In May 2015, Google announced that “more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan.”
In November 2015, the first time in our website’s 15 year history mobile use has overtaken desktop use on.
Responsive Design
We are really pleased to see this as we put a lot of effort into making sure the website works as well on mobile devices as it does on desktop devices. We call this responsive design.
You can see it in action yourself if you are on a desktop computer, go to our site and resize your browser window. You will see the columns stack up and the navigation turn into a more familiar sliding menu as seen on mobile devices.
A key principle was to also make sure users had the same experience whatever mobile device they used or their mobile operating system of choice.
Mobile Apps
We resisted the urge to invest time in an app (downloaded from a mobile app store) due to the significant overhead that would have brought for us and the barriers to entry that would have brought to our users.
The benefits a dedicated app could provide around notifications and offline use just don’t stack up in terms of anything worth investing time or money into for our users.
I have even seen a bit of a shift in the industry recently with some major players moving away from having dedicated apps and just producing a good responsive website design.
Speed and usability
We have received lots of feedback on how fast and easy the site is to use on mobile devices which is great to hear and we have done a lot to ensure the website runs as fast as it can.
The great news is as well that as our officers are being given their new mobile devices over the next few months the website works really well on them straight way without any extra effort.