Ice Nine Online hosted a Google Partners event on 9/28 at TechNexus in Chicago.

We did a little networking, ate some Stan’s Donuts, and watched a live-stream presentation from Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters. Below is a recap of the event and some of the key takeaways from Google’s presentation. This presentation was focused on website user experience and mobile-friendliness.

Google talked a lot about “friction” during this presentation. By that I mean reducing friction between your consumer and business, in other words, making it as easy as possible for people to interact with your company online. Removing friction was stressed: proactively identifying where you’re making your customer’s experience online unnecessarily difficult, and fixing those bottlenecks to make it easier for them. There were some great real-world examples of businesses proactively making frictionless experiences for consumers, like the first bank to offer online check deposits from a mobile phone.

Google stressed the importance of mobile – as they have in many, many other presentations, blog posts, forums, YouTube videos and so on (seriously, if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website now, you’re falling very far behind the pack). One of the best takeaways from the event was the reveal of the brand new Google Mobile-Friendly Test, which now includes item-by-item recommendations to improve the mobile-friendliness and speed of your website. To use the tool, just enter your website’s URL here.

Also, website speed was one of the topics covered quite a bit. Basically, you want your website’s pages to load as fast as possible on both desktop computers and mobile devices. They mentioned that website load time is one of the greatest influencers on Bounce Rate (the percentage of people who visit a website’s pages and leave without interacting with the website). All in all, the high-level theme of the entire presentation was creating a great experience for people who are interacting with your company online.

Watch the entire live-stream:

If you’re interested in meeting new people, eating delicious food, and learning valuable digital marketing info at the next Ice Nine Online event, let us know at messages@icenineonline.com or use your internet skills to send me a message.