Why Client Portal design must be mobile-first

Be where your clients are

The first rule of good service is delivering what your clients need, where they need it. This applies to entertainment, shopping, banking - and investment. In the old days, wealth managers could disseminate information via a traditional website or e-mail and PDF attachments. This approach “did the job” for years. 

From useful to ubiquitous

The launch of the iPhone in 2007 changed the world, taking the mobile phone from a basic tool to the people’s communication device of choice. 

Then, in another pivotal event, when the recession hit from late 2007, consumers and financial investors began demanding more data and more transparency from financial firms.

These two events drove Invessed’s creation, when we determined to build the means for fund managers to deliver that data and transparency to their investors via a mobile-first platform.

Think like your clients, think mobile-first

Analytics from our own Client Portal platform confirms that mobile is now the preferred device for most of our customers’ clients, and wider research supports this; over half the world’s population now accesses the Internet only via mobile.

By 2025, it’ll be almost three-quarters. Google saw this coming in 2010 when CEO Eric Schmidt suggested that designers follow a “mobile first” rule and said that Google would start prioritizing websites by mobile-centricity as well as relevance. 

What does it mean to be mobile-first?

There are two ways to design websites for mobile: Graceful Degradation or Progressive Enhancement. In Graceful Degradation, you first design the desktop experience, with all the bells and whistles. Then you trim off some features and functionality to make the mobile version. This can result in a watered-down or incomplete customer experience. Progressive Enhancement, where you design a simple yet slick iteration of the website for mobile and then build it out for desktop, is now the better option.

Best practice for mobile-first design

What Progressive Enhancement does is force you to design both practically and creatively, but always within the constraints imposed by the mobile format. It is possible to design an attractive, engaging mobile-friendly website and some designers enjoy the simplicity required by mobile.

It’s important to build a high-quality mobile site, so that site visitors get the same premium user experience whether they visit the desktop version or the mobile version. Some of the golden rules of designing for mobile:

• The site needs minimal scrolling; keep the design simple and prioritize key content. What do your users need to see or read first?
• As with websites, prioritize branding and content to sit “above the fold”, the eye always moves from top to bottom.
• Present clickable web page titles in a tidy, compact, navigation bar, some great examples here.
• Use a font size that is optimal for readability on mobile, compress images and use a “lazy load” approach, meaning that some of the sites should load immediately, even if one or two-page elements take a beat longer. 
• Avoid pop-ups and keep contact forms simple.
• If your site displays complex information like financial data, make sure the data is presented via engaging, interactive data visualization, rather than text. 

Join one of our upcoming demos to see how we design our Client Portal solutions with these principles in mind, providing investors with a fast and accessible user experience on their smartphones.