Mobile is your main shop now

Dear reader,

I still meet brand owners who design on a big monitor, sign off the desktop version, and treat mobile as an afterthought that "mostly works". Meanwhile two thirds of their traffic is on a phone, on the train, with one thumb doing all the work. That gap costs real money.

Design for the thumb, not the mouse

A phone is a hostile little environment. The screen is small, the connection is patchy, and the person is rarely giving you their full attention. What feels fine on desktop can be genuinely painful on mobile.

The usual culprits are easy to spot once you look:

• Buttons and links too small or too close together to tap cleanly
• Key actions hidden below the fold, or worse, off-screen
• Pop-ups that are impossible to close on a small screen
• Text so small people have to pinch and zoom to read it

Test on a real phone

Emulators lie. The only honest test is your own thumb on an actual device, ideally an older one on a slower connection.

1. Buy something on your own site using only your phone, start to finish
2. Notice every moment you feel a flicker of friction or hesitation
3. Fix those moments first — they're costing you the most

If a task is annoying for you, the person who built the shop, it's a wall for a stranger who has three other tabs open and a bus to catch.

Pay special attention to the checkout. Small tweaks matter enormously here — a numeric keypad for card fields, address lookup instead of typing, and generous tap targets on the pay button. Every extra tap on mobile leaks customers, and they leak faster than on desktop because patience is thinner.

None of this needs a rebuild. It needs someone to sit with a phone and be honest about where it hurts. If you'd like me to run that pass for you, book advisory time and we'll go through it screen by screen.