White space 'not the enemy' in mobile broadband designs

When designing websites to be accessed via mobile broadband connections, it may be tempting to eliminate empty space, to create a compact design that is fast to load.

However, Google has told webmasters to retain white space, in a post on its Conversion Room blog.

Indeed, adding white space could be beneficial - such as by replacing block paragraphs of text with shorter bullet points.

These may not take up much less room in terms of lines, but on a mobile broadband connection they could prove much faster to digest.

"Mobile users are task-oriented, so they only need the details necessary to complete a task quickly," Google adds.

Bullet points have the added advantage that they keep the relevant information to the left-hand side of the screen.

This could help pages to conform to the often-cited F-shaped model of page content, which places key information at the top and left where most visitors are more likely to look.