Mobile First
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What is Mobile First Design?
Why It’s Important & How To Make It?
On the Mobile World Congress in 2010, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google put forward that designers should follow the “mobile first” rule in product design. What does “mobile first design” mean? Why is it important? How to make it?
To understand the concept of mobile-first design better, you should know the two phrases below first.
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Responsive Web Design (RWD)
Responsive web design is a web design method that enables web to fit the screens of different devices automatically, displaying the content in a way that people feel comfortable. This greatly reduces users’ operations like panning, zooming and scrolling when browsing the web.
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“Progressive Advancement” & “Graceful Degradation”
These two concepts were put forward before responsive web design. In order to make web or application interface display reasonably on different devices, designers provide customized versions of product for different ends.
Progressive Advancement means that when we design a product, first we build a version for the relatively lower browser (like that on a mobile phone). This version includes the most basic functions & features. After that, we tend to the advanced version for a tablet or PC, which is created by adding interactions, more complicated effects, etc. on the basic version for a better user experience.
“Graceful Degradation”, on the contrary, starts the product design from an advanced end like desktop and builds a version with well-rounded features at the beginning. Then designers make the product compatible with mobile ends by cutting some functions or contents.
Progressive Advancement has won the game for now as far as I can see. If UI/UX designers start a product design with its desktop version, they will inevitably want to make use of most of the advantages of the advanced end. For example, the hover effect which is supported by a cursor mouse; HD images & complex charts which can display normally only when there is a recent bandwidth. In this way, the designers will make efforts to complete an amazing desktop version and only to find it can hardly be adopted on a mobile end unless they give up a lot of beautiful ideas. If so, the mobile end version will be more like an afterthought, an incomplete product which’s been watered down.
But if we take the mobile end product design as a starting point, under the restrictions like bandwidth, screen size and so on, designers will naturally seize the key points of a product, head for a lean & neat product with prioritized features. When the platform is expanded to a tablet or PC, designers are able to take advantages of the unique features of these advanced ends to strengthen the product step by step. This might be the main reason that progressive advancement strategy is widely used.
You may ask, why do you spend so much time on explaining the two concepts? The answer is that “mobile first” is exactly a rule of “progressive advancement”.
Responsive web design is the development method used to ensure websites are compatible across devices with various screen sizes, resolutions and operating platforms. At a basic level, the website should display the content in an easy-to-read, coherent and easily navigable format. This is accomplished through CSS media queries which dictate the rules a browser needs to follow.
In other words, media queries let us present the same HTML content with a different CSS layout. This means that a desktop/laptop and mobile iteration of a website can be maintained simultaneously because the same HTML mark-up can be used. So, any content that is uploaded This time-saving, cost-effective solution. content is loaded, it will be automatically be reflected correctly on the device that is being used.