If you can take a few seconds from scrolling through your social media news feeds, you’ll notice that everyone is addicted to using their smartphones. They’ve become a permanent attachment to hands of the public and now life revolves around them.
However, this is probably not recent news, as studies dating back to 2014 suggest that the public had fallen into a regime of constantly checking the portable devices.
It has recently been announced in Australia that the state government for New South Wales intends to start trialling a system of traffic lights in the floor so that pedestrians can stay safe around the streets of Sydney whilst having their heads buried into their smartphones.
The number of traffic accidents involving pedestrians in large cities is believed to be on the up and smartphones have been partly to blame. The New South Wales government intends to spend a sum of $250,000 (£125,244) on the system, which will be trialled for six months.
Australia is not the only country testing out street traffic lights; Germany has also looked into this system, and is trialling it in two areas of Augsburg, a town located on the outskirts of Munich. According to a survey conducted in six capital cities across Europe, 17% of people are glued to the screens of their smartphone whilst walking the streets, a figure that rises to 25% when isolating the 25-35 age category.
The increasing use of smartphones is beginning to impact every aspect of daily life, with businesses needing to adapt to remain in the public eye. Back in 2014, search giant Google predicted that more searches would made through its iconic search engine on mobile devices compared to desktop by 2015 – a prediction that came true.
Following this, Google released an update to its algorithms that meant that companies that had designed their websites to become mobile friendly would benefit from better rankings than those who had sites not optimised for mobile use.
As a result, businesses now have to take into consideration more than just who their target market is. They now have to consider how potential customers would communicate with them and the measures the company can take to make the user experience a positive one. This includes ensuring that the company is easily contactable through mobile devices, since the majority of the public has grown a new technological limb.
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