Google made big news this week with the announcement they had launched a new search algorithm that favored mobile-friendly web sites in its mobile searches. The change was supposedly so important that some in the press even started referring to it as “Mobilegeddon”.
Given the enormous growth in mobile searches and our increasing usage of smartphones, I completely understand the concept of wanting to make mobile searching easier and better. However, there’s a fatal flaw in the argument: today’s mobile phone screens have as good (or even better) resolution than desktops, so what’s the point?
I don’t know about you but frankly, I hate it when a “mobile” version of a website pops up on my smartphone’s screen. Many of these mobile sites have designs that hearken back to 2000—a text list of different options or sections designed into simple rectangles. They’re often just plain terrible and, ironically, harder to navigate on a smartphone than the desktop version of the sites—especially if you’re already familiar with the design of the desktop version. In fact, the first thing I look for when I get to one of these pages is a link to the “full” version of the site and, inevitably, it’s hard to find.
When smartphone screens were small and the resolution of those screens were relatively low, I often put up with these mobile-friendly sites, because I understood (and could readily see) the challenges in displaying a site designed for a larger PC display on a smartphone. But when I’m looking at a 5.5” iPhone 6 Plus screen that features a full HD resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels, I just don’t get it. In fact, it almost feels insulting to get reduced to some lowest common denominator design just because I’m using a smartphone.[pullquote]I don’t know about you but frankly, I hate it when a “mobile” version of a website pops up onto my smartphone’s screen.”[/pullquote]
Now, to be fair, not everyone has a smartphone screen that is that big and whose resolution is that high, but a lot of people do. The percentage of large 5”+ smartphones (nearly all of which feature high-resolution screens) is growing at a dramatic rate, both here in the US and worldwide. In fact, by the end of 2015, the TECHnalysis Research forecast for worldwide market share of large screen smartphone shipments is 33%. The installed base numbers are, of course, lower than that, but with the explosion of interest in larger phones, it won’t be long before the installed base numbers reach a significant portion of the market as well.
As a result, the timing of Google’s focus on mobile-friendly sites seems several years too late. At this point, all it’s really doing is confusing matters for web site developers, because they have to deal with preparing both “mobile friendly” and “desktop” versions of their site. For many web sites, particularly smaller ones, this strikes me as a completely unnecessary hassle.
For example, I found that my company website doesn’t pass Google’s tool for checking mobile-friendliness and, therefore, could suffer in its ranking level for mobile searches. Yet, when I call up my site on my phone, it’s an absolutely perfect representation of the entire page. Yes, some text is small from that zoomed out view, but a quick pinch and zoom and I can easily read whatever I need to. The same is true on other desktop sites I visit as well.
There’s no question sites have to be not only cognizant of the growing share of smartphone-based searches, but also need to cater to them and deliver an experience that suits the device. The screens on smartphones are only going to get better as time goes on, however, so it seems silly to me that sites should have to lower themselves to the base level of an antiquated “mobile” site that helps them fulfill the requirements for mobile-friendliness. Frankly, I think mobile sites can and should go away. Instead, a single, well-designed “full site” that’s been tested on smartphones seems to be a much more intelligent solution.
I couldn’t disagree more. Even though my 7″ smartphone has the exact same resolution than my 26″ main monitor, I want a mobile version of sites displayed on it. Otherwise, readability is too low, and ergonomics horrendous.
I actually switched junk news sites a few months back, because HuffPo wouldn’t let me use their mobile version, whereas other news sites either displayed mobile from the outset, or at least let me choose.
To take your site as an example, I can semi-comfortably read the main menu at the top. That’s it, the rest is unusable for me. The text on the sliding pictures requires effort, the thin white font on a not-plain, sometimes-light background is giving me trouble . I can’t read any of the rest, not without squinting or zooming. I tried the content link on the home page, too small for me too. Zooming in to read the article does reflow the text in Opera, but not in the AOSP browser. I indeed wouldn’t deem your site mobile-friendly, but that’s me.
Example: which site would you rather land on:
(real size on my screen is 15cm = 5.9″ high)
sorry, the bottom picture shouldn’t be there, I deleted it but the site insisted on keeping it.
I’m in your camp, even though I know our site isn’t dedicated mobile friendly. I still fully intend to create dedicated mobile site once we have the budget.
That’s unfortunate. I was just thinking this is the best I’ve seen your site work on mobile devices.
Joe
not saying it doesn’t work well, but we built it as a one site to fit all screens. I’d say its functional but there is more mobile friendly / optimized stuff I’d like to do. Plus we are exploring an app so there is that.. 🙂
Why not just a good responsive layout with a few breakpoints? Responsive design done well seems to work great. Maybe WordPress is limiting in some way?
That’s what it is, it is responsive. If you drag your desktop browser and make it smaller you will the resolutions we optomized for. Still not perfect in my opinion.
Yes, but it does seem like a very basic responsive layout, a template or framework perhaps? It needs a lot of improvement. Some parts of the site don’t work at all on mobile screens, other elements overlap or cover each other.
The way we do responsive layouts now is we decide on a number of breakpoints, and design specific layouts for different sizes of screens, usually small, medium, large. We get very detailed in designing the elements at different sizes and making decisions about interactions at different sizes. We think about where elements will move to and how they will work as we get to different screen sizes.
It takes a lot of planning and design work (and lots of testing and tweaking) but the end result is pretty good. We’ve only started this kind of effort with responsive recently. It’s worth it.
That said, if I was on a budget, I’d just use Squarespace.
Responsive doesn’t mean much.. it means the layout and assets change some depending on rendering area. It doesn’t mean any of the actual results are good, anymore than fries being French makes them automatically tasty.
I’d rather have good unresponsive design in 3 sizes or even just 2, than bad responsive design.
Correct. Although what you describe is essentially responsive design. The user never actually sees a responsive design, unless you’re on a large screen and drag your browser size around, then you see the layout change, but normal users don’t do that. If you handle responsive design properly I think it is the best solution.
Some of it work wells: the “recent articles” list is perfect, the article view is OK. Some not so much: front-page images are huge (I’d just get rid of them and present all articles in the list w/o images), the wildly changing background colors make it jarring to read at night (another reason to use the same layout for all articles in the list).
My preferred site for design is Ars Technica. It does a lot of things well, starting with the basics: a choice of light or dark theme, and a choice of Desktop or Mobile site, both available at all times and remembered. And consistency throughout. It’s also the site with the best comments (not a high bar, but still ^^).
Just to be clear: in my original reply “your site” refers to Bob O’Donell’s. In my reply to you, to TechPinions.
Sometimes this is a function of just plain bad web design. For instance, I find NPR’s and BBC’s mobile sites far more readable than their full website on a PC. However, CNN’s smartphone site is better/easier than their tablet site. Each is still better than their full website on a PC.
Joe
Maybe this is a difference between iOS and Android, if so you can address this. In iOS I can do one of two things or both—double tap to zoom in or turn my phone to landscape.
(change topic) The thing I hate about many non-mobile websites is that almost everything on the page is a link which makes scrolling difficult, inadvertently activating a link. This is a problem in many mobile apps, too.
Je
Both also work on Android, and also a third which I alluded to: change browser – different rendering engines and UIs work best in different situations.
There’s indeed an issue with links. And ads. And portrait vs landscape layout. And graphics size. And…
I agree 100%. I have yet to find a mobile site I like. A well thought out, CSS compliant website shouldn’t need a special mobile version. What I hate most with mobile sites is I lose the ability to pinch and zoom, either texts or pics and illustrations, especially pictures and illustrations.
Joe
“For example, I found that my company website doesn’t pass Google’s tool for checking mobile-friendliness ”
No offense, but your website should fail a test for mobile-friendliness. Any site that relies on zooming and panning in order to find and read content should fail. If I performed a search from my phone and a site like yours was the first one listed, I would be very disappointed. Not only does your site not scale well for a smaller screen, it is not touch-friendly. I would not want to navigate your site using a table or other touch enabled screen.
There are a lot of well designed mobile-friendly websites out there, some of which are actually more accessible and usable than many desktop-friendly sites. You should not dismiss all mobile website development just because most of the sites you have visited suffer from poor or inadequate design.
“Any site that relies on zooming and panning in order to find and read content should fail.”
Except that is exactly what I want of a mobile site. Most fixed mobile sites never have either texts or images at a resolution that works for me. What they think should be bigger is rarely what i want to be bigger. And what they think should be small is usually exactly what I want larger.
But I agree that this largely is a result of poor design. Pinch, zoom, and pan helps me alleviate that issue.
Joe
No offense taken; thanks for the comments (and sorry for the delayed response but was travelling yesterday). I didn’t do the web site design myself but, like many small businesses, hired someone who worked under my guidance. Nevertheless, I did check it on multiple devices as it was being developed and really don’t have a problem with having to pinch and zoom. That was indeed part of the reason for writing the column.
Plus, quite honestly, the nature of my site isn’t one that is that dependent on mobile searches to be honest. Obviously I don’t want to take a hit on any searches, but it won’t dramatically change things for me.
More importantly, the genesis for this column was not at all about my site because in the big scheme of the world, it doesn’t matter that much–I just used it as a small example. The fact is there are tens of thousands (if not millions!) of others like it in the sense that they don’t have a mobile-specific design and I wonder how much time, money and effort it’s worth to create something that is. That’s really the big concern here.
It will take a few years, but going forward most sites will be responsive, and as frameworks improve they’ll be quality responsive layouts. It’s happening already, the HTML folks we work with now roll responsive layouts into their production system. On a small to mid-sized project it might actually cost more to have them not implement a responsive layout. Higher level work will be more costly of course, but the web is going to become responsive over the next few years and the cost factor will become a non-issue. Designers/HTML/programmers (the good ones) will all start with responsive frameworks, their production systems will already incorporate this. Much like there’s no longer any discussion about tables-for-layout vs CSS-for-layout, you just get CSS/modern standards.
I think what you are saying about your website really hits the crux of the matter. That combined with the comment by Space Gorilla below, tells us what the issue was, and how it will be resolved in due time.
First, from your comment. Websites, even for companies with large budgets, are only redesigned every few years at most. I bet that most websites only get a major redesign every 5 years or so, and I’m sure that that is the case in your website too.
Now take @Space Gorilla’s comment, and you see that at least the better web developers currently use responsive layout techniques so that the same web page adjust their rendering based on the screen width of the device (or browser window width in the case of desktop PCs). Also consider that responsive web design techniques only became mainstream after 2011 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design#History).
Basically, what we are currently seeing is a rapid transition towards websites that work well on both mobile and desktop. However, many of the “mobile optimised” sites that were build 5 years ago, for example, don’t incorporate the current techniques. That’s why they suck. Even recent websites made by developers who are not keeping track of the most recent techniques will tend to suck. This will, however, be solved as the cutting-edge techniques trickle down. In fact, as @Space Gorilla noted, if you are basing your designs on WordPress templates or using tools like SquareSpace, your designs will automatically incorporate current best practices.
My conclusion would be, have a bit more patience. Web design trends take time to evolve, and we are still in the transition period. Google is just trying to accelerate the trend.
Many mobile websites do not really take account of the mobile interaction model; they do not maximise information density because they are developed for some lowest common denominator, my interactions on mobile are shorter which imposes constraints on content, and scrolling and swiping is much easier than tapping links.
Designing for mobile requires a degree of discipline and clarity of vision that is often just absent. So, I have to agree with Bob that many mobile sites are not worthwhile. That said, his company’s website is fine on a tablet but a bit hopeless for one-handed operation on a phone (I need two hands to zoom and pinch).
I completely agree with the author. I hate getting a mobile version of a website and, whats even worse, is the websites that launch an app (although that’s a different topic).
One of the features I really appreciate, introduced in iOS 8, is the ability to request the full site (tap the address space to get the Favorites, pull down and tap “request full site’.
FYI Googles own site ranks “fair” using Googles assessment tools.
My company web site — powered by WordPress — passed the test.
If they used a responsive theme, or built a responsive layout with WordPress, then you’re fine. All responsive sites will pass. Responsive layouts will be standard very soon. Just my two cents, WordPress is a bag of snakes, we used it for a few projects, it’s not up to par, not for what we needed anyway.
I know it sounds too good to be true, but http://mobirise.net/ is a great mobile website builder that’s SO easy to use! I nearly knew nothing before trying it.
I must be the only person in the world who hates so called mobile friendly sites. I don’t want huge wasted white space and giant screen eating pictures. I also don’t want to feel like I’m reading a large print nursing home version of text. Why must the headline of an article take an entire screen of space? Why am I forced to scroll through entire articles I don’t want to read to get to the next? Just let me see a list!
Greetings! Very helpful advice in this particular article! It is the little changes which will make the most important changes. Thanks a lot for sharing!