A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.
My morning’s email traffic contained a nasty note from that 900-pound Gorilla known as Google. “Google systems,” it said:
…tested 434 pages from your site and found that 100% of them have critical mobile usability errors. The errors on these 434 pages severely affect how mobile users are able to experience your website. These pages will not be seen as mobile-friendly by Google Search, and will therefore be displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone users.
My sins include no viewport declaration or configuration, font sizes too small, and touch elements too close. Google wants me to tear up and redesign my site so that Google is happy how my pages appear on smartphones and other little screens.
Appeasing Google would require dumbing-down and uglifying Flathead Memo’s pages, which already have a simple, two-column design that accommodates text, images, tables, and graphs. On little smartphone screens, Flathead Memo would be reduced to text and graphics too small to be useful. On 24-inch screens like my primary display, Flathead Memo might sprawl from side to side, forcing viewers to resize their windows from website to website.
Some good people will think this is good advice, that Google’s just being helpful, and that old fogies like me need to be pushed into the viewport design era. I think it’s bullying. In fact, I think that having the power to bully on a large scale is one of the attractions of working for Google.
So far, I’ve received no complaints from the smartphone users who visit Flathead Memo. They must be finding ways to work around the things that so infuriate Google’s mobile worshiping viewport crusaders. So for the moment, I’m not inclined to take time from writing to recode Flathead Memo to improve the user experience on smartphones at the cost of degrading the user experience on desktops.