[Guest Post] 5 Ways to Think on Mission with Mobile

MinistryOps is back, continuing the discoverabiltiy theme from their previous post.

Here are five ways in which you can think about mission and being intermissional with mobile technologies and behaviors as part of your toolkit:

  1. Recognize needs
    By studying our community, we can serve our community. Go to a coffee shop, buy a drink, and meet your community. Find out what people are doing with their phones. If everyone has 4G you probably don’t need to optimize for speed, but if there’s spotty coverage you might want to figure out how to make your content work offline.
  2. Start small
    Instead of blowing up your entire site in the quest for mobile, take incremental steps towards reaching mobile users. Start removing flash content, adjusting drop down menus to work on touch devices. In the process take note of where mobile users are spending time on your existing site, that information will be invaluable in determining your future direction.
  3. Remove friction
    Whenever possible your web app should take advantage of native features. Start with the basics by considering how screen size, and touch interface will affect your design.  Then start looking at how native device features and HTML5 can make life easier.
  4. Insiders know, outsiders Google
    If content can’t be crawled by search engines, it’s not going to be found by outsiders. For audio & video content consider using video sitemaps and creating transcripts to increase visibility of your content.

  5. Cast a wide net
    Test your site on the worst devices you can find. It’s tempting to only test on the latest and greatest devices, but it’s important to make sure that the site is just as usable on older devices.