User experience design has been profoundly effected by mobile. One of the keys to approaching any design is to take what mobile guru Luke W called “Mobile First”. In this week’s UX Power Up, Frank discusses the strategy, what it means and why you should adopt it immediately!
Transcript of video above…
Mobile First (Mobile UX)
Frank Spillers, founder of Experience Dynamics, it’s time for this week’s UX Power Up.
So today we’re talking about an approach to mobile design, that turns out to be an approach to all design. That’s called Mobile First. Mobile First is one of these things that, when you are designing your mobile site or app, you say to yourself – Okay, what’s the design based on? 2 things. First the resolution, and 2nd the context.
Resolution in mobile is forcing you to think in a small screen, small real estate for like a smartphone. That means that you’re having to focus on what’s important, in terms of features, functionality, content and so forth.
Context forces you to think about the – which comes with mobile – it’s like your users are walking around, they’re busy, they’re not paying attention fully to your interface.. they might be driving while using the mobile device, for example. So, context then forces that question of “What is the context of use that my content or features will be used in?”
Now, the mobile first approach is something we apply to all designs – if fact, when we design for desktop applications, we take a mobile first approach. When we design for a web applications or websites, we say “What’s the mobile version?” or what’s the – what would it be like if we design for mobile? This kind of, these 2 things: the resolution and the context force us to kind of think about that. So, I’m sure many of you have heard about mobile first as an approach. It is one of those laws of mobile UX, and it is an important thing to apply when you are building for mobile, and to keep that in mind – that you have constrained real estate and you have context of use that you need to design for and think about.
Happy UX’ing, we’ll see you on a future UX Power Up.
