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Luke Wroblewski, or LukeW as he's known on the web, is a self-described "digital product design & strategy guy" who's been pushing the idea of designing for mobile interfaces first for a while now. He thinks that designing for mobile first works best because 1.) mobile is more important than desktop these days, 2.) mobile forces you to focus on what's really important, and 3.) mobile extends your application's capabilities (GPS, touch-screens, etc.).
Juan Sanchez has picked up the torch and started pushing this idea pretty hard as well. All of his opinions on designing mobile applications carry the undertone that mobile is the more important place to focus our design efforts today, and that designers who focus first on the large screen are likely to produce a bad small-screen result.
I first learned about this idea from Juan who follows Luke around like a digital lapdog. A digital lapdog who can't been seen or heard or petted from a million miles away over the internet, but loyal and devoted nonetheless. I thought to myself, "that sounds interesting" in the way that enhancements to design-view in Flex Builder are interesting: something that might be good, but unlikely to radically change up my life.
I'm sharing this with you because as of last week I have changed my tune and am now 100% convinced that this idea is nothing short of revolutionary. In a recent design exercise at my company, teams were split into four groups of two and each team was asked to design an interface that would allow users to control a home-audio system from multiple rooms. We had limited time, so my group chose to focus on the mobile experience first. It was amazing how everything fell into place after that, and also surprising to me how much simpler our design solution was over some of the other groups. Unnecessary features and confusing user metaphors were easier to ignore and seemed to fade more quickly into the background when we focused on the small, simple, elegant mobile device fist and worried about the desktop version second.
Designing for large screen devices (desktop, laptop) first puts you at a disadvantage for all the reasons that Luke highlights - it makes you think too big too fast, it gives you too much freedom to confuse your user, it's easier to make too many bad assumptions about what they're like or how they work - but more than that it's just kind of boring to me now. Designing for mobile is, for some reason, much more fun. It feels like a new frontier - devices that go places and do things and aren't content to sit on a desk all day. And it just makes sense. In a world where some countries have more cell phones than people, can you really afford to focus your budget on the web first?
Like I said, this is nothing short of revolutionary. I'm so certain of this I keep opening a window to listen for the sounds of joyous uproar from the millions of digital designers out there who are about to discover how great it is to start with mobile. Go ahead - give it a shot. And then don't be afraid to yell a little.
I'm on the Mobile First bandwagon. What do you think - is this just a bunch of hype and nonsense? Will all of our old design problems quickly show up in new digital disguises? Are mobile designs today actually as un-focused and difficult as desktop, and we're just fooling ourselves about it being simpler?
More info:
Here's LukeW giving his tech-talk at the LinkedIn HQ:
Here are the slides from one of Juan's recent talks on the process of designing for mobile:
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I think one thing people over looked a little in the mobile first design is physical form factor. In other words design for the physical screen size relative to a finger tip PPI (Pixels Per Inch), then use code to scale appropriately.
I gave a concept talk on this idea, the link below have the slides and code but it doesn't quite do it justice so I'll post on it again in the future.
http://renaun.com/blog/2010/07/riapalooza-session-source-code/
In many cases this is an excellent idea as it is similar in nature to progressive enhancement, you start with the lowest common denominator and build up. Personally, if it would fit a project I would like to develop this way just to see how it worked out.
But I disagree that mobile is more important than desktop these days. That is too blanket of a statement right now. We're close to that but there are many cases when mobile is not yet a large enough concern.
To me its too much like those other blanket statements that pop up from time to time, like:
"PC gaming is dead because of consoles." (this one comes up every 3 to 5 years)
"Flash is dead because of ajax."
"Flash is dead because of HTML5."
And who knows how many more examples there are that I can't think of at the moment.
@Renaun - Physical form factor is definitely a big one. There are so many more considerations to make for mobile than there are for desktop, which mean there's more opportunity to provide more value to a user. The other big thing that people seem to forget about is context, which can be really powerful in mobile.
@Travis - I'm not sure I agree that mobile is like progressive enhancement and should be considered the lowest common denominator. I think it's more overlap of certain things. I talk to clients a lot who say things like, "We can just port this to the iPhone or the desktop" and it's the wrong way to think about it. If you truly think about your user within the mobile context you will find features that are way more relevant in that state than sitting in front of a computer. A strong mobile strategy that integrates really well with a users points of engagement (mobile, desktop, kiosk, web) throughout a brand can reap larger benefits versus just bringing features from a website.
I agree it may be too soon to say that mobile is more important than desktop, but I think it's a safe bet to start getting more involved with doing more mobile work. I can tell you that more and more clients are asking for mobile apps and I'd say it's getting close to mobile matching web or desktop requests, if not exceeding them.
@Travis @Juan
I think it depends on how we define "important" (which is what Travis may be getting at by calling it "too blanket of a statement.") In terms of reach and penetration I don't think it's too soon to call mobile more important. I think we could argue well for mobile being more important for market growth, reach, capability, and functionality - more important in enough categories to call it more important overall - but that's a lot more than I want to go into in a comment. Next post maybe. :)
I expect to get an Evo next month when I describe my plan, but I would never get a blank. I think it would show dirt and fingerprints too.
Great post- thanks for sharing!
@Travis
But the point isn't which is more important desktop or mobile, it's that by starting to explore requirements and crafting an experience for Mobile first, you can reach a better design faster- right?
Another great resource is Brain Fling's book "Mobile Design and Development" by O'Reilly. He shows the differences between the information architecture one might design for a desktop/web tool vs a mobile app , and the mobile IA is clearly simpler, although it includes the same set of features.