Insights from Nebo

It’s my last day in the Nebo office, and it’s bittersweet. It’s been two and a half years, and a great two and a half  years. In my time here I’ve learned more about SEO than I ever thought possible. I've petted countless adorable dogs, eaten lots of cookies, and had the privilege to work with some seriously awesome and talented people.

But sometimes, even awesome people suck. And I’m not afraid to tell them.

I’m great at vacations. I’m a pro napper, a fantastic shopper, and an even better eater. But then I started working at Nebo. By no means did anyone ask me to work over my break. On the contrary: any time I responded to a Slack, I got yelled at in all caps to delete the app from my phone and relax. But I love Nebo and I love my job, so leaving felt selfish and wrong.

RankBrain is Google’s machine-learning artificial intelligence (AI) program that helps process the massive amount of searches Google receives. RankBrain was first announced in a Bloomberg article in October 2015, though Google said it had been using it since April 2015. By June 2016, Google said that RankBrain was being used to process every search made on their search engine.

It’s not even noon and the Slacks are flying. Monday morning is here and the “Game of Thrones” channel is a fury of fan theories, mortality bets and fiery dragon memes.

When we think of UX, we think site layouts. We think interaction. We think user flow. However, too often, we don’t think copy.

Yes, we design amazing user experiences. But when it comes to site copy, we UX designers often fall back on for-placement-only (FPO) copy. While UX may be a (relatively) new field, FPO copy has roots all the way back in classic Latin literature. Thus, the famous — well, infamous, in our opinion — lorem ipsum.

Even though it goes way back, could it be that lorem ipsum is actually causing more harm than good? If you pause to think about it rather than just doing it because it's always been done that way — the answer is yes. Here’s why.

Arguably, we’re in the midst of the mobile age. Google says we’re moving into an AI-first world, beyond the mobile-first one. Mobile surpassed desktop back in 2015, and today, more than half of all Google searches are done on a mobile device. Over 60 percent of all searches came from mobile devices in 2016.