts, the words didn’t seem accurate. There was no way for me to express how hard the past had been on me without feeling as if I was complaining when he had been paralyzed and not me.

           “Ellie?”

           “This has been really fucking hard on me, Craig,” I finally said, tone far more abrasive than I intended. “And I don’t want to tell you that because you’re dealing with all of the… of the shit that came out of last year; I don’t want to make it out that I have a terrible life because in comparison to you, I don’t. Not to mention-.”

           “What?”

           “Nothing.”

           “Bullshit.”

           “I don’t want you to feel like it’s your fault!” I let loose, tears flowing far more freely as my mouth contorted into ugly lines that I knew were ugly without looking at them. “I never want you to feel like what happened that night after Chili’s was your fault. I never want you to feel like my sadness and depression is your fault. It’s like I said earlier; it’s the drunk driver’s fault. But here’s the thing: I know you, Craig. And I know that no matter how much I tell you that, you’re still going to see me and blame yourself for the fact that I have no idea who I am anymore. Shit like this affects everyone around you and I consider you so much a part of me that when I got to that hospital and no one would tell me if you were alive or dead I felt part of myself dying too.”

Huge trucks roared past the stop the same way they had years before when my car had died on the interstate near downtown Hamish.

           Craig had come to save me, as he tended to do. He had called the tow truck and helped me with my insurance. It was him who put the car in neutral and help the man push it up onto the tow truck. It was him who drove me in his little sedan all the way to the garage. It was him that popped open the hood of the car so the mechanic could tell me my car was shot. It was him who consoled me and then helped me find a new car.

           Sitting in the van next to me, unable to even turn his head to look at me as I spoke, was that same friend.

           “This was never supposed to happen to us,” I started quietly.

[ingridgovaninsights]

Is it Wrong to Try and See Positives in Mental Illnesses? A Discussion

Hi to everyone that’s still with me reading this blog!

Okay, so I think I briefly touched on the idea of this in my blog post reviewing the book Be Different, as the author chooses to write the book in an empowering way, discussing how his “disability” of Asperger’s Syndrome actually gave him a lot of strengths, and in some cases, an advantage over others. Why is it not more common for us to see literature like that, instead of it always being about how it hinders your performance and quality of life? 

Well, I think it can be a sensitive topic. But as someone who struggles with mental illness myself, I feel like I can at least put my two cents out there without people getting too upset. The reason why I say it can be sensitive is because some people may mistakenly see it as “glorifying” it, which isn’t the case at all. I do not think mental illness ROCKS, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. What I am saying is, if you already have it, you may as well try and find some positives about it so that you can maybe better accept it and learn to live with it and not let it rule you or define you.

Some people will say, “There ARE no positives to mental illness” but I think that’s pretty extreme to say. Does this mean your life is doomed if you are diagnosed with a mental illness? This is absolutely not the case. The fact that you can have a mental illness and still live a happy, meaningful life is a sign of strength and perseverance. Yes, you can have a mental illness and still experience a sense of well-being- I think some people have the misconception that you’re destined to be miserable if you have any sort of mental illness. 

I think the answer will be unique to you, but it might be helpful to think about how mental illness has given you some sort of advantage or positive impact. For me, I think it has really helped me in my writing- I sure do have a hell of a lot to write about. If it weren’t for mental illness, I probably wouldn’t have written The Charlotte Chapters, I probably wouldn’t have created nearly as many poems, and this blog more than likely wouldn’t exist. And that’s a big one for me. 

Some people say it has helped them to empathize more with others, their story allows them to help others, and it’s a testament to their strength. Of course, this isn’t a complete list, and I’m sure people can brainstorm even more ways that it has made a positive impact on their lives. 

I like to think about the “butterfly effect” when I think about this question. That is, when you change one small thing in your past, how it would affect/change everything in your future. For instance, if I didn’t have mental illness, I may not have been involved in certain relationships, and then therefore I wouldn’t have learned what I did, which means I wouldn’t have done a lot of the writing I do today, and that also means I wouldn’t have as much of a passion for mental health. Maybe I wouldn’t have taken Social Service Work if it weren’t for mental illness inspiring me to make a difference- and not going to college definitely would have dramatically changed who I am today. I met lots of great people, learned lots about sensitivity and best practices, and I grew as an individual. I may have chosen a completely different path- who knows? You get the idea. One small alteration can change the course of your life... maybe. 

I know some people will say “Well my life would be a HELL of a lot easier if I didn’t have mental illness”, and I think, yeah, okay... but that’s not the point of the exercise. Personally, I think it shows strength and resiliency if you are able to make a meaningful and happy life in spite of what’s been thrown at you. 

I think it is all a matter of perspective, and it’s all in how you handle it. For example, let’s say we have two people. Both of them experienced very similar things- maybe they have both survived abuse, or battled a drug addiction. One of them seeks help and goes on to raise awareness on domestic violence and drug addiction, the other one does not appear to do as well, has trouble coping and may keep turning to drugs or alcohol or another substance to self-medicate. Why is it that two people with such similar experiences have such vastly different “outcomes”? In this example, I’m not trying to shame the person that struggles to cope in a healthy way. I’m just saying here that one person may have better resources and supports than the other, and the one person may also have a slightly more positive perspective on life. Just something to think about. Of course, this is just an opinion piece, and you can take it any way you want, or you can completely disregard it. I don’t claim to be an expert; I’m just trying to offer a positive perspective for a hopefully refreshing change.

So, what do you think? Can mental illness have “positives” or “advantages”, or is it insensitive/insulting to think this could be? How do you embrace and accept your mental illness? 

[dinafbrownil]

The Deep Divide: State Borders Create Medicaid Haves And Have-Nots

ST. LOUIS — Patricia Powers went a few years without health insurance and couldn’t afford regular doctor visits. So she had no idea cancerous tumors were silently growing in both of her breasts.

More From The Midwest Bureau

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If Powers lived just across the Mississippi River in Illinois, she would have qualified for Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for low-income residents that 36 states and the District of Columbia decided to expand under the Affordable Care Act. But Missouri politicians chose not to expand it — a decision some groups are trying to reverse by getting signatures to put the option on the 2020 ballot.

Powers’ predicament reflects an odd twist in the way the health care law has played out: State borders have become arbitrary dividing lines between Medicaid’s haves and have-nots, with Americans in similar financial straits facing vastly different health care fortunes. This affects everything from whether diseases are caught early to whether people can stay well enough to work.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The ACA, passed in 2010, called for extending Medicaid to all Americans earning up to 138% of the federal poverty level, around $17,000 annually for an individual. But the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012 let states choose whether to expand Medicaid. Illinois did, bringing an additional 650,000-plus people onto its rolls. Missouri did not, and today about 200,000 of its residents are like Powers, stuck in this geographic gap.

Powers briefly thought about moving to another state, just to be able to get Medicaid. “You ask yourself: Where do you go? What do you do?” said Powers, who was in her early 60s when diagnosed. “Do I look at what’s happening in Illinois, right across the river?”

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A recent University of Michigan study found Medicaid expansion substantially reduced mortality rates from 2014 to 2017. The researchers said Illinois averted 345 deaths annually while Missouri had 194 additional deaths each year. The same trends held for other side-by-side states such as Kentucky (did expand) and Tennessee (did not), New Mexico (did) and Texas (did not).

Dr. Karen Joynt Maddox, co-director of the Center for Health Economics and Policy at Washington University in St. Louis, said health care providers in her border city see how the coverage differences affect people. When treating Medicaid patients from Illinois, she said, doctors know procedures, equipment and medicines will likely be covered. With uninsured Missourians, they must consider whether patients can afford even follow-up medications after heart attacks.

Nonetheless, Medicaid expansion faces significant opposition in Missouri, a red state led by a Republican governor with GOP supermajorities in both legislative chambers.

Patrick Ishmael, director of government accountability for the Show-Me Institute, a Missouri free-market think tank, said offering Medicaid to people with incomes above the poverty level would drain resources from the state’s underserved poor and push up taxpayer costs. Though the federal government pays 90% of the cost of the expansion coverage, he said, Missourians contribute to that through their federal taxes. Medicaid already accounts for about a third of the state’s budget, which he said puts pressure on other priorities, like education.

“Missouri and other states need to think about whether they are a government that provides health care or a health care provider that sometimes governs,” he said.

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A Missouri Story

Powers, a minister in the St. Louis suburb of Hazelwood, used to get health insurance through her husband’s job selling lumber and hardware. After he was disabled in 2009, their coverage continued on and off for a while, and her husband eventually received Medicare, the federal insurance program for seniors and people with disabilities. But Powers had no insurance starting in 2012 as the couple struggled on, at most, $1,500 a month.

Medicaid wasn’t an option for her. Missouri could have opened the program to more adults as early as 2010, in preparation for the health care law’s expanded coverage taking effect in 2014. Without the ACA’s expansion, adults who aren’t 65 or older or disabled don’t qualify, no matter how low their income. Missouri’s program generally covers only pregnant women and children from low-income families, parents with incomes about 22% of the federal poverty level and people who are poor and blind, disabled or 65 or older.

Powers and her husband earned too little for her to qualify for subsidies on the federal ACA marketplace, so she couldn’t afford to buy her own plan. And without insurance, Powers never saw doctors for routine health visits or screenings. She stopped taking her prescribed medications for high blood pressure and anxiety — until she could no longer do without her anti-anxiety medicine, Lexapro.

In early 2016, she discovered a place to get help when she gave her friend a ride to a St. Louis clinic for the uninsured called Casa de Salud, where health services cost less than $30.

Powers figured she’d ask about getting back onto Lexapro there. She got a thorough checkup. The doctor found a walnut-sized lump in her right breast, and a mammogram found a tumor the size of a grain of rice in her left. A clinic caseworker helped her sign up for a Medicaid program for breast cancer patients. She underwent surgery in April 2016, then had 35 radiation treatments and took follow-up medications.

She kept thinking she could have found the cancer earlier if only she had insurance. That would have meant less treatment and lower costs for taxpayers, who ended up footing the bill anyway. Research shows breast cancer in its earliest stage can cost half as much to treat as in later stages.

“Even if you didn’t care about the human cost, you should care about the economic cost,” said Jorge Riopedre, president and CEO of Casa de Salud. “Treating a disease at its first stage is always going to be much cheaper than treating it at its advanced stage.”

An Illinois Story

In neighboring Illinois, getting Medicaid through the expansion helped Matt Bednarowicz avoid debilitating medical debt after a motorcycle crash. He was able to go back to work after he was injured while delivering a package in mid-May 2018.

The wreck crushed his left foot, requiring doctors to insert pins in it. Without Medicaid, he would have faced thousands of dollars in medical bills.

“The debt would have been greater than I could comprehend overcoming,” said Bednarowicz, who is now 29.

His Medicaid kicked in “just in the nick of time” to cover the surgery, he said. It also allowed him to get psychiatric help for depression. More than a year later, he’s able to get around well — even jog — and works as a caretaker for an elderly man.

Having insurance helps people like Bednarowicz stay productive, said Riopedre.

“The person who gets sick can’t work, can’t support his or her family, can’t be a consumer and buy goods. If they’re not working, they can’t pay taxes,” Riopedre said. “It just is a tidal wave of downstream effects that if we can’t get it right, it’s going to have repercussions across the nation.”

Amid Controversy, Future Uncertain For Missouri

As the ballot measure push continues, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, recently created a task force to look into expanding Medicaid through a waiver allowing states to skip some federal requirements. His office referred questions to the state’s Department of Health and Senior Services, which in turn referred them to the Department of Social Services. Rebecca Woelfel, a spokeswoman for that agency, said the department doesn’t typically comment on potential ballot issues.

Ishmael, of the Show-Me Institute, said he hopes expansion doesn’t happen. He said the Medicaid system overall is wasteful, with outcomes often not fully justifying the expense. The cost of an expansion would depend on how it’s structured, he said, but “it could be a real budget-buster.”

The impact of an expansion on Missouri’s budget remains unclear. A February analysis by researchers at Washington University estimated it would be “approximately revenue-neutral.” But their estimates range widely for the first year depending on enrollment and other factors, from up to $95 million in savings for Missouri’s Medicaid program to costing $42 million more than not expanding.

Powers, whose husband died last year, said she fully supports Medicaid expansion.

But whatever happens, especially now that she’s suffering from heart failure, she’s grateful she won’t have to worry about being uninsured again. At 66, she’s now old enough for Medicare.

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/the-deep-divide-state-borders-create-medicaid-haves-and-have-nots/

[hugecount]

6 Trends and Technologies in Material Handling Industry | Hugecount

Material handling industry is experiencing rapid growth over the recent years, and it is no different in 2019. Following these changes is not an easy task, but if you wish to remain competitive, you must adapt quickly. Here are some of the trends in the material handling industry you need to look out for:

A Changing Workforce

One of the more noticeable trends in material handling industry is the aging workforce. Many reliable, experienced workers are on the brink of retirement, and consequently, it is much harder to find qualified candidates to fill their spots. The direction where this industry is going suggests that business owners will need to adapt to the market and hire workers that haven’t been much included so far in this field, like women, individuals with disabilities, or people under 35.

More Women in the Industry

As mentioned above, more women will find their place in the material handling business. Many of them have already established themselves in this field. Although males dominate this industry, nowadays it is not uncommon to find more and more female workers, who are beginning to fill roles in almost every aspect of the industry, like management, research, and development. Since this is traditionally male industry, hiring women to take some of the responsibilities often results in higher work output. Women bring a fresh, energetic approach, combined with high workplace engagement and eagerness to learn.

The Rise of E-Commerce

Online shopping, and e-commerce, in general, have skyrocketed in the last couple of years. This growth will undoubtedly affect material handling businesses. More and more companies are giving e-commerce a go, and as a result, they need to optimize their warehouses to respond to this new trend accordingly. New systems that allow tracking of the shipments and inventory need to be introduced, to make the process shipping and storing a breeze. Also, there’s a growing need for dependable and high-quality handling and sorting machinery. Conveyor belt equipment, like Belle Banne has to offer, will help streamline and speed up the process of inventory management.

Automation is Taking Over

Almost every industry is taking advantage of technological advancements. Automating processes and implementing new and innovative technologies yields better results, both in speeding up the production, and lowering the overall costs. Many people working in this industry fear that these machines will be replacing them shortly. However, the truth is, these innovations only open up new job opportunities, for engineers, developers, operators, and technicians who need to handle these machines. And since the prices of these gadgets have dropped over the last couple of years, we can expect that more and more businesses will be trying this approach very soon.

Raised Awareness About Sustainability

Industry leaders are becoming increasingly aware of the necessity of creating a sustainable work environment. These concerns are affecting all aspects and levels of material handling business. Most of them have already begun incorporating green solutions to reduce their impact on the environment. Since customers nowadays have a much deeper understanding of the environmental impact of the manufacturers, they expect the companies to reduce their carbon footprint and the negative effects on our surroundings. The material handling industry will likely develop entirely accepted metrics and standards for approaching this issue in the next couple of years.

It is Growing Fast

Material handling equipment can find its use in many industries, almost any you can imagine. And with the rapid growth of e-commerce and online shopping, the need for organized and efficient storages and warehouses will only grow. The need for faster and more efficient sorting and deploying of goods has vastly increased the demand for this type of equipment. Since this trend won’t stop any time soon, it is safe to say that the material handling industry is safe in the foreseeable future.

Staying informed and on top of your game is imperative if you want to be a significant player in your industry. This applies to material handling as well. Changes in technology and fluctuation of workforce force you always to expect the unexpected and stay on your toes. Embracing these changes and not fighting them is the best way to come out as a winner in this business!

Source: https://hugecount.com/business/6-trends-and-technologies-in-material-handling-industry/

[abeerabutaliba]

PEST Analysis:

Political Factors:

Ecological/Environmental factors are an important point for my design studio to hold ethical and environmental values and it's very important that the studio is seen to act responsibly.

FSC certified paper (Forest Stewardship Council, 1993) is almost standard now and recycled stocks and vegetable inks are extras which could help a design studio to take this issue further.

Recycling paper, card and ink cartridges and responsibly disposing of old equipment are examples of where my studio can act considerately within the studio environment itself. It would be good if this was widely recognised by our clients as well as our competition.

Copyright matters:

In terms of my employees, I should make clear in their contract of employment that the copyright of any work they produce belongs to me, their employer. (Copyright breach, as it needs to be in writing).

The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) is responsible for intellectual property matters in the UK. The IPO website contains comprehensive information on copyright issues. *guideline*

Just in case, I should be prepared to assign my rights in my original work to our clients, or licence them to use it while retaining ownership. This is something to be agreed between me and the client and should be clearly set out in any contract between us.

Funding & Stationary:

A good idea to look at places that offer non-repayable grants. This would be useful once I present a sound business plan to show how I would use the capital. Such places include; The Arts Council, The Princes Trust, National Enterprise Scheme.

Networking can present opportunities that could lead to me obtaining investment. Perhaps from venture capitalists for example. (Awards shows, competitions, events, galas, exhibitions, etc. Anything that requires me traveling and meeting people/designers/investors from different places and sectors.

In terms of stationary, once my completed letterhead and other business stationary are completely designed, I need to remember that certain company details must by law be included on things like letterheads, order forms and other formal documents. (More on the Companies House website).

Health & Safety: 

First and foremost, i need to make sure that with my employees, I comply with health & safety legislation which covers all aspects of work place health and safety.

Employers have a duty to ensure the health and safety at work of all their employees and those with more than five employees must prepare a written health and safety policy statement - this wouldn't affect my studio in the beginning if we start small but it's something I would need to bear in mind if we expanded.

Fire Safety: All employers must comply with fire safety regulations - this means carrying out a fire risk assessment at your premises and putting in place fire precaution measures. These could include fire alarm systems and extinguishers as well as clearly signed escape routes. Once studio location is determined, this can be assessed accordingly.

NOTE: I would be held responsible not only for the safety of my staff but also of anyone who might be on my premises, like clients or suppliers.

Disability Legislation:

As an employer and head of studios, I need to make sure that the whole studio does not treat a disabled employee or job applicant less favourably than someone else accessing goods and services.

I must also sure that disabled people are not treated less favourably and that they can access any services I provide. I may need to make physical changes to your premises to ensure this is the case.

Economic Factors:

Home economy/overseas economy (?)* (revisit)

Many other economies around the world have suffered similarly to the UK over the past few years and have recovered at widely varying rates. - Graphic designers often work on projects that involve overseas clients and if we were to be targeting certain clientele in other countries, then their economic climate may well affect their spending upon promotional services such as graphic design.

Interest/Exchange Rates: Both interest and exchange rates have fluctuated vastly as a result of the recent economic downturn which will have impacted heavily upon all business types.

Seasonality Issues: Graphic design is in demand all year round but certain holiday periods for example are likely to increase demand further within particular areas of the industry. At the same time, many businesses also see the start of a new year as the opportunity to undertake a re-brand or to step up their promotion.

In many current graphic design studios, they seem to try and offer potential clients the 'whole package' of a range of different services so covering as many areas of design as possible would be beneficial. However, it is also highly likely that certain clients will be searching for highly specialised design services and so how we pitch ourselves in the market will be key to attracting the desired customer base. Being a studio with a specialised skills set could prove to be a great selling point for our company.

Sociological Factors: 

Lifestyle Trends: Graphic design is impacted upon heavily by emerging lifestyle trends but graphic design itself can be responsible for setting lifestyle trends. Keeping up to date with trends within the industry will be important in maintaining a confident and contemporary edge to the business.

Trends and buzzwords come and go very quickly regardless of which sector of design you work in and you can't really fail to notice them once they are around. Playing on these things are risky as the company could quickly become outdated when trends move on to other things. BARK. being a modern in-house studio, this needs to be read up on and kept up with.

It's also very important to retain a distinctive style that is unique to our business so that customers can recognise us for being a quality firm in the areas that we are specialists in.

Demographics: The demographics that designers can produce work for ranges across the ages but, for our business, we were looking to gain clients that are small to medium size businesses and from the not-for-profit sector. This may involve a younger clientele with small start up businesses which are looking to grow and are perhaps more likely to allow a little more creative freedom for whoever produces the identity and promotional material.

Brand/Company:The way in which a graphic design company brands and promotes itself is one of the most important aspects of the business as we are essentially showing other people what we are capable of doing for them.

Building a professional body of work and promoting ourselves are also key steps to establishing our own brand. If a good reputation is built within the industry then recommendations and past work should draw in a large volume of work.

Advertising/Publicity: The work that graphic designers produce is often meant to be out there in the public domain and to attract attention or promote something for example. Therefore it is of high importance that anything produced does not offend ethnic or religious groups or certain demographics of the general public. This is avoided by being informed about what we are doing through conducting thorough research on the background of each project.

Graphic design is also something that has power to persuade public opinion and so with that must come a responsibility to fully consider what we produce and the effects it may have, although of course some work is intended to shock etc.

Technological Factors:

Competing Technology: As a small design studio that is just starting up we may find ourselves facing competition from more established businesses that have greater resources and better equipment. We will also be reliant on the technology that we decide to use keeping itself at the head of the market, however since the Adobe package is industry standard then this shouldn't become an issue.

Research funding: Resulting from research visits are wider factors to think about such as travel costs, eating out with clients and purchasing samples for example. Also visits to cities, galleries, museums or the purchase of books, magazines or journals should be considered.

Licensing/Patents. (Trademarking, etc). (?) * (Revisit)

Intellectual Property Issues: Intellectual property rights can cover ideas and inventions which can the be patented. There is an intellectual property office which deals with matters surrounding this.

[samiam03x]

8 Overlooked Mobile Design Best Practices You Need to Implement

93% of Internet users browse the Internet on a mobile device every day. That’s 3.5 billion people who could potentially be seeing your website on their phones or tablets at any given time.

It follows, then, that you should be working as hard as you can to optimize your online presence for mobile. Trust me, there’s nothing worse than having a marketing funnel that’s totally ineffective on non-desktop devices.

To give you some guidance, I’ve put together 8 mobile design best practices you need to be following. They’ll help you streamline your visitors’ user experience, maximizing the impact of your marketing funnel for any device.

1. Get Rid of Your Navbar

On mobile, real estate is at a premium – I think of my iPhone screen like a map of downtown Manhattan, where every pixel costs a pretty penny. Check out how much space a mobile navbar can take.

This means you need to maximize what you’re getting out of your website on mobile.

One easy way to do this is to drop your navbar on mobile.

On a laptop or desktop, your navbar can be incredibly helpful – it’s a simple way for your visitors to browse the pages on your site, making it simple for them to find exactly what they’re looking for.

But on mobile, your navbar can take up a ton of space that could otherwise be used for text, images, or whatever other content you have on your website or landing pages.

Now, you might be wondering how visitors are expected to browse your site without a navbar. There’s a few ways around this…

The most popular way is to incorporate a hamburger menu, which allows you to create a much smaller (but still branded) top bar. The hamburger menu acts as a drawer, pulling out from the left side of your screen to show the various menu items in your navbar.

Or, depending on the size of your webpages, you might opt to create a single-page layout for mobile devices. However, unless your website is relatively sparse content-wise, this probably isn’t the best option for your business.

2. Keep Important Elements Within Reach

Think about the time you spend on your smartphone.

I’m willing to bet you use it pretty often – maybe while you’re on the bus or waiting in the line at Starbucks (or perhaps reading this article, right now?). Now, think about how you hold it. If you’re like most of us, you’re only using one of your thumbs to interact with your screen.

You’re not alone: according to a recent study by mobile UX expert Steve Hoober, 75% of people only use one thumb to interact, too.

Years ago, the diagram below was a bible for mobile designers, giving them insight into how they should lay out content to optimize user experience for the majority of website visitors.

Image Source

Though the above may have been accurate at the time, things change quickly (and in technology, even quicker). In the last few years, our phones and screens have been getting bigger and bigger… but our hands are staying the same.

The way we hold our phones has changed – as such, screen “hot spots” have shifted, with touch accuracy dropping as we approach the screen’s outer edges.

Image Source

As a result, we as designers need to organize content in a way that puts primary interactions front and center, saving secondary and tertiary functions for the top and bottom screen edges.

The position of these functions relates directly to ease of access for a user. Primary functions lie in the area that users can access easily with their thumbs, while tertiary (and to some extent, secondary) functions lie in lower-accuracy zones and require a little more work to get to.

3. Optimize and Minimize File Sizes

You’re probably already aware of how important it is to optimize the size of the images on your website. They drastically affect load time, which has a cascading effect on both user experience and the search ranking of your pages.

This is doubly important on mobile. Not only are connections less reliable on mobile, but also mobile users don’t like waiting. That means if your page isn’t loading quickly, they probably won’t stick around to let it finish.

Use a site like TinyJPG, or tools like ImageOptim (Mac only) or Photoshop’s “Export for Web” to make sure you minimize the file size of your images before you upload them to your website.

There are two primary properties that affect file size:

Quality: Put simply, quality is exactly what it sounds like. Turning down the quality setting will reduce the sharpness of your images and increase the possibility of artifacts appearing on your images.

Size/Resolution: Go figure – the actual size of your image has a large effect on its file size. Obviously, you don’t want to make your images so tiny that your visitors can’t see them – but if, for example, the column you’re placing your image in is 600px wide, your image doesn’t need to be 1000px wide. Resize them to fit before uploading.

4. Link Phone Numbers and Addresses

Optimizing for mobile is all about streamlining a visitor’s experience. It should take them as few steps as possible.

This means taking advantage of interactions on mobile that will help make visiting your website (and buying your product or contacting your business) a pleasant experience.

If your website is sales-reliant or if phone is an important touchpoint in your marketing funnel, one of the most important things you can do is make it easy for people to call you.

One simple way to add value to your “contact us” page is to make your phone number a clickable link. Everybody knows the pain of frantically swapping back and forth between your phone and browser apps to type in a phone number, or trying to copy it and accidentally copying all of the other content on the page, too.

Trust me, making your phone number clickable makes a big difference.

All you need to do is link your phone number like this:

And it will appear like this:

123-123-1234

This will allow users to click to call.

In the same vein, you’ll want to make sure other important details are interactive as well – for example, clicking your address should open up a visitor’s Maps application. Though most apps like Facebook will automatically set this up, you can type your address into Google Maps and copy the Share link to link it to the address on your website.

It’s these little things that help make visitors feel like they’re not missing out on anything when they visit your pages on mobile, and it saves them from having to do extra work.

To put it simply, don’t let your mobile browsing experience choke your marketing and sales funnels.

5. Design for Responsiveness

If you were around during the advent and uprise of the mobile web, you might recall that most websites actually built entirely new layouts for mobile that would work for the smaller screens of the pre-iPhone era.

These pages often featured minimal images, and were relatively text-heavy to combat the slow browsing speeds mobile users received on their non-3G, non-LTE, non-WiFi networks.

Fast-forward about ten years, and the mobile landscape has changed entirely. Screens are huge, internet connections have quickened, and tablets exist.

These advancements (and other advancements in front-end design languages like CSS) have paved the way for responsive and adaptive design.

Though there are nuances between these two types of design, their principal purpose remains the same: create a single website layout that responds and changes dynamically based on the device each visitor is using.

Hopefully, the webpage template or landing page editor you’re using will automatically create a mobile-responsive version of your page as you build it, removing the hassle from you or your designers to manually create it.

There are a few things to keep in mind when we consider responsiveness:

Image sizes: If images are important to the content on your page, make sure they’re clearly visible on mobile. Images that are 50% width on desktop may also show up at 50% on mobile, and that’s too small.

Layout/order of content: Depending on the way you organize the elements on your page for desktop, your content may be awkwardly ordered when you shift to mobile. Double-check to make sure all content is in order, even on other devices.

Animations: Animations that look fine on desktop might not work out well on mobile. Check these over on your phone before publishing your page to make sure they’re okay.

Video: In keeping in mind my previous recommendations regarding file sizes, think about hiding (or removing) video on mobile. It’s large, heavy, and can drastically slow down your mobile experience.

JavaScript: Though JavaScript is a wonderful and magical thing, it won’t always work on mobile – check to make sure it does.

6. Disable Popups

In 2017, Google rolled out their soft penalty for what they call “intrusive interstitials”.

In layman’s terms, this pretty much means popups. Here are a couple examples straight from the horse’s mouth.

Image Source

Basically, having popups show on your webpages on mobile devices greatly detracts from user experience, as visitors are unable to access or see the content they’ve clicked to find. To combat this, Google is penalizing pages with popups by reducing their search ranking, to discourage people from adding popups to their sites.

The simple solution? Disable popups on mobile. Seriously – just turn them off.

Allegedly, some user-triggered popups like scroll or click popups aren’t penalized – but I can’t find anywhere that confirms this, so take it with a grain of salt.

If your popup is rather important, add the content in as a section on your page, within your content (or even above the fold). This will stop Google from penalizing your site’s search ranking.

7. Optimize Forms for Mobile

If you’ve ever done some online shopping on your phone, you probably know how frustrating it can be to fill out form after endless form.

While the overall typing experience on mobile has vastly improved from the days of T9, it’s still not perfect. It relies heavily on autocorrect, and can still be quite taxing on the thumbs.

What’s the lesson here? A simple syllogism: long forms require a lot of typing. Typing sucks on mobile. Therefore… long forms suck on mobile.

If you want to try to minimize the negative effect mobile might be having on your conversion rates, try making one of the following changes to your form fields.

Reduce the number of form fields on your page

It’s simple – reducing the number of form fields a user needs to fill out greatly reduces their perceived workload, which can help in reducing visitor friction.

Though this isn’t always a viable option – often, form fields are there because they’re necessary – reducing some of the less necessary ones (last name, maybe?) or combining multiple form fields into a single field (first and last name, for example) can make a big difference.

Break up forms into multiple steps

Segmenting your form into multiple steps can help you increase conversion rates on mobile.

For example, if you have 9 fields, you may want to put only 3 in the first step. When a user fills out these 3 and presses the form submission button, they’re taken to the next page to fill in a few more fields, and so on.

This not only makes converting on your form seem less intimidating initially, it allows you to collect lead information in small bits from your visitors, which can help you if they eventually bounce from your form. I’d recommend collecting at least email on the first part of your form, so you can market to them in the future.

8. Utilize Collapsible Sections/Accordions

When your content has all been collapsed into a single column on a smaller screen, it’s going to end up being much longer.

This is an issue on mobile because it suddenly makes it much more difficult for a visitor to navigate and find what they’re looking for.

An elegant solution to this is to utilize collapsible content sections, otherwise known as accordions.

Accordions are containers that hold content; they show up as only a header and expand once a user taps on them. This allows your visitors to skim your page for the content or topic they’re looking for without needing to sift through a ton of copy and images.

You’ll need to do a bit of front-end work to put together an accordion, so get your designer or developer on the line!

Wrapping it up

Hopefully, these mobile design tips have given you some insight into how you can streamline user experience for the people who visit your website (or landing pages) on mobile.

These are things that are often overlooked, which can lead to a significant decrease in conversion rates on non-desktop devices.

Follow these tips, and I can guarantee your mobile visitors will have a better experience with your site, making them more likely to convert.

Good luck!

About the Author: Carlo is a digital marketer and designer at Wishpond. When he’s not creating content or A/B testing, he enjoys making music, drinking copious amounts of coffee, and shopping for sneakers. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @carlonathan.

http://ift.tt/2wjWPbv from MarketingRSS http://ift.tt/2wROf7X via Youtube

[marie85marketing]

8 Overlooked Mobile Design Best Practices You Need to Implement

93% of Internet users browse the Internet on a mobile device every day. That’s 3.5 billion people who could potentially be seeing your website on their phones or tablets at any given time.

It follows, then, that you should be working as hard as you can to optimize your online presence for mobile. Trust me, there’s nothing worse than having a marketing funnel that’s totally ineffective on non-desktop devices.

To give you some guidance, I’ve put together 8 mobile design best practices you need to be following. They’ll help you streamline your visitors’ user experience, maximizing the impact of your marketing funnel for any device.

1. Get Rid of Your Navbar

On mobile, real estate is at a premium – I think of my iPhone screen like a map of downtown Manhattan, where every pixel costs a pretty penny. Check out how much space a mobile navbar can take.

This means you need to maximize what you’re getting out of your website on mobile.

One easy way to do this is to drop your navbar on mobile.

On a laptop or desktop, your navbar can be incredibly helpful – it’s a simple way for your visitors to browse the pages on your site, making it simple for them to find exactly what they’re looking for.

But on mobile, your navbar can take up a ton of space that could otherwise be used for text, images, or whatever other content you have on your website or landing pages.

Now, you might be wondering how visitors are expected to browse your site without a navbar. There’s a few ways around this…

The most popular way is to incorporate a hamburger menu, which allows you to create a much smaller (but still branded) top bar. The hamburger menu acts as a drawer, pulling out from the left side of your screen to show the various menu items in your navbar.

Or, depending on the size of your webpages, you might opt to create a single-page layout for mobile devices. However, unless your website is relatively sparse content-wise, this probably isn’t the best option for your business.

2. Keep Important Elements Within Reach

Think about the time you spend on your smartphone.

I’m willing to bet you use it pretty often – maybe while you’re on the bus or waiting in the line at Starbucks (or perhaps reading this article, right now?). Now, think about how you hold it. If you’re like most of us, you’re only using one of your thumbs to interact with your screen.

You’re not alone: according to a recent study by mobile UX expert Steve Hoober, 75% of people only use one thumb to interact, too.

Years ago, the diagram below was a bible for mobile designers, giving them insight into how they should lay out content to optimize user experience for the majority of website visitors.

Image Source

Though the above may have been accurate at the time, things change quickly (and in technology, even quicker). In the last few years, our phones and screens have been getting bigger and bigger… but our hands are staying the same.

The way we hold our phones has changed – as such, screen “hot spots” have shifted, with touch accuracy dropping as we approach the screen’s outer edges.

Image Source

As a result, we as designers need to organize content in a way that puts primary interactions front and center, saving secondary and tertiary functions for the top and bottom screen edges.

The position of these functions relates directly to ease of access for a user. Primary functions lie in the area that users can access easily with their thumbs, while tertiary (and to some extent, secondary) functions lie in lower-accuracy zones and require a little more work to get to.

3. Optimize and Minimize File Sizes

You’re probably already aware of how important it is to optimize the size of the images on your website. They drastically affect load time, which has a cascading effect on both user experience and the search ranking of your pages.

This is doubly important on mobile. Not only are connections less reliable on mobile, but also mobile users don’t like waiting. That means if your page isn’t loading quickly, they probably won’t stick around to let it finish.

Use a site like TinyJPG, or tools like ImageOptim (Mac only) or Photoshop’s “Export for Web” to make sure you minimize the file size of your images before you upload them to your website.

There are two primary properties that affect file size:

Quality: Put simply, quality is exactly what it sounds like. Turning down the quality setting will reduce the sharpness of your images and increase the possibility of artifacts appearing on your images.

Size/Resolution: Go figure – the actual size of your image has a large effect on its file size. Obviously, you don’t want to make your images so tiny that your visitors can’t see them – but if, for example, the column you’re placing your image in is 600px wide, your image doesn’t need to be 1000px wide. Resize them to fit before uploading.

4. Link Phone Numbers and Addresses

Optimizing for mobile is all about streamlining a visitor’s experience. It should take them as few steps as possible.

This means taking advantage of interactions on mobile that will help make visiting your website (and buying your product or contacting your business) a pleasant experience.

If your website is sales-reliant or if phone is an important touchpoint in your marketing funnel, one of the most important things you can do is make it easy for people to call you.

One simple way to add value to your “contact us” page is to make your phone number a clickable link. Everybody knows the pain of frantically swapping back and forth between your phone and browser apps to type in a phone number, or trying to copy it and accidentally copying all of the other content on the page, too.

Trust me, making your phone number clickable makes a big difference.

All you need to do is link your phone number like this:

And it will appear like this:

123-123-1234

This will allow users to click to call.

In the same vein, you’ll want to make sure other important details are interactive as well – for example, clicking your address should open up a visitor’s Maps application. Though most apps like Facebook will automatically set this up, you can type your address into Google Maps and copy the Share link to link it to the address on your website.

It’s these little things that help make visitors feel like they’re not missing out on anything when they visit your pages on mobile, and it saves them from having to do extra work.

To put it simply, don’t let your mobile browsing experience choke your marketing and sales funnels.

5. Design for Responsiveness

If you were around during the advent and uprise of the mobile web, you might recall that most websites actually built entirely new layouts for mobile that would work for the smaller screens of the pre-iPhone era.

These pages often featured minimal images, and were relatively text-heavy to combat the slow browsing speeds mobile users received on their non-3G, non-LTE, non-WiFi networks.

Fast-forward about ten years, and the mobile landscape has changed entirely. Screens are huge, internet connections have quickened, and tablets exist.

These advancements (and other advancements in front-end design languages like CSS) have paved the way for responsive and adaptive design.

Though there are nuances between these two types of design, their principal purpose remains the same: create a single website layout that responds and changes dynamically based on the device each visitor is using.

Hopefully, the webpage template or landing page editor you’re using will automatically create a mobile-responsive version of your page as you build it, removing the hassle from you or your designers to manually create it.

There are a few things to keep in mind when we consider responsiveness:

Image sizes: If images are important to the content on your page, make sure they’re clearly visible on mobile. Images that are 50% width on desktop may also show up at 50% on mobile, and that’s too small.

Layout/order of content: Depending on the way you organize the elements on your page for desktop, your content may be awkwardly ordered when you shift to mobile. Double-check to make sure all content is in order, even on other devices.

Animations: Animations that look fine on desktop might not work out well on mobile. Check these over on your phone before publishing your page to make sure they’re okay.

Video: In keeping in mind my previous recommendations regarding file sizes, think about hiding (or removing) video on mobile. It’s large, heavy, and can drastically slow down your mobile experience.

JavaScript: Though JavaScript is a wonderful and magical thing, it won’t always work on mobile – check to make sure it does.

6. Disable Popups

In 2017, Google rolled out their soft penalty for what they call “intrusive interstitials”.

In layman’s terms, this pretty much means popups. Here are a couple examples straight from the horse’s mouth.

Image Source

Basically, having popups show on your webpages on mobile devices greatly detracts from user experience, as visitors are unable to access or see the content they’ve clicked to find. To combat this, Google is penalizing pages with popups by reducing their search ranking, to discourage people from adding popups to their sites.

The simple solution? Disable popups on mobile. Seriously – just turn them off.

Allegedly, some user-triggered popups like scroll or click popups aren’t penalized – but I can’t find anywhere that confirms this, so take it with a grain of salt.

If your popup is rather important, add the content in as a section on your page, within your content (or even above the fold). This will stop Google from penalizing your site’s search ranking.

7. Optimize Forms for Mobile

If you’ve ever done some online shopping on your phone, you probably know how frustrating it can be to fill out form after endless form.

While the overall typing experience on mobile has vastly improved from the days of T9, it’s still not perfect. It relies heavily on autocorrect, and can still be quite taxing on the thumbs.

What’s the lesson here? A simple syllogism: long forms require a lot of typing. Typing sucks on mobile. Therefore… long forms suck on mobile.

If you want to try to minimize the negative effect mobile might be having on your conversion rates, try making one of the following changes to your form fields.

Reduce the number of form fields on your page

It’s simple – reducing the number of form fields a user needs to fill out greatly reduces their perceived workload, which can help in reducing visitor friction.

Though this isn’t always a viable option – often, form fields are there because they’re necessary – reducing some of the less necessary ones (last name, maybe?) or combining multiple form fields into a single field (first and last name, for example) can make a big difference.

Break up forms into multiple steps

Segmenting your form into multiple steps can help you increase conversion rates on mobile.

For example, if you have 9 fields, you may want to put only 3 in the first step. When a user fills out these 3 and presses the form submission button, they’re taken to the next page to fill in a few more fields, and so on.

This not only makes converting on your form seem less intimidating initially, it allows you to collect lead information in small bits from your visitors, which can help you if they eventually bounce from your form. I’d recommend collecting at least email on the first part of your form, so you can market to them in the future.

8. Utilize Collapsible Sections/Accordions

When your content has all been collapsed into a single column on a smaller screen, it’s going to end up being much longer.

This is an issue on mobile because it suddenly makes it much more difficult for a visitor to navigate and find what they’re looking for.

An elegant solution to this is to utilize collapsible content sections, otherwise known as accordions.

Accordions are containers that hold content; they show up as only a header and expand once a user taps on them. This allows your visitors to skim your page for the content or topic they’re looking for without needing to sift through a ton of copy and images.

You’ll need to do a bit of front-end work to put together an accordion, so get your designer or developer on the line!

Wrapping it up

Hopefully, these mobile design tips have given you some insight into how you can streamline user experience for the people who visit your website (or landing pages) on mobile.

These are things that are often overlooked, which can lead to a significant decrease in conversion rates on non-desktop devices.

Follow these tips, and I can guarantee your mobile visitors will have a better experience with your site, making them more likely to convert.

Good luck!

About the Author: Carlo is a digital marketer and designer at Wishpond. When he’s not creating content or A/B testing, he enjoys making music, drinking copious amounts of coffee, and shopping for sneakers. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @carlonathan.

[reputationiseverything]

8 Overlooked Mobile Design Best Practices You Need to Implement

email marketing for small business

93% of Internet users browse the Internet on a mobile device every day. That’s 3.5 billion people who could potentially be seeing your website on their phones or tablets at any given time.

It follows, then, that you should be working as hard as you can to optimize your online presence for mobile. Trust me, there’s nothing worse than having a marketing funnel that’s totally ineffective on non-desktop devices.

To give you some guidance, I’ve put together 8 mobile design best practices you need to be following. They’ll help you streamline your visitors’ user experience, maximizing the impact of your marketing funnel for any device.

1. Get Rid of Your Navbar

On mobile, real estate is at a premium – I think of my iPhone screen like a map of downtown Manhattan, where every pixel costs a pretty penny. Check out how much space a mobile navbar can take.

This means you need to maximize what you’re getting out of your website on mobile.

One easy way to do this is to drop your navbar on mobile.

On a laptop or desktop, your navbar can be incredibly helpful – it’s a simple way for your visitors to browse the pages on your site, making it simple for them to find exactly what they’re looking for.

But on mobile, your navbar can take up a ton of space that could otherwise be used for text, images, or whatever other content you have on your website or landing pages.

Now, you might be wondering how visitors are expected to browse your site without a navbar. There’s a few ways around this…

The most popular way is to incorporate a hamburger menu, which allows you to create a much smaller (but still branded) top bar. The hamburger menu acts as a drawer, pulling out from the left side of your screen to show the various menu items in your navbar.

Or, depending on the size of your webpages, you might opt to create a single-page layout for mobile devices. However, unless your website is relatively sparse content-wise, this probably isn’t the best option for your business.

2. Keep Important Elements Within Reach

Think about the time you spend on your smartphone.

I’m willing to bet you use it pretty often – maybe while you’re on the bus or waiting in the line at Starbucks (or perhaps reading this article, right now?). Now, think about how you hold it. If you’re like most of us, you’re only using one of your thumbs to interact with your screen.

You’re not alone: according to a recent study by mobile UX expert Steve Hoober, 75% of people only use one thumb to interact, too.

Years ago, the diagram below was a bible for mobile designers, giving them insight into how they should lay out content to optimize user experience for the majority of website visitors.

Image Source

Though the above may have been accurate at the time, things change quickly (and in technology, even quicker). In the last few years, our phones and screens have been getting bigger and bigger… but our hands are staying the same.

The way we hold our phones has changed – as such, screen “hot spots” have shifted, with touch accuracy dropping as we approach the screen’s outer edges.

Image Source

As a result, we as designers need to organize content in a way that puts primary interactions front and center, saving secondary and tertiary functions for the top and bottom screen edges.

The position of these functions relates directly to ease of access for a user. Primary functions lie in the area that users can access easily with their thumbs, while tertiary (and to some extent, secondary) functions lie in lower-accuracy zones and require a little more work to get to.

3. Optimize and Minimize File Sizes

You’re probably already aware of how important it is to optimize the size of the images on your website. They drastically affect load time, which has a cascading effect on both user experience and the search ranking of your pages.

This is doubly important on mobile. Not only are connections less reliable on mobile, but also mobile users don’t like waiting. That means if your page isn’t loading quickly, they probably won’t stick around to let it finish.

Use a site like TinyJPG, or tools like ImageOptim (Mac only) or Photoshop’s “Export for Web” to make sure you minimize the file size of your images before you upload them to your website.

There are two primary properties that affect file size:

Quality: Put simply, quality is exactly what it sounds like. Turning down the quality setting will reduce the sharpness of your images and increase the possibility of artifacts appearing on your images.

Size/Resolution: Go figure – the actual size of your image has a large effect on its file size. Obviously, you don’t want to make your images so tiny that your visitors can’t see them – but if, for example, the column you’re placing your image in is 600px wide, your image doesn’t need to be 1000px wide. Resize them to fit before uploading.

4. Link Phone Numbers and Addresses

Optimizing for mobile is all about streamlining a visitor’s experience. It should take them as few steps as possible.

This means taking advantage of interactions on mobile that will help make visiting your website (and buying your product or contacting your business) a pleasant experience.

If your website is sales-reliant or if phone is an important touchpoint in your marketing funnel, one of the most important things you can do is make it easy for people to call you.

One simple way to add value to your “contact us” page is to make your phone number a clickable link. Everybody knows the pain of frantically swapping back and forth between your phone and browser apps to type in a phone number, or trying to copy it and accidentally copying all of the other content on the page, too.

Trust me, making your phone number clickable makes a big difference.

All you need to do is link your phone number like this:

And it will appear like this:

123-123-1234

This will allow users to click to call.

In the same vein, you’ll want to make sure other important details are interactive as well – for example, clicking your address should open up a visitor’s Maps application. Though most apps like Facebook will automatically set this up, you can type your address into Google Maps and copy the Share link to link it to the address on your website.

It’s these little things that help make visitors feel like they’re not missing out on anything when they visit your pages on mobile, and it saves them from having to do extra work.

To put it simply, don’t let your mobile browsing experience choke your marketing and sales funnels.

5. Design for Responsiveness

If you were around during the advent and uprise of the mobile web, you might recall that most websites actually built entirely new layouts for mobile that would work for the smaller screens of the pre-iPhone era.

These pages often featured minimal images, and were relatively text-heavy to combat the slow browsing speeds mobile users received on their non-3G, non-LTE, non-WiFi networks.

Fast-forward about ten years, and the mobile landscape has changed entirely. Screens are huge, internet connections have quickened, and tablets exist.

These advancements (and other advancements in front-end design languages like CSS) have paved the way for responsive and adaptive design.

Though there are nuances between these two types of design, their principal purpose remains the same: create a single website layout that responds and changes dynamically based on the device each visitor is using.

Hopefully, the webpage template or landing page editor you’re using will automatically create a mobile-responsive version of your page as you build it, removing the hassle from you or your designers to manually create it.

There are a few things to keep in mind when we consider responsiveness:

Image sizes: If images are important to the content on your page, make sure they’re clearly visible on mobile. Images that are 50% width on desktop may also show up at 50% on mobile, and that’s too small.

Layout/order of content: Depending on the way you organize the elements on your page for desktop, your content may be awkwardly ordered when you shift to mobile. Double-check to make sure all content is in order, even on other devices.

Animations: Animations that look fine on desktop might not work out well on mobile. Check these over on your phone before publishing your page to make sure they’re okay.

Video: In keeping in mind my previous recommendations regarding file sizes, think about hiding (or removing) video on mobile. It’s large, heavy, and can drastically slow down your mobile experience.

JavaScript: Though JavaScript is a wonderful and magical thing, it won’t always work on mobile – check to make sure it does.

6. Disable Popups

In 2017, Google rolled out their soft penalty for what they call “intrusive interstitials”.

In layman’s terms, this pretty much means popups. Here are a couple examples straight from the horse’s mouth.

Image Source

Basically, having popups show on your webpages on mobile devices greatly detracts from user experience, as visitors are unable to access or see the content they’ve clicked to find. To combat this, Google is penalizing pages with popups by reducing their search ranking, to discourage people from adding popups to their sites.

The simple solution? Disable popups on mobile. Seriously – just turn them off.

Allegedly, some user-triggered popups like scroll or click popups aren’t penalized – but I can’t find anywhere that confirms this, so take it with a grain of salt.

If your popup is rather important, add the content in as a section on your page, within your content (or even above the fold). This will stop Google from penalizing your site’s search ranking.

7. Optimize Forms for Mobile

If you’ve ever done some online shopping on your phone, you probably know how frustrating it can be to fill out form after endless form.

While the overall typing experience on mobile has vastly improved from the days of T9, it’s still not perfect. It relies heavily on autocorrect, and can still be quite taxing on the thumbs.

What’s the lesson here? A simple syllogism: long forms require a lot of typing. Typing sucks on mobile. Therefore… long forms suck on mobile.

If you want to try to minimize the negative effect mobile might be having on your conversion rates, try making one of the following changes to your form fields.

Reduce the number of form fields on your page

It’s simple – reducing the number of form fields a user needs to fill out greatly reduces their perceived workload, which can help in reducing visitor friction.

Though this isn’t always a viable option – often, form fields are there because they’re necessary – reducing some of the less necessary ones (last name, maybe?) or combining multiple form fields into a single field (first and last name, for example) can make a big difference.

Break up forms into multiple steps

Segmenting your form into multiple steps can help you increase conversion rates on mobile.

For example, if you have 9 fields, you may want to put only 3 in the first step. When a user fills out these 3 and presses the form submission button, they’re taken to the next page to fill in a few more fields, and so on.

This not only makes converting on your form seem less intimidating initially, it allows you to collect lead information in small bits from your visitors, which can help you if they eventually bounce from your form. I’d recommend collecting at least email on the first part of your form, so you can market to them in the future.

8. Utilize Collapsible Sections/Accordions

When your content has all been collapsed into a single column on a smaller screen, it’s going to end up being much longer.

This is an issue on mobile because it suddenly makes it much more difficult for a visitor to navigate and find what they’re looking for.

An elegant solution to this is to utilize collapsible content sections, otherwise known as accordions.

Accordions are containers that hold content; they show up as only a header and expand once a user taps on them. This allows your visitors to skim your page for the content or topic they’re looking for without needing to sift through a ton of copy and images.

You’ll need to do a bit of front-end work to put together an accordion, so get your designer or developer on the line!

Wrapping it up

Hopefully, these mobile design tips have given you some insight into how you can streamline user experience for the people who visit your website (or landing pages) on mobile.

These are things that are often overlooked, which can lead to a significant decrease in conversion rates on non-desktop devices.

Follow these tips, and I can guarantee your mobile visitors will have a better experience with your site, making them more likely to convert.

Good luck!

About the Author: Carlo is a digital marketer and designer at Wishpond. When he’s not creating content or A/B testing, he enjoys making music, drinking copious amounts of coffee, and shopping for sneakers. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @carlonathan.

Youtobe

[alissaselezneva]

8 Overlooked Mobile Design Best Practices You Need to Implement

93% of Internet users browse the Internet on a mobile device every day. That’s 3.5 billion people who could potentially be seeing your website on their phones or tablets at any given time.

It follows, then, that you should be working as hard as you can to optimize your online presence for mobile. Trust me, there’s nothing worse than having a marketing funnel that’s totally ineffective on non-desktop devices.

To give you some guidance, I’ve put together 8 mobile design best practices you need to be following. They’ll help you streamline your visitors’ user experience, maximizing the impact of your marketing funnel for any device.

1. Get Rid of Your Navbar

On mobile, real estate is at a premium – I think of my iPhone screen like a map of downtown Manhattan, where every pixel costs a pretty penny. Check out how much space a mobile navbar can take.

This means you need to maximize what you’re getting out of your website on mobile.

One easy way to do this is to drop your navbar on mobile.

On a laptop or desktop, your navbar can be incredibly helpful – it’s a simple way for your visitors to browse the pages on your site, making it simple for them to find exactly what they’re looking for.

But on mobile, your navbar can take up a ton of space that could otherwise be used for text, images, or whatever other content you have on your website or landing pages.

Now, you might be wondering how visitors are expected to browse your site without a navbar. There’s a few ways around this…

The most popular way is to incorporate a hamburger menu, which allows you to create a much smaller (but still branded) top bar. The hamburger menu acts as a drawer, pulling out from the left side of your screen to show the various menu items in your navbar.

Or, depending on the size of your webpages, you might opt to create a single-page layout for mobile devices. However, unless your website is relatively sparse content-wise, this probably isn’t the best option for your business.

2. Keep Important Elements Within Reach

Think about the time you spend on your smartphone.

I’m willing to bet you use it pretty often – maybe while you’re on the bus or waiting in the line at Starbucks (or perhaps reading this article, right now?). Now, think about how you hold it. If you’re like most of us, you’re only using one of your thumbs to interact with your screen.

You’re not alone: according to a recent study by mobile UX expert Steve Hoober, 75% of people only use one thumb to interact, too.

Years ago, the diagram below was a bible for mobile designers, giving them insight into how they should lay out content to optimize user experience for the majority of website visitors.

Image Source

Though the above may have been accurate at the time, things change quickly (and in technology, even quicker). In the last few years, our phones and screens have been getting bigger and bigger… but our hands are staying the same.

The way we hold our phones has changed – as such, screen “hot spots” have shifted, with touch accuracy dropping as we approach the screen’s outer edges.

Image Source

As a result, we as designers need to organize content in a way that puts primary interactions front and center, saving secondary and tertiary functions for the top and bottom screen edges.

The position of these functions relates directly to ease of access for a user. Primary functions lie in the area that users can access easily with their thumbs, while tertiary (and to some extent, secondary) functions lie in lower-accuracy zones and require a little more work to get to.

3. Optimize and Minimize File Sizes

You’re probably already aware of how important it is to optimize the size of the images on your website. They drastically affect load time, which has a cascading effect on both user experience and the search ranking of your pages.

This is doubly important on mobile. Not only are connections less reliable on mobile, but also mobile users don’t like waiting. That means if your page isn’t loading quickly, they probably won’t stick around to let it finish.

Use a site like TinyJPG, or tools like ImageOptim (Mac only) or Photoshop’s “Export for Web” to make sure you minimize the file size of your images before you upload them to your website.

There are two primary properties that affect file size:

Quality: Put simply, quality is exactly what it sounds like. Turning down the quality setting will reduce the sharpness of your images and increase the possibility of artifacts appearing on your images.

Size/Resolution: Go figure – the actual size of your image has a large effect on its file size. Obviously, you don’t want to make your images so tiny that your visitors can’t see them – but if, for example, the column you’re placing your image in is 600px wide, your image doesn’t need to be 1000px wide. Resize them to fit before uploading.

4. Link Phone Numbers and Addresses

Optimizing for mobile is all about streamlining a visitor’s experience. It should take them as few steps as possible.

This means taking advantage of interactions on mobile that will help make visiting your website (and buying your product or contacting your business) a pleasant experience.

If your website is sales-reliant or if phone is an important touchpoint in your marketing funnel, one of the most important things you can do is make it easy for people to call you.

One simple way to add value to your “contact us” page is to make your phone number a clickable link. Everybody knows the pain of frantically swapping back and forth between your phone and browser apps to type in a phone number, or trying to copy it and accidentally copying all of the other content on the page, too.

Trust me, making your phone number clickable makes a big difference.

All you need to do is link your phone number like this:

And it will appear like this:

123-123-1234

This will allow users to click to call.

In the same vein, you’ll want to make sure other important details are interactive as well – for example, clicking your address should open up a visitor’s Maps application. Though most apps like Facebook will automatically set this up, you can type your address into Google Maps and copy the Share link to link it to the address on your website.

It’s these little things that help make visitors feel like they’re not missing out on anything when they visit your pages on mobile, and it saves them from having to do extra work.

To put it simply, don’t let your mobile browsing experience choke your marketing and sales funnels.

5. Design for Responsiveness

If you were around during the advent and uprise of the mobile web, you might recall that most websites actually built entirely new layouts for mobile that would work for the smaller screens of the pre-iPhone era.

These pages often featured minimal images, and were relatively text-heavy to combat the slow browsing speeds mobile users received on their non-3G, non-LTE, non-WiFi networks.

Fast-forward about ten years, and the mobile landscape has changed entirely. Screens are huge, internet connections have quickened, and tablets exist.

These advancements (and other advancements in front-end design languages like CSS) have paved the way for responsive and adaptive design.

Though there are nuances between these two types of design, their principal purpose remains the same: create a single website layout that responds and changes dynamically based on the device each visitor is using.

Hopefully, the webpage template or landing page editor you’re using will automatically create a mobile-responsive version of your page as you build it, removing the hassle from you or your designers to manually create it.

There are a few things to keep in mind when we consider responsiveness:

Image sizes: If images are important to the content on your page, make sure they’re clearly visible on mobile. Images that are 50% width on desktop may also show up at 50% on mobile, and that’s too small.

Layout/order of content: Depending on the way you organize the elements on your page for desktop, your content may be awkwardly ordered when you shift to mobile. Double-check to make sure all content is in order, even on other devices.

Animations: Animations that look fine on desktop might not work out well on mobile. Check these over on your phone before publishing your page to make sure they’re okay.

Video: In keeping in mind my previous recommendations regarding file sizes, think about hiding (or removing) video on mobile. It’s large, heavy, and can drastically slow down your mobile experience.

JavaScript: Though JavaScript is a wonderful and magical thing, it won’t always work on mobile – check to make sure it does.

6. Disable Popups

In 2017, Google rolled out their soft penalty for what they call “intrusive interstitials”.

In layman’s terms, this pretty much means popups. Here are a couple examples straight from the horse’s mouth.

Image Source

Basically, having popups show on your webpages on mobile devices greatly detracts from user experience, as visitors are unable to access or see the content they’ve clicked to find. To combat this, Google is penalizing pages with popups by reducing their search ranking, to discourage people from adding popups to their sites.

The simple solution? Disable popups on mobile. Seriously – just turn them off.

Allegedly, some user-triggered popups like scroll or click popups aren’t penalized – but I can’t find anywhere that confirms this, so take it with a grain of salt.

If your popup is rather important, add the content in as a section on your page, within your content (or even above the fold). This will stop Google from penalizing your site’s search ranking.

7. Optimize Forms for Mobile

If you’ve ever done some online shopping on your phone, you probably know how frustrating it can be to fill out form after endless form.

While the overall typing experience on mobile has vastly improved from the days of T9, it’s still not perfect. It relies heavily on autocorrect, and can still be quite taxing on the thumbs.

What’s the lesson here? A simple syllogism: long forms require a lot of typing. Typing sucks on mobile. Therefore… long forms suck on mobile.

If you want to try to minimize the negative effect mobile might be having on your conversion rates, try making one of the following changes to your form fields.

Reduce the number of form fields on your page

It’s simple – reducing the number of form fields a user needs to fill out greatly reduces their perceived workload, which can help in reducing visitor friction.

Though this isn’t always a viable option – often, form fields are there because they’re necessary – reducing some of the less necessary ones (last name, maybe?) or combining multiple form fields into a single field (first and last name, for example) can make a big difference.

Break up forms into multiple steps

Segmenting your form into multiple steps can help you increase conversion rates on mobile.

For example, if you have 9 fields, you may want to put only 3 in the first step. When a user fills out these 3 and presses the form submission button, they’re taken to the next page to fill in a few more fields, and so on.

This not only makes converting on your form seem less intimidating initially, it allows you to collect lead information in small bits from your visitors, which can help you if they eventually bounce from your form. I’d recommend collecting at least email on the first part of your form, so you can market to them in the future.

8. Utilize Collapsible Sections/Accordions

When your content has all been collapsed into a single column on a smaller screen, it’s going to end up being much longer.

This is an issue on mobile because it suddenly makes it much more difficult for a visitor to navigate and find what they’re looking for.

An elegant solution to this is to utilize collapsible content sections, otherwise known as accordions.

Accordions are containers that hold content; they show up as only a header and expand once a user taps on them. This allows your visitors to skim your page for the content or topic they’re looking for without needing to sift through a ton of copy and images.

You’ll need to do a bit of front-end work to put together an accordion, so get your designer or developer on the line!

Wrapping it up

Hopefully, these mobile design tips have given you some insight into how you can streamline user experience for the people who visit your website (or landing pages) on mobile.

These are things that are often overlooked, which can lead to a significant decrease in conversion rates on non-desktop devices.

Follow these tips, and I can guarantee your mobile visitors will have a better experience with your site, making them more likely to convert.

Good luck!

About the Author: Carlo is a digital marketer and designer at Wishpond. When he’s not creating content or A/B testing, he enjoys making music, drinking copious amounts of coffee, and shopping for sneakers. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @carlonathan.

from WordPress https://reviewandbonuss.wordpress.com/2017/09/26/8-overlooked-mobile-design-best-practices-you-need-to-implement/

[filipeteimuraz]

8 Overlooked Mobile Design Best Practices You Need to Implement

93% of Internet users browse the Internet on a mobile device every day. That’s 3.5 billion people who could potentially be seeing your website on their phones or tablets at any given time.

It follows, then, that you should be working as hard as you can to optimize your online presence for mobile. Trust me, there’s nothing worse than having a marketing funnel that’s totally ineffective on non-desktop devices.

To give you some guidance, I’ve put together 8 mobile design best practices you need to be following. They’ll help you streamline your visitors’ user experience, maximizing the impact of your marketing funnel for any device.

1. Get Rid of Your Navbar

On mobile, real estate is at a premium – I think of my iPhone screen like a map of downtown Manhattan, where every pixel costs a pretty penny. Check out how much space a mobile navbar can take.

This means you need to maximize what you’re getting out of your website on mobile.

One easy way to do this is to drop your navbar on mobile.

On a laptop or desktop, your navbar can be incredibly helpful – it’s a simple way for your visitors to browse the pages on your site, making it simple for them to find exactly what they’re looking for.

But on mobile, your navbar can take up a ton of space that could otherwise be used for text, images, or whatever other content you have on your website or landing pages.

Now, you might be wondering how visitors are expected to browse your site without a navbar. There’s a few ways around this…

The most popular way is to incorporate a hamburger menu, which allows you to create a much smaller (but still branded) top bar. The hamburger menu acts as a drawer, pulling out from the left side of your screen to show the various menu items in your navbar.

Or, depending on the size of your webpages, you might opt to create a single-page layout for mobile devices. However, unless your website is relatively sparse content-wise, this probably isn’t the best option for your business.

2. Keep Important Elements Within Reach

Think about the time you spend on your smartphone.

I’m willing to bet you use it pretty often – maybe while you’re on the bus or waiting in the line at Starbucks (or perhaps reading this article, right now?). Now, think about how you hold it. If you’re like most of us, you’re only using one of your thumbs to interact with your screen.

You’re not alone: according to a recent study by mobile UX expert Steve Hoober, 75% of people only use one thumb to interact, too.

Years ago, the diagram below was a bible for mobile designers, giving them insight into how they should lay out content to optimize user experience for the majority of website visitors.

Image Source

Though the above may have been accurate at the time, things change quickly (and in technology, even quicker). In the last few years, our phones and screens have been getting bigger and bigger… but our hands are staying the same.

The way we hold our phones has changed – as such, screen “hot spots” have shifted, with touch accuracy dropping as we approach the screen’s outer edges.

Image Source

As a result, we as designers need to organize content in a way that puts primary interactions front and center, saving secondary and tertiary functions for the top and bottom screen edges.

The position of these functions relates directly to ease of access for a user. Primary functions lie in the area that users can access easily with their thumbs, while tertiary (and to some extent, secondary) functions lie in lower-accuracy zones and require a little more work to get to.

3. Optimize and Minimize File Sizes

You’re probably already aware of how important it is to optimize the size of the images on your website. They drastically affect load time, which has a cascading effect on both user experience and the search ranking of your pages.

This is doubly important on mobile. Not only are connections less reliable on mobile, but also mobile users don’t like waiting. That means if your page isn’t loading quickly, they probably won’t stick around to let it finish.

Use a site like TinyJPG, or tools like ImageOptim (Mac only) or Photoshop’s “Export for Web” to make sure you minimize the file size of your images before you upload them to your website.

There are two primary properties that affect file size:

Quality: Put simply, quality is exactly what it sounds like. Turning down the quality setting will reduce the sharpness of your images and increase the possibility of artifacts appearing on your images.

Size/Resolution: Go figure – the actual size of your image has a large effect on its file size. Obviously, you don’t want to make your images so tiny that your visitors can’t see them – but if, for example, the column you’re placing your image in is 600px wide, your image doesn’t need to be 1000px wide. Resize them to fit before uploading.

4. Link Phone Numbers and Addresses

Optimizing for mobile is all about streamlining a visitor’s experience. It should take them as few steps as possible.

This means taking advantage of interactions on mobile that will help make visiting your website (and buying your product or contacting your business) a pleasant experience.

If your website is sales-reliant or if phone is an important touchpoint in your marketing funnel, one of the most important things you can do is make it easy for people to call you.

One simple way to add value to your “contact us” page is to make your phone number a clickable link. Everybody knows the pain of frantically swapping back and forth between your phone and browser apps to type in a phone number, or trying to copy it and accidentally copying all of the other content on the page, too.

Trust me, making your phone number clickable makes a big difference.

All you need to do is link your phone number like this:

And it will appear like this:

123-123-1234

This will allow users to click to call.

In the same vein, you’ll want to make sure other important details are interactive as well – for example, clicking your address should open up a visitor’s Maps application. Though most apps like Facebook will automatically set this up, you can type your address into Google Maps and copy the Share link to link it to the address on your website.

It’s these little things that help make visitors feel like they’re not missing out on anything when they visit your pages on mobile, and it saves them from having to do extra work.

To put it simply, don’t let your mobile browsing experience choke your marketing and sales funnels.

5. Design for Responsiveness

If you were around during the advent and uprise of the mobile web, you might recall that most websites actually built entirely new layouts for mobile that would work for the smaller screens of the pre-iPhone era.

These pages often featured minimal images, and were relatively text-heavy to combat the slow browsing speeds mobile users received on their non-3G, non-LTE, non-WiFi networks.

Fast-forward about ten years, and the mobile landscape has changed entirely. Screens are huge, internet connections have quickened, and tablets exist.

These advancements (and other advancements in front-end design languages like CSS) have paved the way for responsive and adaptive design.

Though there are nuances between these two types of design, their principal purpose remains the same: create a single website layout that responds and changes dynamically based on the device each visitor is using.

Hopefully, the webpage template or landing page editor you’re using will automatically create a mobile-responsive version of your page as you build it, removing the hassle from you or your designers to manually create it.

There are a few things to keep in mind when we consider responsiveness:

Image sizes: If images are important to the content on your page, make sure they’re clearly visible on mobile. Images that are 50% width on desktop may also show up at 50% on mobile, and that’s too small.

Layout/order of content: Depending on the way you organize the elements on your page for desktop, your content may be awkwardly ordered when you shift to mobile. Double-check to make sure all content is in order, even on other devices.

Animations: Animations that look fine on desktop might not work out well on mobile. Check these over on your phone before publishing your page to make sure they’re okay.

Video: In keeping in mind my previous recommendations regarding file sizes, think about hiding (or removing) video on mobile. It’s large, heavy, and can drastically slow down your mobile experience.

JavaScript: Though JavaScript is a wonderful and magical thing, it won’t always work on mobile – check to make sure it does.

6. Disable Popups

In 2017, Google rolled out their soft penalty for what they call “intrusive interstitials”.

In layman’s terms, this pretty much means popups. Here are a couple examples straight from the horse’s mouth.

Image Source

Basically, having popups show on your webpages on mobile devices greatly detracts from user experience, as visitors are unable to access or see the content they’ve clicked to find. To combat this, Google is penalizing pages with popups by reducing their search ranking, to discourage people from adding popups to their sites.

The simple solution? Disable popups on mobile. Seriously – just turn them off.

Allegedly, some user-triggered popups like scroll or click popups aren’t penalized – but I can’t find anywhere that confirms this, so take it with a grain of salt.

If your popup is rather important, add the content in as a section on your page, within your content (or even above the fold). This will stop Google from penalizing your site’s search ranking.

7. Optimize Forms for Mobile

If you’ve ever done some online shopping on your phone, you probably know how frustrating it can be to fill out form after endless form.

While the overall typing experience on mobile has vastly improved from the days of T9, it’s still not perfect. It relies heavily on autocorrect, and can still be quite taxing on the thumbs.

What’s the lesson here? A simple syllogism: long forms require a lot of typing. Typing sucks on mobile. Therefore… long forms suck on mobile.

If you want to try to minimize the negative effect mobile might be having on your conversion rates, try making one of the following changes to your form fields.

Reduce the number of form fields on your page

It’s simple – reducing the number of form fields a user needs to fill out greatly reduces their perceived workload, which can help in reducing visitor friction.

Though this isn’t always a viable option – often, form fields are there because they’re necessary – reducing some of the less necessary ones (last name, maybe?) or combining multiple form fields into a single field (first and last name, for example) can make a big difference.

Break up forms into multiple steps

Segmenting your form into multiple steps can help you increase conversion rates on mobile.

For example, if you have 9 fields, you may want to put only 3 in the first step. When a user fills out these 3 and presses the form submission button, they’re taken to the next page to fill in a few more fields, and so on.

This not only makes converting on your form seem less intimidating initially, it allows you to collect lead information in small bits from your visitors, which can help you if they eventually bounce from your form. I’d recommend collecting at least email on the first part of your form, so you can market to them in the future.

8. Utilize Collapsible Sections/Accordions

When your content has all been collapsed into a single column on a smaller screen, it’s going to end up being much longer.

This is an issue on mobile because it suddenly makes it much more difficult for a visitor to navigate and find what they’re looking for.

An elegant solution to this is to utilize collapsible content sections, otherwise known as accordions.

Accordions are containers that hold content; they show up as only a header and expand once a user taps on them. This allows your visitors to skim your page for the content or topic they’re looking for without needing to sift through a ton of copy and images.

You’ll need to do a bit of front-end work to put together an accordion, so get your designer or developer on the line!

Wrapping it up

Hopefully, these mobile design tips have given you some insight into how you can streamline user experience for the people who visit your website (or landing pages) on mobile.

These are things that are often overlooked, which can lead to a significant decrease in conversion rates on non-desktop devices.

Follow these tips, and I can guarantee your mobile visitors will have a better experience with your site, making them more likely to convert.

Good luck!

About the Author: Carlo is a digital marketer and designer at Wishpond. When he’s not creating content or A/B testing, he enjoys making music, drinking copious amounts of coffee, and shopping for sneakers. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @carlonathan.

Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2017/09/8-overlooked-mobile-design-best.html

[reviewandbonuss]

8 Overlooked Mobile Design Best Practices You Need to Implement

93% of Internet users browse the Internet on a mobile device every day. That’s 3.5 billion people who could potentially be seeing your website on their phones or tablets at any given time.

It follows, then, that you should be working as hard as you can to optimize your online presence for mobile. Trust me, there’s nothing worse than having a marketing funnel that’s totally ineffective on non-desktop devices.

To give you some guidance, I’ve put together 8 mobile design best practices you need to be following. They’ll help you streamline your visitors’ user experience, maximizing the impact of your marketing funnel for any device.

1. Get Rid of Your Navbar

On mobile, real estate is at a premium – I think of my iPhone screen like a map of downtown Manhattan, where every pixel costs a pretty penny. Check out how much space a mobile navbar can take.

This means you need to maximize what you’re getting out of your website on mobile.

One easy way to do this is to drop your navbar on mobile.

On a laptop or desktop, your navbar can be incredibly helpful – it’s a simple way for your visitors to browse the pages on your site, making it simple for them to find exactly what they’re looking for.

But on mobile, your navbar can take up a ton of space that could otherwise be used for text, images, or whatever other content you have on your website or landing pages.

Now, you might be wondering how visitors are expected to browse your site without a navbar. There’s a few ways around this…

The most popular way is to incorporate a hamburger menu, which allows you to create a much smaller (but still branded) top bar. The hamburger menu acts as a drawer, pulling out from the left side of your screen to show the various menu items in your navbar.

Or, depending on the size of your webpages, you might opt to create a single-page layout for mobile devices. However, unless your website is relatively sparse content-wise, this probably isn’t the best option for your business.

2. Keep Important Elements Within Reach

Think about the time you spend on your smartphone.

I’m willing to bet you use it pretty often – maybe while you’re on the bus or waiting in the line at Starbucks (or perhaps reading this article, right now?). Now, think about how you hold it. If you’re like most of us, you’re only using one of your thumbs to interact with your screen.

You’re not alone: according to a recent study by mobile UX expert Steve Hoober, 75% of people only use one thumb to interact, too.

Years ago, the diagram below was a bible for mobile designers, giving them insight into how they should lay out content to optimize user experience for the majority of website visitors.

Image Source

Though the above may have been accurate at the time, things change quickly (and in technology, even quicker). In the last few years, our phones and screens have been getting bigger and bigger… but our hands are staying the same.

The way we hold our phones has changed – as such, screen “hot spots” have shifted, with touch accuracy dropping as we approach the screen’s outer edges.

Image Source

As a result, we as designers need to organize content in a way that puts primary interactions front and center, saving secondary and tertiary functions for the top and bottom screen edges.

The position of these functions relates directly to ease of access for a user. Primary functions lie in the area that users can access easily with their thumbs, while tertiary (and to some extent, secondary) functions lie in lower-accuracy zones and require a little more work to get to.

3. Optimize and Minimize File Sizes

You’re probably already aware of how important it is to optimize the size of the images on your website. They drastically affect load time, which has a cascading effect on both user experience and the search ranking of your pages.

This is doubly important on mobile. Not only are connections less reliable on mobile, but also mobile users don’t like waiting. That means if your page isn’t loading quickly, they probably won’t stick around to let it finish.

Use a site like TinyJPG, or tools like ImageOptim (Mac only) or Photoshop’s “Export for Web” to make sure you minimize the file size of your images before you upload them to your website.

There are two primary properties that affect file size:

Quality: Put simply, quality is exactly what it sounds like. Turning down the quality setting will reduce the sharpness of your images and increase the possibility of artifacts appearing on your images.

Size/Resolution: Go figure – the actual size of your image has a large effect on its file size. Obviously, you don’t want to make your images so tiny that your visitors can’t see them – but if, for example, the column you’re placing your image in is 600px wide, your image doesn’t need to be 1000px wide. Resize them to fit before uploading.

4. Link Phone Numbers and Addresses

Optimizing for mobile is all about streamlining a visitor’s experience. It should take them as few steps as possible.

This means taking advantage of interactions on mobile that will help make visiting your website (and buying your product or contacting your business) a pleasant experience.

If your website is sales-reliant or if phone is an important touchpoint in your marketing funnel, one of the most important things you can do is make it easy for people to call you.

One simple way to add value to your “contact us” page is to make your phone number a clickable link. Everybody knows the pain of frantically swapping back and forth between your phone and browser apps to type in a phone number, or trying to copy it and accidentally copying all of the other content on the page, too.

Trust me, making your phone number clickable makes a big difference.

All you need to do is link your phone number like this:

And it will appear like this:

123-123-1234

This will allow users to click to call.

In the same vein, you’ll want to make sure other important details are interactive as well – for example, clicking your address should open up a visitor’s Maps application. Though most apps like Facebook will automatically set this up, you can type your address into Google Maps and copy the Share link to link it to the address on your website.

It’s these little things that help make visitors feel like they’re not missing out on anything when they visit your pages on mobile, and it saves them from having to do extra work.

To put it simply, don’t let your mobile browsing experience choke your marketing and sales funnels.

5. Design for Responsiveness

If you were around during the advent and uprise of the mobile web, you might recall that most websites actually built entirely new layouts for mobile that would work for the smaller screens of the pre-iPhone era.

These pages often featured minimal images, and were relatively text-heavy to combat the slow browsing speeds mobile users received on their non-3G, non-LTE, non-WiFi networks.

Fast-forward about ten years, and the mobile landscape has changed entirely. Screens are huge, internet connections have quickened, and tablets exist.

These advancements (and other advancements in front-end design languages like CSS) have paved the way for responsive and adaptive design.

Though there are nuances between these two types of design, their principal purpose remains the same: create a single website layout that responds and changes dynamically based on the device each visitor is using.

Hopefully, the webpage template or landing page editor you’re using will automatically create a mobile-responsive version of your page as you build it, removing the hassle from you or your designers to manually create it.

There are a few things to keep in mind when we consider responsiveness:

Image sizes: If images are important to the content on your page, make sure they’re clearly visible on mobile. Images that are 50% width on desktop may also show up at 50% on mobile, and that’s too small.

Layout/order of content: Depending on the way you organize the elements on your page for desktop, your content may be awkwardly ordered when you shift to mobile. Double-check to make sure all content is in order, even on other devices.

Animations: Animations that look fine on desktop might not work out well on mobile. Check these over on your phone before publishing your page to make sure they’re okay.

Video: In keeping in mind my previous recommendations regarding file sizes, think about hiding (or removing) video on mobile. It’s large, heavy, and can drastically slow down your mobile experience.

JavaScript: Though JavaScript is a wonderful and magical thing, it won’t always work on mobile – check to make sure it does.

6. Disable Popups

In 2017, Google rolled out their soft penalty for what they call “intrusive interstitials”.

In layman’s terms, this pretty much means popups. Here are a couple examples straight from the horse’s mouth.

Image Source

Basically, having popups show on your webpages on mobile devices greatly detracts from user experience, as visitors are unable to access or see the content they’ve clicked to find. To combat this, Google is penalizing pages with popups by reducing their search ranking, to discourage people from adding popups to their sites.

The simple solution? Disable popups on mobile. Seriously – just turn them off.

Allegedly, some user-triggered popups like scroll or click popups aren’t penalized – but I can’t find anywhere that confirms this, so take it with a grain of salt.

If your popup is rather important, add the content in as a section on your page, within your content (or even above the fold). This will stop Google from penalizing your site’s search ranking.

7. Optimize Forms for Mobile

If you’ve ever done some online shopping on your phone, you probably know how frustrating it can be to fill out form after endless form.

While the overall typing experience on mobile has vastly improved from the days of T9, it’s still not perfect. It relies heavily on autocorrect, and can still be quite taxing on the thumbs.

What’s the lesson here? A simple syllogism: long forms require a lot of typing. Typing sucks on mobile. Therefore… long forms suck on mobile.

If you want to try to minimize the negative effect mobile might be having on your conversion rates, try making one of the following changes to your form fields.

Reduce the number of form fields on your page

It’s simple – reducing the number of form fields a user needs to fill out greatly reduces their perceived workload, which can help in reducing visitor friction.

Though this isn’t always a viable option – often, form fields are there because they’re necessary – reducing some of the less necessary ones (last name, maybe?) or combining multiple form fields into a single field (first and last name, for example) can make a big difference.

Break up forms into multiple steps

Segmenting your form into multiple steps can help you increase conversion rates on mobile.

For example, if you have 9 fields, you may want to put only 3 in the first step. When a user fills out these 3 and presses the form submission button, they’re taken to the next page to fill in a few more fields, and so on.

This not only makes converting on your form seem less intimidating initially, it allows you to collect lead information in small bits from your visitors, which can help you if they eventually bounce from your form. I’d recommend collecting at least email on the first part of your form, so you can market to them in the future.

8. Utilize Collapsible Sections/Accordions

When your content has all been collapsed into a single column on a smaller screen, it’s going to end up being much longer.

This is an issue on mobile because it suddenly makes it much more difficult for a visitor to navigate and find what they’re looking for.

An elegant solution to this is to utilize collapsible content sections, otherwise known as accordions.

Accordions are containers that hold content; they show up as only a header and expand once a user taps on them. This allows your visitors to skim your page for the content or topic they’re looking for without needing to sift through a ton of copy and images.

You’ll need to do a bit of front-end work to put together an accordion, so get your designer or developer on the line!

Wrapping it up

Hopefully, these mobile design tips have given you some insight into how you can streamline user experience for the people who visit your website (or landing pages) on mobile.

These are things that are often overlooked, which can lead to a significant decrease in conversion rates on non-desktop devices.

Follow these tips, and I can guarantee your mobile visitors will have a better experience with your site, making them more likely to convert.

Good luck!

About the Author: Carlo is a digital marketer and designer at Wishpond. When he’s not creating content or A/B testing, he enjoys making music, drinking copious amounts of coffee, and shopping for sneakers. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @carlonathan.

[ericsburden-blog]

8 Overlooked Mobile Design Best Practices You Need to Implement

93% of Internet users browse the Internet on a mobile device every day. That’s 3.5 billion people who could potentially be seeing your website on their phones or tablets at any given time.

It follows, then, that you should be working as hard as you can to optimize your online presence for mobile. Trust me, there’s nothing worse than having a marketing funnel that’s totally ineffective on non-desktop devices.

To give you some guidance, I’ve put together 8 mobile design best practices you need to be following. They’ll help you streamline your visitors’ user experience, maximizing the impact of your marketing funnel for any device.

1. Get Rid of Your Navbar

On mobile, real estate is at a premium – I think of my iPhone screen like a map of downtown Manhattan, where every pixel costs a pretty penny. Check out how much space a mobile navbar can take.

This means you need to maximize what you’re getting out of your website on mobile.

One easy way to do this is to drop your navbar on mobile.

On a laptop or desktop, your navbar can be incredibly helpful – it’s a simple way for your visitors to browse the pages on your site, making it simple for them to find exactly what they’re looking for.

But on mobile, your navbar can take up a ton of space that could otherwise be used for text, images, or whatever other content you have on your website or landing pages.

Now, you might be wondering how visitors are expected to browse your site without a navbar. There’s a few ways around this…

The most popular way is to incorporate a hamburger menu, which allows you to create a much smaller (but still branded) top bar. The hamburger menu acts as a drawer, pulling out from the left side of your screen to show the various menu items in your navbar.

Or, depending on the size of your webpages, you might opt to create a single-page layout for mobile devices. However, unless your website is relatively sparse content-wise, this probably isn’t the best option for your business.

2. Keep Important Elements Within Reach

Think about the time you spend on your smartphone.

I’m willing to bet you use it pretty often – maybe while you’re on the bus or waiting in the line at Starbucks (or perhaps reading this article, right now?). Now, think about how you hold it. If you’re like most of us, you’re only using one of your thumbs to interact with your screen.

You’re not alone: according to a recent study by mobile UX expert Steve Hoober, 75% of people only use one thumb to interact, too.

Years ago, the diagram below was a bible for mobile designers, giving them insight into how they should lay out content to optimize user experience for the majority of website visitors.

Image Source

Though the above may have been accurate at the time, things change quickly (and in technology, even quicker). In the last few years, our phones and screens have been getting bigger and bigger… but our hands are staying the same.

The way we hold our phones has changed – as such, screen “hot spots” have shifted, with touch accuracy dropping as we approach the screen’s outer edges.

Image Source

As a result, we as designers need to organize content in a way that puts primary interactions front and center, saving secondary and tertiary functions for the top and bottom screen edges.

The position of these functions relates directly to ease of access for a user. Primary functions lie in the area that users can access easily with their thumbs, while tertiary (and to some extent, secondary) functions lie in lower-accuracy zones and require a little more work to get to.

3. Optimize and Minimize File Sizes

You’re probably already aware of how important it is to optimize the size of the images on your website. They drastically affect load time, which has a cascading effect on both user experience and the search ranking of your pages.

This is doubly important on mobile. Not only are connections less reliable on mobile, but also mobile users don’t like waiting. That means if your page isn’t loading quickly, they probably won’t stick around to let it finish.

Use a site like TinyJPG, or tools like ImageOptim (Mac only) or Photoshop’s “Export for Web” to make sure you minimize the file size of your images before you upload them to your website.

There are two primary properties that affect file size:

Quality: Put simply, quality is exactly what it sounds like. Turning down the quality setting will reduce the sharpness of your images and increase the possibility of artifacts appearing on your images.

Size/Resolution: Go figure – the actual size of your image has a large effect on its file size. Obviously, you don’t want to make your images so tiny that your visitors can’t see them – but if, for example, the column you’re placing your image in is 600px wide, your image doesn’t need to be 1000px wide. Resize them to fit before uploading.

4. Link Phone Numbers and Addresses

Optimizing for mobile is all about streamlining a visitor’s experience. It should take them as few steps as possible.

This means taking advantage of interactions on mobile that will help make visiting your website (and buying your product or contacting your business) a pleasant experience.

If your website is sales-reliant or if phone is an important touchpoint in your marketing funnel, one of the most important things you can do is make it easy for people to call you.

One simple way to add value to your “contact us” page is to make your phone number a clickable link. Everybody knows the pain of frantically swapping back and forth between your phone and browser apps to type in a phone number, or trying to copy it and accidentally copying all of the other content on the page, too.

Trust me, making your phone number clickable makes a big difference.

All you need to do is link your phone number like this:

And it will appear like this:

123-123-1234

This will allow users to click to call.

In the same vein, you’ll want to make sure other important details are interactive as well – for example, clicking your address should open up a visitor’s Maps application. Though most apps like Facebook will automatically set this up, you can type your address into Google Maps and copy the Share link to link it to the address on your website.

It’s these little things that help make visitors feel like they’re not missing out on anything when they visit your pages on mobile, and it saves them from having to do extra work.

To put it simply, don’t let your mobile browsing experience choke your marketing and sales funnels.

5. Design for Responsiveness

If you were around during the advent and uprise of the mobile web, you might recall that most websites actually built entirely new layouts for mobile that would work for the smaller screens of the pre-iPhone era.

These pages often featured minimal images, and were relatively text-heavy to combat the slow browsing speeds mobile users received on their non-3G, non-LTE, non-WiFi networks.

Fast-forward about ten years, and the mobile landscape has changed entirely. Screens are huge, internet connections have quickened, and tablets exist.

These advancements (and other advancements in front-end design languages like CSS) have paved the way for responsive and adaptive design.

Though there are nuances between these two types of design, their principal purpose remains the same: create a single website layout that responds and changes dynamically based on the device each visitor is using.

Hopefully, the webpage template or landing page editor you’re using will automatically create a mobile-responsive version of your page as you build it, removing the hassle from you or your designers to manually create it.

There are a few things to keep in mind when we consider responsiveness:

Image sizes: If images are important to the content on your page, make sure they’re clearly visible on mobile. Images that are 50% width on desktop may also show up at 50% on mobile, and that’s too small.

Layout/order of content: Depending on the way you organize the elements on your page for desktop, your content may be awkwardly ordered when you shift to mobile. Double-check to make sure all content is in order, even on other devices.

Animations: Animations that look fine on desktop might not work out well on mobile. Check these over on your phone before publishing your page to make sure they’re okay.

Video: In keeping in mind my previous recommendations regarding file sizes, think about hiding (or removing) video on mobile. It’s large, heavy, and can drastically slow down your mobile experience.

JavaScript: Though JavaScript is a wonderful and magical thing, it won’t always work on mobile – check to make sure it does.

6. Disable Popups

In 2017, Google rolled out their soft penalty for what they call “intrusive interstitials”.

In layman’s terms, this pretty much means popups. Here are a couple examples straight from the horse’s mouth.

Image Source

Basically, having popups show on your webpages on mobile devices greatly detracts from user experience, as visitors are unable to access or see the content they’ve clicked to find. To combat this, Google is penalizing pages with popups by reducing their search ranking, to discourage people from adding popups to their sites.

The simple solution? Disable popups on mobile. Seriously – just turn them off.

Allegedly, some user-triggered popups like scroll or click popups aren’t penalized – but I can’t find anywhere that confirms this, so take it with a grain of salt.

If your popup is rather important, add the content in as a section on your page, within your content (or even above the fold). This will stop Google from penalizing your site’s search ranking.

7. Optimize Forms for Mobile

If you’ve ever done some online shopping on your phone, you probably know how frustrating it can be to fill out form after endless form.

While the overall typing experience on mobile has vastly improved from the days of T9, it’s still not perfect. It relies heavily on autocorrect, and can still be quite taxing on the thumbs.

What’s the lesson here? A simple syllogism: long forms require a lot of typing. Typing sucks on mobile. Therefore… long forms suck on mobile.

If you want to try to minimize the negative effect mobile might be having on your conversion rates, try making one of the following changes to your form fields.

Reduce the number of form fields on your page

It’s simple – reducing the number of form fields a user needs to fill out greatly reduces their perceived workload, which can help in reducing visitor friction.

Though this isn’t always a viable option – often, form fields are there because they’re necessary – reducing some of the less necessary ones (last name, maybe?) or combining multiple form fields into a single field (first and last name, for example) can make a big difference.

Break up forms into multiple steps

Segmenting your form into multiple steps can help you increase conversion rates on mobile.

For example, if you have 9 fields, you may want to put only 3 in the first step. When a user fills out these 3 and presses the form submission button, they’re taken to the next page to fill in a few more fields, and so on.

This not only makes converting on your form seem less intimidating initially, it allows you to collect lead information in small bits from your visitors, which can help you if they eventually bounce from your form. I’d recommend collecting at least email on the first part of your form, so you can market to them in the future.

8. Utilize Collapsible Sections/Accordions

When your content has all been collapsed into a single column on a smaller screen, it’s going to end up being much longer.

This is an issue on mobile because it suddenly makes it much more difficult for a visitor to navigate and find what they’re looking for.

An elegant solution to this is to utilize collapsible content sections, otherwise known as accordions.

Accordions are containers that hold content; they show up as only a header and expand once a user taps on them. This allows your visitors to skim your page for the content or topic they’re looking for without needing to sift through a ton of copy and images.

You’ll need to do a bit of front-end work to put together an accordion, so get your designer or developer on the line!

Wrapping it up

Hopefully, these mobile design tips have given you some insight into how you can streamline user experience for the people who visit your website (or landing pages) on mobile.

These are things that are often overlooked, which can lead to a significant decrease in conversion rates on non-desktop devices.

Follow these tips, and I can guarantee your mobile visitors will have a better experience with your site, making them more likely to convert.

Good luck!

About the Author: Carlo is a digital marketer and designer at Wishpond. When he’s not creating content or A/B testing, he enjoys making music, drinking copious amounts of coffee, and shopping for sneakers. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @carlonathan.

8 Overlooked Mobile Design Best Practices You Need to Implement

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Artists and Activists Propose a “People’s Cultural Plan” for New York City

Artist Alicia Grullón speaking at a CreateNYC cultural plan meeting (image courtesy Hester Street Collaborative)

Since October, New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) has conducted more than 100 interviews, held dozens of focus groups and dozens more tabling events, and surveyed 10,000 residents. The focus of these inquiries has been the city’s first-ever cultural plan, dubbed CreateNYC. When it’s released in July, the plan will become a blueprint for funding and supporting arts and culture throughout New York City, and the DCLA has been soliciting public input.

“New Yorkers value arts and culture — and they want more of it,” states “What We Heard,” a document compiling the findings from this recently completed phase of the planning process. The DCLA — which, it’s worth noting, is the largest cultural funding agency in the US — released the overview on Monday, an 18-pager filled with infographics and stats outlining what arts and culture–related issues New Yorkers care about most. The document identifies eight key areas, from “Equity” and “Social & Economic Impact” to “Arts, Culture & Science Education” and “Neighborhood Character.” It takes readers through each one, offering lists and sublists of goals within each area. Some, like “Consider Community Land Trusts, fractional ownership, rent to own, deed restrictions, cross subsidization, and mobile studios,” are refreshingly forward-thinking and specific; others, like “Partner with City agencies and community stakeholders to support cultural preservation in neighborhoods across all five boroughs,” sound admirable but uselessly broad.

Graphic from CreateNYC’s “What We Heard” (image via createnyc.org)

The DCLA has made a point of stressing the amount of outreach it’s done and the number of diverse voices it’s solicited — but the cultural plan is not without its critics. In January, three local artists and activists, Jenny Dubnau, Alicia Grullón, and Shellyne Rodriguez, told Hyperallergic of their misgivings about the way the plan is being created. This week, as part of a larger coalition of roughly two dozen artists, activists, and cultural workers, they responded to the official process by releasing their own blueprint for the city, the “People’s Cultural Plan” (PCP).

“Artists, cultural workers, and cultural access in the city are in a huge crisis,” said Dubnau. “If you’re going to have a plan in our time, we felt it had to be a powerful, strongly worded, tough, courageous plan. If you’re not going to talk about actual policy that’s making artists leave the city, displacing communities of color, where the funding is so lopsided in terms of equity — if you’re not going to radically approach those issues, it’s not going to be a relevant enough plan.”

Dubnau’s comments echo the three core issues of the PCP: “Equitable Housing, Land, & Development Politics,” “Labor Equity,” and “Public Funding Equity.” None of those headers would look out of place in the DCLA’s “What We Heard” document, but the tone and scope of the PCP are vastly different, beginning with its opening paragraph:

Inequity in arts and culture is a persistent problem in New York City. The worsening climate of fear, intolerance, and fascism, especially affecting immigrants, all people of color, and LGBTQ individuals, must be countered with more than lip service in support of “diversity”: Only by implementing true equity in all city policies will the most vulnerable be protected from the multiple crises facing our communities. As a sanctuary city, any cultural plan for New York must be supportive of the lives and contributions of All People of Color, including tribally-enrolled indigenous people, Black, Asian, Latinx, and Arab peoples, and the LGBTQ, disabled, and elder members of our communities.

The 17-page plan goes on to make a host of detailed policy recommendations, from, in the housing section, calling for a citywide rent freeze on stabilized apartments and the overturning of the Urstadt Law; to, in the labor section, demanding mandatory artist compensation, salary caps or maximum ratios within institutions, and the passage of the state-level New York Health Act; and, in the funding section, the implementation of language access plans and mandating that DCLA budget increases “go first to neighborhoods, districts, organizations and artists that currently receive the lowest allocations, and first to organizations led by and serving communities of color.” It’s a wide-ranging but deeply researched document that seeks to redress structural inequities.

“Why can we not reimagine more for ourselves? Why not begin with the arts?” asked Grullón, who went on to cite a host of academics and “creative thinkers” whose work the group had drawn on in making its plan (some of which are cited within the document). “We’re not reinventing the wheel; we’re trying to fix the vehicle that is on the wheel.”

Graphic by: @fatitaj #WEcreateNYC is a platform to enrich the cultural life and legacy of NYC by centralizing the lived experiences of African-, Arab-, Asian-, Caribbean-, Chicanx-, Latinx-, Native-, and Pacific Islander-American descended people. We celebrate the vitality and vibrancy of these communities with a living cultural plan using their stories past, present, and future. We understand that culture- foods, music, art, and language- hold our desires, stories, and endeavoring to be a people that are braver than the histories that bring us shame. Our living cultural plan prioritizes a multigenerational approach to building a just, inclusive, equitable city – a new ecological system that is not only imagined, but reached. Join the conversation using the #CulturalEquityNYC ! #poc #CulturalEquityNYC #WEcreateNYC #harlem #statenisland #manhattan #brooklyn #queens #bronx #createequity #nyc #forusbyus

A post shared by WEcreateNYC2017 (@wecreatenyc2017) on Dec 6, 2016 at 5:43pm PST

In its introduction, the PCP specifically calls out the contracting of two companies to work on the cultural plan: James Lima Planning + Development, which is focused “on the economics of placemaking,” and BJH Advisors LLC, “a real estate development and advisory firm.” As noted previously by Seph Rodney for Hyperallergic, the activists “argue that these organizations … are already involved in projects (they cite the MIH/ZQA rezonings and the BQX trolley car schemes) that will result in the displacement of long-time residents, mostly through raising the average cost of rent.” When asked about the objection to these firms, a spokesperson for the DCLA noted that CreateNYC’s lead contractor, Hester Street Collaborative, had enlisted them, and told me that both “bring an understanding of planning and development in New York — something that’s incredibly important when the cost of real estate is central to many of the issues and concerns we’ve heard through CreateNYC.”

But to Dubnau and Grullón, the hiring of the firms represents a larger, more problematic ethos embedded in the project: looking at culture in New York City through corporate-colored glasses — that is, as a question of economics. “It just highlights the motivation behind the city, where economics … becomes a much more urgent matter for them rather than the current state that folks are living in,” said Grullón. “Their reasons will be: Arts and culture and creativity are tied to economic vitality. They create new jobs. But new jobs for who? Especially when we bring in questions of the ‘creative class.’ There’s no investment made in the small businesses that are already there. There’s no thinking of how to revitalize economic development in a way that’s sustainable for the future but radically changes our connection to place and still keeps people there. Their initiative is to bring in more tourism. Their view of economic growth and vitality does not have foresight. It is outdated. We can see repeatedly that it only benefits the very few.”

“The city’s plan is making nods towards cultural equity, but in terms of the real estate angle, it becomes a question of, what is culture?” Dubnau added. “Is it this creative tech, real estate–driven appearance of culture, where the rents are skyrocketing and the real culture makers and communities can’t afford to remain in place? Or is it a vital city where immigrants get to stay, working artists get to remain?”

Graphic from CreateNYC’s “What We Heard” (image via createnyc.org)

Members of the PCP group have spoken with representatives of the DCLA, and both sides remarked upon the discussions positively. Since the official cultural plan is still in formation — public polling is happening now, online — the ball is, as the saying goes, in the DCLA’s court.

“I would like to see DCLA implement what we recommend in our plan that they do have direct control over, which is funding,” Dubnau said, acknowledging that a number of proposals in the PCP are out of the department’s control and tied to measures overseen by the city council, mayor, or even the state government. They group also believes the DCLA could start working to guarantee “all artists and workers … a basic wage, benefits, job security.” But most importantly, Dubnau said, “we would love to have the DCLA make concrete policy recommendations. I don’t see why — other than politics and caution — a document like the NYC cultural plan cannot make concrete policy recommendations that go outside the purview of the Department of Cultural Affairs.”

“We’ve seen the People’s Cultural Plan and we’re glad to have this thorough set of proposals in hand, along with the feedback from the more than 185,000 New Yorkers we’ve heard from since last fall,” the DCLA spokesperson commented. “The planning process is still underway, and we will absolutely consider these ideas as we work toward releasing the CreateNYC cultural plan this summer.”

Aerial view of the architect’s rendering of the Shed structure at night (image via Wikipedia)

If it’s hard to believe that a government agency would go out on a limb and adopt something as radical as the PCP, it might make sense to hope for the creation of something that falls in between: A plan that accounts for at least some of the city’s blind spots (such as the DCLA “giving nearly 60% of its funding to Manhattan alone out of the five boroughs, and almost 80% of its funding to only 33 of the 1,000+ organizations funded,” according to the PCP). A plan that balances an awareness of culture’s economic value with an understanding that the impact of the arts is, ultimately, immeasurable. A plan that considers community groups as vital to the future of the city as a high-end Shed.

“When we fund, we have to think of funding for justice,” Grullón said. “We have to start thinking about how that is the driving force behind culture.”

The post Artists and Activists Propose a “People’s Cultural Plan” for New York City appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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