Designing for a phone in the rain
Most people meet your website one handed, outdoors, in bad light, with something else going on. Designing for a wet February afternoon in Dorset makes better websites.
Design work gets reviewed on a big screen, in a quiet room, with good light and a fast connection. Almost nobody uses it that way. Standing on the seafront at Weymouth in February trying to find a phone number with cold hands and a screen full of drizzle is a much more honest test, and it is closer to how a lot of people will actually meet your site.
What that changes
- Tap targets get bigger and further apart than feels necessary on desktop
- Contrast goes up, because daylight flattens everything on a phone screen
- The one thing a visitor came for, call, directions, opening hours, price, sits above the first scroll
- Images get sized and compressed properly, because rural signal is not what the office wifi is
- Forms lose fields, because typing in the rain is miserable
The bit people worry about
Clients often assume this means a plainer, uglier site. In my experience it is the opposite. Designing for the worst conditions strips out the things that were decorative rather than useful, and what is left tends to look more confident. Big type, clear hierarchy and a lot of space read as premium anyway, they just happen to also work in bad light.
How I test it
Before anything goes live I load it on my own phone, on mobile data, outside. If I cannot find the main action in a couple of seconds while walking, it is not finished. It is not a scientific test, but it has caught more real problems than any checklist I have used.