mobile first

Responsive web design is not mobile first. In fact, in most cases, it’s mobile last. 

Responsive means taking an app or a site that is web-first and making that experience mobile-friendly.

Mobile first, on the other hand, entails thinking about usage on mobile and extrapolating the flows and user experience to be seamless on the web as well. The constraints of a mobile environment are powerful. They force us to tailor app development and present only the most important actions to a user in a streamlined way, so that an average user can navigate the app in expected ways. Mobile first is paring down redundancy, starting with strong information architecture and intuitive hierarchical menus, and building that into every form factor. Mobile first does not mean that every screen should look the same nor have 1:1 feature parity, just on a littler screen with a slightly different layout.

Take caution when you approach the land of “mobile first,” lest you get swept up in tiny versions of web apps and call it a day.

build something

“If you are going to build something, you have to be able to think about all aspects of the business, you have to understand that if you build a product, you then have to market it, you have to know how the economics work, how users respond to it, and you have to be able to motivate a team to build and sell it….

“I fundamentally believe that we should always challenge ourselves to build a better business on a daily basis, because if we don’t, someone else will.”

– Mathew Smith, in Getting to Here in Product Management

“You see companies that have poached Apple designers, and they come up
with sexy interfaces or something interesting, but it doesn’t
necessarily move the needle for their business or their product. That’s
because all the designer did was work on an interface piece, but to have
a really well-designed product in the way Steve would say, this
‘holistic’ thing, is everything. It’s not just the interface piece. It’s
designing the right business model into it. Designing the right
marketing and the copy, and the way to distribute it. All of those
pieces are critical.”

– Mark Kawano, 4 Myths About Apple Design, From an Ex-Apple Designer

the high school reunion experiment

I’m an adamant champion of the end user, and I strive to empathize with anyone willing to give my work a shot. Throughout my work, I have come to feel fairly good at understanding user needs and requests, but today everything I thought I knew about humans was dismantled.

Usability or #schoolstuff

For anyone interested in usability and user experience, do help plan a high school reunion. The gems that are unearthed will blow your mind. Continue reading “the high school reunion experiment” →