It's also comical at times. On more than one occasion, an agency starts the presentation off by stating they are presenting 'mobile centric' creative. Then to show their ideas on the next million slides all on a desktop ratio. Even, finishing the presentation with a mobile mockup. And what's on the screen? A tiny version of the desktop design. Head meet desk.
I'm in the small minority that doesn't advocate designing for mobiles first. I DESIGN FOR HUMANS, end off.
Is it important that the user journey flows perfectly on a mobile device? Absolutely it is. Is it important that a SaSS application runs effortlessly on all browsers and screen sizes? You're damn skippy it is.
Globally, 68.1% of all website visits in 2020 came from mobile devices—an increase from 63.3% in 2019. Desktops drove 28.9% of visits, while 3.1% of visitors came from tablets. However, desktop devices remain very important, as they drove 53.3% of total time on-site in the U.S. and 46.4% of total time on site globally.
One constant in a user journey is change. It has been known to assume a customer would remain in the same context for the duration of an interaction. The only change that designers use to consider was the change in the customer state enabled by the user interface (UI). Don’t want a change? Then don’t build an affordance for that change. Simple. In the real world, users don't act, react or behave in the manner you may expect. The key is to know the target customer, understand how they want or need to interact with your products. Where they are interacting from, both in their own surroundings and in what mental state they maybe in. It is also important to understand on what platforms.
Designing a beautiful mobile web page with lots of shiny assets and expensive films is a joy to do. If the user is on the website, while on location to book into something, what sort of state do we think that user is in? Odds are they are a little stressed, maybe a little tired and they could be using a pad screen provided by the company. The last thing this user wants is to have to work out what they need to do. The bells and whistles that look great are in the way. The pad screen has a different ratio to the mobile device and the user has had to up their cognitive load.
Another example is in the car industry. Looking at the stats on a recent project, the client's website visits were dominated by mobile users. Not only that but over 70% of the mobile users where on an apple device. Straight forward you may think, well, not really. when looking at the goal set, the majority of success came from the minority of desktop visits. The one theory that proved to be correct was the initial searching phase of the journey was carried out on a mobile. When the next stage of the journey was about to commence, the same user then picked that up on a 'desktop'.
What about designing for SEO?
Search engine optimization is an important part of web design. High ranking websites can receive a lot of referral traffic from search engines. You should not prioritize designing for search engines over designing for humans though. Humans are the ones actually using your website. They can identify usability issues that search engine crawlers cannot. There is also the risk of over optimizing for search engines and not focussing enough on quality of content.
Consider a website full of keywords and content tailored to manipulate search engines. How do you think visitors to this site will find the experience? They probably won’t enjoy it. Sites aimed at gaming search engines usually come across as being shady. This erodes user trust as well as the website’s credibility. Search engines are also always improving and can identify many gaming tactics.
Genuine search engine optimization improves the quality of content by providing descriptive and relevant content organised in a reasonable way. The focus is on improving content so that it can be discovered by search engines. It is improved by making it easier for those consuming it to access and understand. It all comes back to creating for humans.
The moral of the story is, you are human, you are someone's user, create for humans, not machines.