In April the long-talked-about update to Google’s search algorithm that favored mobile-friendly sites went into effect. Informally dubbed Mobilegeddon the update was rolled out over the end of April. The Global WebSphere Community recently sat down with Jason Pamental Lead UX Strategist at Fresh Tilled Soil and speaker at the upcoming Future Insights Live conference to talk about the shift and what it means in practical terms. He also told us about his session at Future Insights Live “Designing the Experience Continuum: Typography in the Age of the Connected Everything.”

Global WebSphere Community: To start off what are we talking about when we hear about Mobilegeddon? How and why is Google changing its search algorithm?

Jason Pamental: There are a few things at work. One is Google is finding that something like 50 percent or more of the searches on Google.com are coming from mobile devices so they are trying to nudge people towards making sure that every single piece of content is accessible on any device that’s coming to it. So Google’s preference there is that it be generally speaking responsive content—that it’s one page it’s not a separate mobile website. It’s one website one URL one piece of content that will format itself appropriately for the device on which it’s being viewed. In that sense if you are a believer in responsive web design and if you build things in the way so that it will scale and reflow automatically on any device then you’re fine; there’s really not anything you have to worry about. But for many companies where it’s a much bigger challenge to rebuild an entire website or web infrastructure you will definitely see some changes in your search results and it’s time to be mobile-friendly.

GWC: If you’re a company that’s behind the curve what are some of the first steps you need to take in order to adjust to this?

JP: This is really specific to public-facing web—that’s really the only place where this actually matters. So an internal facing application like a large complex desktop dashboard application it’s not really critical at all but for public-facing content you want to take a look at that infrastructure. If you’re using a content management system take a look and see if there are tools or themes or ways of working that can help you get to the point where you can be responsive. Certainly if you are in the midst of doing any redesigns it certainly should be responsive there.

I think the days of there being a choice about a static website and an app versus making a single responsive website and then maybe adding an app if it’s still needed I think that’s gone. I think people are recognizing that it’s just important to make sure that your content just works.

GWC: Aside from website responsiveness are there any other areas that need to be looked at if you’re evaluating a move or if you’re playing catch-up?

JP: The other area that often goes hand-in-hand with this is performance and that’s something that Google is also paying a lot of attention to. Along with making sure that the content is formatted properly it also needs to get there. And so if you’re dealing with content that is meant to be easily consumed on a mobile device you need to think about how much wait you’re asking people to put up with when you’re on a flaky cell phone connection. A lot of people have made some noise about responsive design resulting in poor performance and I would say that’s a result of not doing responsive design well.  I’ve done refits on static websites to make them responsive and that’s a first step but then what you really want to start thinking about is not just scaling the page but really thinking about the assets you’re asking people to download. Don’t include unnecessary web fonts; make sure you’re only loading the ones you need; make sure you’re serving scaled images to smaller screens so that you’re not burdening people with an unnecessary download. But simply making it responsive is the important first step.

GWC: Since this was rolled out have you personally seen or heard any real-world examples of companies that have been negatively affected by this?

JP: No I haven’t but I actually just got back from a string of three different conferences in the last two weeks and it was certainly one of the most talked about developments in the industry particularly at O’Reilly’s Fluent Conference in San Francisco. There are a lot of people talking about this and one of the things that does come into play is there is a lot of talk about using frameworks like Angular or Ember to build front-ends for web. The problem there is that it’s not necessarily going to be as accessible and it may or may not actually give you the benefits people are hoping for when it comes to search optimization accessible use with assisted technologies and you know just the plain old fact that JavaScript doesn’t always load.

But so far I’m fairly certain that the world hasn’t ended. I think issues with peoples’ search results are readily corrected by making the front end behave a little bit better and I think it can be an easier first step than people think it might be to take those first steps to make the front end responsive.

GWC: Can you tell me about the presentation you’ll be giving at Future Insights Live?

JP: When I talked do the folks at the conference originally we were really trying to think about how some of the things I talk about when using web fonts and trying to incorporate better typography how that really does touch across both mobile design and application design—technical implementation as well as design.

That’s really one of the big benefits in that conference—you really have a lot of great sessions that can suit a lot of different members of your team so it actually does make a great place for groups to go and learn together.

My interest was really in seeing based on the way technology has developed how we could really start to extend a brand experience across a whole spectrum of devices—it’s not an individual user experience it’s more of an experience continuum. With these new developments and scalable type on low-cost electronics you could have better type on small screen you could have better type and design in automotive electronics so in-dash electronics could be a lot better because we could actually create a better typographic hierarchy as we can now scale the type better than we could before. That was something that I thought was really interesting—how good typography could be that bridge from the smallest least expensive wearable devices to phone applications to desktop websites and print collateral. Fitbit is a really great example—they have never been able to do stuff on their wearables in terms of bringing the typography they have on their apps all the way down and all the way up. BMW has great apps for their cars but they can’t match that same typographic experience from the BMW brand in the dashboard and they could actually do that now.

So I think there are some really interesting things to look at there and that’s what I’ll be talking about is how all these technologies are allowing us to be much more consistent and integrated in the way we present the voice and tone of a given brand.

To learn more about Pamental’s presentation and Future Insights Live visit futureinsightslive.com.