Testing With One Hand on a Ladder

Where your site is actually opened

Not at a desk. On a roof, in a plant room, in a van at a merchant's counter, in a customer's hallway with a toolbox in the other hand.

For a great many trade and field businesses, the person looking something up is standing, moving, and using one thumb.

They are also frequently doing it in a hurry, in front of somebody, which raises the cost of any friction considerably.

None of that is reproduced by anybody testing a site seated in an office.

What one-handed use actually means

A thumb reaches comfortably across roughly the lower two-thirds of a phone screen, and the far top corner is the hardest place on the device to reach.

Reaching it requires either shifting the grip, which risks dropping the phone, or bringing the other hand up, which may be holding a ladder.

So anything in the top corner is effectively expensive, and that is exactly where menus, search, and call buttons are conventionally placed.

The convention came from desktop layouts and has survived without ever being reconsidered for the way phones are held.

The conditions that break things

• Gloves, which most touchscreens ignore entirely.
• Wet or dirty fingers, which register imprecisely.
• Bright daylight, which washes out faint text.
• A dimmed screen, because the battery is low by two o'clock.
• Poor signal, inside a building or below ground.
• Movement, which makes small targets much harder to hit.

Any two of these together defeat a site that works perfectly in an office, and on a working day most tradespeople experience all six.

What they are looking for

A short list, and it is worth knowing because it is not what most sites are organised around.

A phone number, to call somebody now.

An address, to navigate to.

Opening hours, to know whether it is worth driving there.

Whether you stock or do a specific thing.

And occasionally a specification or a document, needed on site while somebody waits.

Almost nobody standing on a ladder is reading your about page, and a site that puts those five things behind a menu tap has misjudged its visitor.

A worked example

A plumbing merchant redesigned their site and were pleased with it, having tested it thoroughly on desktop and in a mobile preview.

Trade counter staff started hearing the same complaint: customers could not find the branch phone number while driving.

The number was in the top-right corner of the header, inside a collapsed menu, in a fourteen-pixel light grey.

Reaching it needed a thumb stretch to the hardest corner of the screen, a tap on a small target, then a second tap on faint text.

They moved a tappable phone number to a fixed bar across the bottom of the screen on mobile, sixteen pixels, high contrast, on every page.

Calls from the site roughly doubled in the following quarter. Nothing else changed, and no new visitors arrived. The number had simply become reachable by a thumb.

The bottom of the screen is the useful part

The single most valuable adjustment for a field audience.

The lower third of the screen is where a thumb rests, and it is where the actions people came for should be.

A persistent bar carrying a call button, and directions where a physical location matters, costs a small strip of screen and removes the reach problem entirely.

It also survives the case where somebody has scrolled halfway down a page and then decides to call, which otherwise means scrolling back to the header.

Make the targets bigger than looks necessary

Standard guidance puts a comfortable tap target at somewhere around forty-four to forty-eight pixels square, with clear space around it.

That figure assumes a seated person with clean dry hands paying attention.

For an audience wearing gloves, moving, or working in poor light, err upward and be generous with the spacing between adjacent targets, because a mis-tap that calls the wrong branch or opens the wrong page costs more than the extra space did.

The places this usually fails are footer links, items in a list of services, and anything sitting close to another control.

Test it properly

The test is embarrassing to perform and takes fifteen minutes.

Stand up. Hold your phone in one hand. Turn the brightness down to about a quarter. Go outside.

Then attempt five tasks: find the phone number and call it, find the address and open directions, find the opening hours, find one specific service, and submit an enquiry.

Time each one, and note anywhere you needed the second hand.

Anything taking more than about ten seconds, or requiring a grip change, is a fault your customers hit daily and have never mentioned.

Ask the people who serve them

Counter staff, drivers, and anybody who answers the phone already know most of this.

They hear the complaints in their original form, they watch customers standing at a counter failing to find something on a phone, and they are never asked.

Two questions are usually enough: what do people ring up to ask that is already on the website, and what do you watch customers struggle to find.

The answers arrive immediately and they are more accurate than any analytics report, because they include the people who gave up.

The counter-case

This is a specific audience and designing for it universally would be a mistake.

A business whose customers research at length, at a desk, before making a considered decision needs depth, detail, and comparison, and stripping a site to five thumb-reachable actions would remove what those buyers came for.

Many businesses serve both, in which case the answer is not to choose but to sequence: the immediate actions always reachable, the depth available underneath for anybody who wants it.

What is not defensible is designing exclusively for the seated researcher when most of your traffic is standing up, which is the position a great many trade suppliers are in without having checked.

The fifteen-minute test

1. Stand up, one hand, screen dimmed, outdoors.
2. Call the business from your own site.
3. Open directions to the address.
4. Find the opening hours.
5. Find one specific service or product.
6. Note every grip change you needed.
7. Ask your counter staff what people ring up to ask.

Everything that fails is something a customer has already given up on this month.

Answering while working is covered in answering the phone when you are on a roof.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.