Show, But Don’t Forget To Tell - Anne Thomas

Owning and operating your own Shopify store can be both exciting and overwhelming for even the most seasoned business-minded seller, and there are many pitfalls to avoid while building and maintaining your shop. According to mobile UX design expert Anne Thomas, all too frequently a store owner will spend too much time, attention and overall resources on making sure their site looks fantastic over desktop, the most universal and frequently best looking medium for display, but won’t consider how it may look, even at its best, on mobile. 

What may look detailed and perfectly positioned, with fully functioning interactivity over a desktop browser may run into minor errors, or even total failure, when viewed over even the most up to date mobile device, for a variety of reasons, from simple issues such as screen size and shape to image processing capabilities and contrary interactive-touch functions. To avoid unexpected and often extensive, thus expensive, failure, always keep these helpful guidelines in mind.

• Never forget your scale. Text, images, or the dreaded perfect storm of text on images can look great at full size and fidelity, but mobile users, especially smartphone users, are engaging with your site on a screen that may be smaller, display measurement-wise, than the very image you designed. As such, that image, and more importantly the small print on the image, could be unreadable to most users, and lose all detail and resolution when pinched-zoomed in on. Make sure, if you must use a static image with text on it, that the text is clear enough to be read on even the smallest of contemporary screens.
• Never forget your alternative-viewing options. Not everyone “looks” at a site the same way. Some visually impaired customers may use screen readers, which would be equally unable to read any text that appears in an image, if there is not alt-text reposts of the same text coded into the image itself. What’s more, text in images don’t appear in or activate Google, or any competiting search engines optimization features, and will go completely unnoticed. If you are using static images with text, always reproduce the text as alt-text in the image’s coding or placement description.
• Never forget built-in the limitations of SEO. Alt-text is great for getting keywords and terms into the coding of your site, but search engines won’t prioritize alt-text into optimization. Unless you have at least the keywords of the text somewhere else prominently on the page, either as a title, in the item description, or as a subgrouping headline, it’s likely to be missed entirly, no matter how well designed the image its included in may be, and regardless of the device it’s viewed on. Always repeat your fundamental message and offer on the page itself, the higher on the page the more effective.

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