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Monthly Archives: August 2021

Eden Ads Mobile First Sites
In Digital Marketing,Web Design , , , ,

Mobile First Websites: Graphical User Interface (GUI)

Mobile First Websites: Graphical User Interface (GUI)

Spicy Nugget symbol

SPICY NUGGET
A “responsive” replica of your desktop site is a sorry excuse for a mobile site. ‘Mobile First’ sites are purpose-built… or they don’t generate the leads and sales you need.
— Phil Chavanne, Snr SEO Consultant

In Part I of this series about mobile-optimized sites (“Mobile First sites”), we alluded to the rules mobile sites must conform to in order to find grace in the eyes of Google. In Part II, we looked at the need for speed as browsing and searching happen increasingly on mobile devices, and consumers prefer speedy sites.

In this new part, we’ll discuss how the design (GUI) of a mobile site contributes to its usability, the quality of a user’s experience, and beyond, its conversion rates.

Graphical User Interface & Responsiveness

Anyone who lived on the web longer than in the last 10 years will remember the clunky mobile interface of websites made only for desktop. Web designers didn’t anticipate the mobile revolution and were slow to catch up with it. iPhone was “something for Apple apps”. In the late part of the first decade of the new millennium, Flash was still at the top of what could be done with a website, and with the advent of broadband, the canons of web design favored screen-wide images, animated text over hero shots, and video served from regular hosting servers.

As a result of the design trends of the times, mobile users were saddled with websites that had to be resized with 2 fingers, and constantly re-centered with 1 finger to be read in the viewport of an iPhone 4. Loading times were horrendously long, unless you were browsing an old site hard-coded in HTML. But then again, the look and “mobile-readiness” of these sites were questionable, at best.

By 2010, it had become obvious that mobile users’ experience was crying for a long-overdue change. And then, just like that, the next revolution in design happened.

WordPress theme creators started to code themes to be resized on a mobile screen to keep them legible, and avoid the “2-finger spread” and the “1-finger drag”. The responsiveness discontinuity started with these 2 imperatives: keep the text legible by keeping the font size as was set for desktop, and organize the design elements always visible in the mobile viewport without forcing users to drag the design back to center.

 

Mobile First Sites and Graphical User Interface (GUI) Issues with Finger Motions

 

The verticalization of design was a complete innovation for the industry, and so was the advent of WYSIWYG page builders. The new capacity of WordPress to recalibrate the front-end to make it display in a legible format, coupled with its ease of use and its document management capability, imposed it as the obvious replacement for the best site builder software of the mid-2000s, Adobe’s Dreamweaver.

For web designers, the new slew of responsive WordPress themes was a killer sales tool. Local business websites started to look awesome again, and thanks to a vibrant developer community, WordPress quickly expanded its already predominant market share, dwarfing all the other content management systems combined. Drupal and Joomla didn’t even stand a chance.

The discontinuity stopped there, however, at “mobile responsiveness”.

Responsiveness: Useful… but incomplete

In fact, responsiveness as both a coding and design concept has not much evolved since its early days. Mobile-responsive themes adapt to more screen sizes and more devices than in 2012. New plugins have been developed to make building a WordPress mobile site even easier.

In 2015 Google came out with AMP, a development framework designed to speed up mobile sites. AMP HTML was a rudimentary language, with a limited number of expressions, difficult to implement with a sophisticated graphical user interface (GUI). It took years to mature, and caused a lot of grief in the web design community. Its birth and maturation take place in the stream of incremental changes aiming at  sculpting the web for mobile browsing.

 

Accelerated Mobile Pages AMP logo 400px

 

As imperfect as their approach to the new mobile web paradigm has been, Google has played a critical role in moving the developer community forward towards better mobile sites. By way of example, Google’s engineers have kept offering testing tools to the community, to validate their code. Google adopted WebPageTest.org to offer practical diagnostic solutions to bottlenecks and code optimization issues.

From “mobile responsiveness”, Google gradually transitioned to “mobile friendliness”. The Google Search Console is the testing framework in which this evolution is taking place.

User interface issues

Inevitably, the quest for better mobile usability led designers, developers, WordPress theme creators, and Google engineers to work on the GUI of mobile sites.

 

Using a smart phone in many different situations

 

Mobile browsing occurs in a variety of situations that have little in common with the environment in which desktop browsing usually happen. Think about it: where and how you do consult your smart phone?

    • In your car, quickly, at the red light (hopefully)
    • Out in the street, night and day (when a glaring sun reflects off your screen and blinds you) 
    • With and without your readers (if you are 40+)
    • At the office, between 2 tasks (surreptitiously, as The Man doesn’t like it) 
    • With your baby in your arms (who’s the focus of your attention?)
    • At the restaurant, in a fully lit or a dark intimate setting (ah, those pesky neon lights reflecting off your screen)
    • On motorcycle handlebars, glance by glance, to follow map directions (high vibrations and traffic dangers don’t make for comfy reading)
    • Under the rain, looking for directions (trying to protect your expensive iPhone from the shower)
    • Etc…

In all these situations, at least 3 external constraints impact your visual experience:

    • Lighting conditions
    • Speed of visual interaction
    • Situational stress

These constraints will translate into a set of specific design issues:

    • Is there enough contrast between the design elements to allow a quick read in all type of lighting?
    • Are the design elements big enough that they can be read at a glance, with and without readers?
    • Are the design elements well-differentiated and their individual function recognizable at a glance through color coding?
    • Are the design elements grouped by functional types that are easy to understand?

Mobile First Website - Graphic User Interface

 

Likewise, because the conditions under which you search and browse on a mobile device can be less-than-ideal, the ergonomics of a mobile website will affect the quality of your interaction with it.

The set of external hindrances at play comprises:

    • Small viewport size (until they invent the holographic phone)
    • Interactivity tools (fingers + voice + stylus, vs. mouse pointer)
    • Situational stress

From this set of hindrances arises a new set of graphic user interface issues:

    • Is there enough space between the elements of design to enable a clumsier interaction? (Your fingers are not as accurate as a mouse)
    • Is there too much space between the elements of design to enable quick decision-making without forcing you to move the site up and down? (Value-destructive interaction)
    • Are design elements big enough to enable a simple interaction? (Don’t you hate those extra-small buttons?)
    • Are design elements quick to respond to interaction? (Or do you need to tap twice to get a response from the site?)
    • Are design elements uselessly “floating” in the viewport? (Forcing you to re-center them left and right in a wasteful interaction)
    • Does the general page design create “reflows” forcing you to wait to interact with the site or even impeding your interaction? (E.g. bothersome ads that change the position of design elements)
    • Does the design give you a visual feedback of your interaction? (E.g. color change when tapping on an element, audible or haptic signals)

In the past couple of years, the Google Search Console has started to integrate programmatic tools designed to send you alerts (“mobile usability issues“) about perceived design flaws of your mobile site.

 

Google Search Console Alert on GUI issue

 

These alerts are not always accurate (far from it), but they call your attention to potential design hindrances that may impact user experience. Since Google never wastes a good opportunity to threaten you with de-ranking (“We recommend that you fix these issues when possible to enable the best experience and coverage in Google Search“), it’s a good rule of thumb to login to the Search Console and have a look at what their programmatic tool has to say.

This effort takes place in the framework of the “mobile-friendly” site, a design step-up from the “mobile responsive” site.

Mobile-friendly sites

“Mobile-friendly” is an expression coined by Big G a couple years ago to designate websites that comply with a set of guidelines:

    1. Measure the effectiveness of your website by how easily mobile customers can complete common tasks
    2. Select a mobile template, theme, or design that’s consistent for all devices

The task-oriented approach is the core of Google’s user interface design guidelines. The goal of your design is to help visitors accomplish their purpose in the shortest time possible, with the minimum number of steps, and with the greatest ease. All this in a format that is consistent across platforms. Measure and optimize.

In this approach we find commonalities with the philosophy of “lean manufacturing” pioneered by Toyota: measure and optimize your process to consume the least possible materials and energy (incl. human labor), eliminate re-work (or waste, “muda” in Japanese), bring in your materials and subsystems only as you need them, and detect/remedy quality issues as they happen (to avoid more “muda“).

Google’s approach to mobile-friendly sites is holistic in nature: align all elements of your system under a single goal of serving your customers well. Anything that does not concur to this objective is to be removed from the system.

One of the key concept behind the making of a mobile-friendly site is the hierarchization of information. As Google puts it:

“Making a mobile site requires prioritization. Start by working out what the most important and common tasks are for your customers on mobile.”

Information hierarchy

The fundamental differences in browsing experience between desktop sites and mobile sites make it necessary for web designers to organize the information presented to visitors in a different way.

The design concept dubbed “responsiveness” never included information hierarchy. Based on our experience, only web designers close to their local clients actually observed they could not show on a mobile site all that they could show on a desktop.

When local users shop for a plumber, an HVAC company or a restaurant, they typically have 5+ options to choose from within a 10 mile radius, and way more in a big city. They don’t like wasting time in navigating a complicated site.

 

Complex website navigation bad information hierarchy model

 

On the other side of the ledger, local businesses can’t afford wasting leads. They are keenly aware of the calls they get, and they watch their pennies: if their website doesn’t generate business, they are quick to fire their web team. This explains why local web designers are usually a step ahead of Google insofar as the best way to present important information first. There are “the quick”, and then there are “the dead”.

Some of the issues that need to be planned out when designing a mobile site:

    • What services do people most often look for when they need a plumber? An HVAC company? A mechanic? How to display these services on a mobile site so they can be accessed with 1 single click?
    • Do visitors expect to find specials and coupons on a site they visit? If so, where to present them?
    • What do visitors have to do to find your phone number and call? Do they have to go up and down the home page trying to locate your number? Or do you show it so obviously that no one could miss the call button?
    • It is important or not to display a map with your business on it? Should this map be interactive?

All these issues relate to the hierarchy of information presented on the site. What to present, where to present it, how to present it.

 

Information hierarchization involves making choices in the way core information is presented, or omitted, or moved to the bottom of the menu.

In other words, it is counter-productive to show on a mobile site everything you show on a desktop site, and in the same order. Your visitors will leave in droves before they even interact twice with your mobile site.

As designers, we have to be careful to not misinterpret Google’s concern with “skinny” mobile content. Google states: “Don’t get caught in the trap of only creating a mobile-formatted site that doesn’t provide the full functionality [of the desktop site].”  Yes, Google will penalize skinny content. But they won’t penalize a site because its mobile menu is organized differently from its desktop menu. However, if your desktop site has a blog, this blog’s better be present on your mobile site.

Mobile-First sites are mobile-optimized

Google does not instruct designers as to where and how the information should be presented on a mobile site. Each client has different needs, and this is the designer’s job to define these needs correctly, and hierarchize information according to a workable model. The model just has to work for end-customers AND for Google.

This is the reason why we believe Google’s concept of “mobile-friendly sites” falls a tad short of what really needs to be done on a mobile site to make it efficient for both users and search engines.

At Eden Ads, we have pushed the mobile-friendly concept a bit further, to create mobile-optimized sites:

    • Optimized information hierarchy
    • Optimized ergonomics & graphical user interface
    • Optimized speed
    • Optimized schema mark-up for local search
    • Optimized page tagging for search engines
    • Optimized conversions

The process through which we go to design an optimized mobile size requires studying your business with you, defining what your visitors expect, what your customers buy, what offers are necessary to clinch a deal, etc.

The philosophy of Mobile First is not an after-thought, but a carefully prepared planning process
that will make your mobile site a great weapon in your lead generation arsenal.

Don’t build a mobile replica of your desktop site. That won’t generate the leads and sales you need.

Free independent evaluation

Eden Ads is a full-service digital marketing agency in Tampa, FL. Our team offers qualified local businesses a unique opportunity to have their website and digital marketing/advertising campaigns fully evaluated under multiple aspects:

    • ROI of Google Ads campaigns
    • Finding where you waste money in your Google Ads campaigns
    • ROI of Facebook campaigns
    • Search engine position checks on your 2 or 3 main keywords
    • General SEO-readiness
    • Adequacy of mobile design
    • Google speed scoring of your mobile website

This free independent evaluation can reveal weaknesses that hurt your site and prevent it to get to the top of search results. It can also highlights design issues blocking it from converting more visitors into leads. Call our web consultants today at (813) 940-5699 to request a free independent evaluation, and discuss your most pressing needs.

If you’re want results, speak with one of our Marketing Consultants to find out how we can help you! Call us at (813) 940-5699 or make contact with our team via our secure online form.

Core Web Vitals - Need for speed
In Web Design , , , , ,

Mobile First Websites: The Need for Speed

Mobile First Sites: The Need for Speed

Spicy Nugget symbol

SPICY NUGGET
The mobile web is replacing the desktop web in browsing & buying habits. Speed and downloading time directly impact your website capacity to make your phone and cash register ring.
— Phil Chavanne, Snr SEO Consultant

In Part I of this series about the design of mobile optimized websites, we explored “the lay of the Googleland”, i.e. the new rules for mobile sites as a function of changing expectations by visitors and evolving requirements by Google.

In this new instalment, we will look at the all-important criterion of speed, and its impact on search engine optimization and visitors’ reactions to your site.

First, let’s take a quick trip to memory lane to understand where we come from…

Google’s romance with mobile sites

Google’s infatuation with speedy mobile sites is hardly a historical factor: by this, we mean that Big G did not concern itself with mobile site speed until some time in 2015.

Up until a few short years ago, Google was actually much more concerned with mobile content than with mobile speed. Web designers at the cusp of technology had foreseen the mobile (r)evolution and pruned down the mobile version of their clients’ websites to give visitors a better User eXperience (UX) through faster speeds on slow mobile networks (2G, 3G, even early 4G). But never mind, folks, Google’s engineers were warning designers that they “had to provide mobile users an experience as rich as that provided to desktop users”… or else.

Since Google was threatening us with SEO penalties if we did not cram mobile versions with the same information as the desktop versions, we had to find ways to display volumes of information in ways that would make sense for mobile visitors, and avoid cluttering our mobile real-estate with irrelevant data.

 

Mobile First websites - Bad GUI

 

Google did not focus on speed until late in 2016, well after social media platforms had changed mobile user’s browsing habits to “infinite scrolling”, and 6+ months after Bing released a watershed study on the browsing habits of local visitors: this study clearly showed visitor traffic to local businesses’ websites had reached 50% of their total traffic. Google was completely missing the mobile revolution, just as it had totally missed the social network revolution with the constraints imposed on its Google+ platform (letting Facebook run circles around them).

That blindness was all the more strange since Google has invented the concept of “local search results” back in 2006, way-way-way before anyone else had a clue it would become THE way for small local businesses to be discovered in search results (on an equal footing with the big players). It goes to show Big G is not a monolithic beacon of light: rather, it looks like a bunch of disrelated units that don’t act in sync. Some of its teams are freakin’ brilliant, others are as tone-deaf as bricks.

Speed is Google’s new black

Be it as it may, Google’s local search team (today, “Google My Business”) must have woken up from deep slumber one day and realized that mobile search had become a thing. They published a short paper backing up Bing’s previously published research: mobile browsing accounted for over 50% of the visitor traffic received by local businesses.

Suddenly the Google engineering team started to observe mobile users’ habits, “discovering” in the process that the vast majority of mobile sites would take 10-15 seconds to download on a mobile home screen. (We had been aware of the issue since… 2012).

Having decided that speed was the new black, Big G announced its next move way in advance, to give webmasters, theme authors and plugin developers time to adjust their speed specs. The next major algorithm update related to mobile speed was rolled out between June 2018 and early 2019.

Mobile First indexing

First question: What is it?

In Google’s own words:

“Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Historically, the index primarily used the desktop version of a page’s content when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user’s query. Since the majority of users now access Google Search with a mobile device, Googlebot primarily crawls and indexes pages with the smartphone agent going forward.”

 

Googlebot crawling mobile site

 

There are 2 important parts to this explanation:

  • “Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking”
    This means that the positions of your website in the search engine result pages (SERPs) are primarily determined by its mobile version.
  • “Googlebot primarily crawls and indexes pages with the smartphone agent”
    This means that the Googlebot that scouts your site is specifically designed to look at it with the “eyes” of a smart phone. In other words, if it’s slow on a mobile network, you will be penalized in the search results.

In implementing Mobile First Indexing, Google continued to insist that mobile sites that did not mirror their desktop content would risk a traffic loss (stemming from a deranking).

Make sure that your mobile site contains the same content as your desktop site. If your mobile site has less content than your desktop site, consider updating your mobile site so that its primary content is equivalent to your desktop site. You can have a different design on mobile to maximize user experience (for example, moving content into accordions or tabs); just make sure that the content is equivalent to the desktop site, since almost all indexing on your site comes from the mobile site.

WARNING: If it’s your intention that the mobile page should have less content than the desktop page, you can expect some traffic loss when your site is enabled mobile-first indexing, since Google can’t get as much information from your page as before. Instead of removing content, consider moving content into accordions or tabs to save space.

Source: Google

NOTE: The last advice consisting in tucking content in accordions and tabs may sound “thoughtful” but that’s not the way mobile users browse content. If you want your content discovered on mobile, make it obvious and don’t resort to complex navigation schemes like tabs that are unwieldy in the small viewport of a smart phone.

In any case, if you were not aware that “mobile first” had become the new indexing standard of Google, and your mobile site matters very much, consider yourself updated. What’s next?

Core Web Vitals

Google is in a long-term effort to reduce the total processing power required from its server infrastructure to index the web and serve it to Google users. From a financial standpoint, indexing and handling trillions of pages and exabytes of data (that’s 1 000 000 000 000 000 000, or 10.18 Bytes) requires a huge quantity of processing power and electricity. Big G, as the energy-conscious business it portrays itself to be (or maybe more prosaically, as a profit-conscious business) is on a crusade to decrease its power usage.

To this end, holding web designers accountable for how speedily their mobile sites perform is a great idea. Reduce the weight (in KB) of your pages, shorten the distance it takes to reach the website (via content distribution networks), minimize the number of HTTP calls to your server, and simplify/minify your stylesheets and JS, and your site will be much faster to crawl and much faster to serve. Your visitors will love, Google will love, everybody wins. That’s basically the rationale behind the new kids on the block: the Core Web Vitals.

 

Core Web Vitals: Mobiel First Site Speed Measurements

 

The Core Web Vitals are a new series of speed indicators Google announced back in November 2020 and tested before rolling their implementation out at end-May 2021.

What does Big G have to say about this?

Page experience is a set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its pure information value. It includes Core Web Vitals, which is a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the page.

OK, so in simple terms, Google measures how fast your mobile site is, how long it takes your visitors to be able to interact with it, and how much unwanted motion the design of your mobile pages imposes on your visitors. Yes, nobody likes a page that’s slow to download, that forces users to wait until its clickable buttons become clickable, and that continues to move after it’s fully downloaded.

The Core Web Vitals were rolled out at the end of May 2021 in some markets, a bit later in others. Google had warned web designers that speed would now be a ranking factor. They didn’t lie. Slow websites have taken a hit. Faster websites have been positively impacted. We did before/after tests in several markets, and there is little doubt that today, speedy sites do better in the search results.

But just how fast?

The common answer you’ll find around the web to this question would be 3.0 seconds. But that’s not the case.

The 3.0 second target was the 2018 figure given by Google at the time they were preparing to roll out Mobile First Indexing.  As they observed that an average website was still taking 10-15 seconds to download, Google’s engineers set 3.0 seconds as the new normal. Above that number, penalties would start applying. The 3 sec rule became a popular number and the industry started to work towards that number to improve their positions in the search results.

In reality, the Core Web Vitals are a more complex set of targets. The sum total boils down to a couple of scores (mobile and desktop), but these are calculated based on the actual Core Web Vitals.

There are the 3 performance indicators your site needs to match. Here is what Google states:

The page [i.e. your site] provides a good user experience, focusing on the aspects of loading, interactivity, and visual stability:

 

(Source: Google)

As you can see in the timings, there is no mention of a “3.0 seconds” target — even if, once again, this target is a good number to aim at for both search engine rankings and user experience.

 

Mobile First Mobile Optimized Website - Core Web Vitals scoringGoogle has made several tools available to mesure your website performance, and understand where it may need help. The simplest testing tool to use is Page Speed Insights.

  • If your website’s Core Web Vitals are already measured by Google, the results you will get from the testing tool will be real results (“field” results) gathered in the past 28 days. The scoring will also show if your website passes or fails the Core Web Vitals.
  • If your website’s Core Web Vitals are not already measured by Google (for instance, your site doesn’t have any significant traffic or it is not connected to the Google Search Console), the Page Speed Insights test will give you “lab data” (not “field” data), i.e. a snapshot of your site performance. The scoring system will show you where the problems are. There is a difference between “field data” and “lab data”, but you will get a great indication of how speedy your site is, and a series of recommendations to bring it up to snuff, on all Core Web Vitals.

Correlation to user experience

There is a variety of statistics quoted on the web purporting to show a correlation between speed, user experience, and user behavior.

One of these is an Amazon paper published in 2009 showing the theoretical impact on revenues of a 100-millisecond delay in page loading time. Another paper widely quoted was published by CDN provider Akamai in 2017 exploring the impact of a 1-second delay on conversion rates (buyers/visitors ratio). Yet another one is a discussion that took place at a Web 2.0 conference in 2006 where then-Google VP Marissa Mayer described how a 0.5 second latency in search results negatively impacted search traffic.

All these “magic numbers” are to be taken with a grain of salt: the websites that quote them usually don’t dig into the conditions of the studies, and raw numbers can’t be properly interpreted without background data. Furthermore, how relevant today are studies published in 2006 or 2009?

More to the point is a paper published by audit and accounting firm Deloitte, quoting in part Google’s numbers, a section of which we reproduce here. The following table shows the change in user experience and behavior as loading time increases. For practical purposes, a delay in loading time does not seem to impact user behavior until the 1-second mark.

 

 

The scope and results of this study leave little interpretation to error. Based on a very large sampling (7.4 million user sessions) over 4 different industries (Retail, Travel, Lead Generation, Luxury), the researchers draw several key conclusions: An improvement of website speed by 0.1 second on mobile devices will favorably impact key metrics:

  • Visitors progress further along the sales funnel (from browsing to checking out)
  • Pageviews per session increased (depth of visits)
  • Conversion rates (buyers/visitors) improved (*)
  • Transaction values ($/buyer) improved

(*) Excepted in the lead generation industry where mobile conversion rates decreased.

 

As the mobile web gradually replaces the desktop web in searching, browsing, and buying habits, speed becomes a critical factor in the capacity of your website to make your phone ring, and transform visitors into buyers.


Free independent evaluation

Eden Ads is a full-service digital marketing agency in Tampa, FL. Our team offers qualified local businesses a unique opportunity to have their website, their SEO and their digital marketing/advertising campaigns fully evaluated under multiple aspects:

  • ROI of Google Ads campaigns
  • Finding where you waste money in your Google Ads campaigns
  • ROI of Facebook campaigns
  • Search engine position checks on your 2 or 3 main keywords
  • General SEO-readiness
  • Adequacy of mobile design
  • Google speed scoring of your mobile website

This free independent evaluation can reveal weaknesses that hurt your site and prevent it to get to the top of search results. It can also highlights design issues blocking it from converting more visitors into leads. Call our web consultants today at (813) 940-5699 to request a free independent evaluation, and discuss your most pressing needs.

If you’re want results, speak with one of our Marketing Consultants to find out how we can help you! Call us at (813) 940-5699 or make contact with our team via our secure online form.

Eden Ads Mobile First Sites - Web Design Tampa
In Web Design , , ,

Mobile First Websites: A New Quality Label

Mobile First Websites: A New Quality Label 

 

The lay of the (Google)land

There are 7 rules to creating a killer “mobile first” website:

  1. Design it for Mobile First
  2. Favor speed, speed, speed
  3. Offer a simpler GUI
  4. Display only what’s necessary
  5. Avoid bothersome interrupts
  6. Design it for outdoor use
  7. Make it accessible to the sight-impaired

In this new series of technical articles, we will explore each one of these rules and their accompanying challenges.

Let’s start with an observation that is quickly becoming a truism…

Responsiveness is an outdated concept

Most website templates on the market have been designed and coded “for desktop first”. Their mobile versions follow the rules of responsiveness: (a) verticalize content, (b) resize containers and images, and (c) display legible fonts on a variety of mobile devices.

That was excellent web design in 2012. Good in 2014. Passable in 2016. Kind of sucky in 2018. Unacceptable in 2021.

Mobile design has evolved with usage and usability.

Usage? In most B2C industries, smart phone browsing has become the #1 access method to a business site.

Usability? People use their phones in tricky situations that require good design ergonomics. Outdoors, where sunlight flattens contrast. In their car, where speed of display and convenient access to buttons are essential. At work, for private purposes, where quick in-and-out interaction is the rule.

Simply verticalizing a desktop site — the barebone answer of responsive websites to the constraints of smart phone display — violates most of the new norms of usage and usability.

Responsive design has become woefully inadequate, and creates significant hindrances to consumer interaction.

Design for mobile first

Because smart phone browsing is now the #1 way to access information anywhere, anytime, web designers starting from a blank slate must now “think mobile first”.

 

Designing a site starting with the mobile site

 

The notion of “designing for mobile before desktop” sounds counter-intuitive, but it is only counter-habitual. In fact, mobile-first design forces both designers and clients to think of what is most important to visitors, pare down less important information, and articulate a website structure along these lines.

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing else to remove.
French pilot and writer Antoine de St Exupéry, author of The Little Prince

 

Designing for mobile first is an exercise in simplification.

It starts with a simple question: “What is most relevant to my visitors?“. This calls for information prioritization, and sometimes hard choices. What goes on the home screen of mobile first websites is almost never what the run-of-the-mill responsive version of a desktop site would show smart phone users.

Unique ergonomic challenges

Once these choices are made, the designer will works with ergonomics in mind. Mobile devices present some unique challenges compared with computer monitors:

    • A much smaller screen surface makes miniaturization a must
    • Bare-hand input (vs. digital pointers) makes precision interaction more difficult
    • The form factor can hinder interaction
    • Limited light output is easily overpowered by ambient light
    • A glossy screen surface further decreases legibility

 

Ergonomics impacts usability, and usability impacts both top and bottom lines.

ergonoimics impacts usability and top and bottom lines

 

Designers have to have a good understanding of usability rules to lay out a mobile graphic user interface that makes sense to the eyes, hands and fingers of most visitors. We will cover these in detail in a later instalment.

The need for speed

Speed means even more for mobile users than for desktop visitors. Smart phone users consult their phones in situations that require quick glances and fast downloads.

The fact mobile infrastructure is going 5G alleviates speed bottlenecks as 5G capability is rated to be up to 20x faster than 4G LTE. This said, low-speed cable is almost as fast as theoretical 5G speed, and with download speeds of 50-100 MB/s high-speed cable smokes 5G in households paying for the extra bandwidth.

The need for speed is nothing new. Back in 2018, the rollout of “Mobility First” — Google’s paradigm-changing indexing method — showed Big G was dead-serious in following up the early warnings it had given web designers as early as 2016.

“Mobility First” revolutionized the way Google indexes websites by giving priority to speedy mobile sites in its result pages. From June 2018 on, mobile user experience became a primary factor in the way Google evaluates the performance of websites. (More about this and the next major algorithm update rolled out by Google in May 2021 in another instalment of this series.)

The need for speed is not just user-led: it’s also Google-pushed. The “lay of the Googleland” affects in a big way the design decisions webmasters must make when creating mobile first websites, and the building process they follow.

 

The need for speed means designing faster mobile first websites

“Designed For Mobile”: a new quality label

The paradigm shift in browsing habits started in 2011, when sales of mobile devices started to overtake sales of laptops and home PCs, has ratcheted up to a point today that makes desktop websites less crucial than in the past for local businesses.

Some statistics reflect this trend:

      • According to Statista.com, mobile browsing accounted for 53% of all pageviews in the U.S. in 2017.
      • Even in the B2B sector, a recent study published by Smart Insights show that 50% of inquiries were made through smartphones in 2021. In 2020, during the Covid lockdowns, this number even reached 70%.
      • At the local level, Google had published a report a couple years ago showing that more than half of all search queries where done from a mobile device. A recent study by Hitwise puts this figure at nearly 58%.

 

Mobile design is the new black: “Designed for Mobile”, the new quality label.

Designers and clients must adapt to this trend. The process through which a new website is created and coded must change to meet the expectations of consumers, professional buyers, and… Google.

In the next instalments we’ll detail the approach and creative decisions our design team implements to achieve the new standard of the “Mobile First Websites”.

 

Mobile First Websites

 

Phil Chavanne
Snr SEO Consultant

Free independent evaluation

Eden Ads is a full-service digital marketing agency in Tampa, FL. Our team offers qualified local businesses a unique opportunity to have their website and digital marketing/advertising campaigns fully evaluated under multiple aspects:

      • ROI of Google Ads campaigns
      • Finding where you waste money in your Google Ads campaigns
      • ROI of Facebook campaigns
      • Search engine position checks on your 2 or 3 main keywords
      • General SEO-readiness
      • Adequacy of mobile design
      • Google speed scoring of your mobile website

This free independent evaluation can reveal weaknesses that hurt your site and prevent it to get to the top of search results. It can also highlights design issues blocking it from converting more visitors into leads. Call our web consultants today at (813) 940-5699 to request a free independent evaluation, and discuss your most pressing needs.

If you’re want results, speak with one of our Marketing Consultants to find out how we can help you! Call us at (813) 940-5699 or make contact with our team via our secure online form.

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