Is Mobile-First important in 2021?
2021 is the year of new opportunities and rebuilding. Growth and potential. This is the year when you'll discover new opportunities and expand your horizons. If you're a business owner looking to expand into the online market or you're already selling goods or services online; maybe you're a designer, or a web enthusiast and you've heard of the phrase "mobile-first", but what does it mean? In this article I will explore the concepts of creating rich user experiences for online products using the mobile-first methodology as well as explain when it should and shouldn't be used. Let's dive in!
What is it?
As the name suggests mobile-first approach is when during planning, creating and iterating on products and services the owners and developers work by taking all or most trade-offs in favour of mobile users. What about other platforms - you might ask. Well, as the process of mobile-first methodology dictates, in order to develop other products, such as a website design for viewing on your computer, a desktop application or even an app for Apple TV would have to be scaled from the initial mobile designs and business decisions should be taken by considering the mobile use-case first.
Examples of mobile-first websites include the famous Instagram, the ever-growing social platform TikTok and even Twitter.
In order to understand the significance of why the creators of those products, we have to look into some numbers. According to a 2017 study done by Google to showcase the significance of media businesses moving to use a light mobile experience instead of chunky websites, around 80% of users visit Twitter via mobile phone.
Many business take advantage of Google Analytics to evaluate the importance of mobile and you can too. Read more about it
Mobile-first websites shouldn't only be usable on mobile devices. There are some examples of completely ignoring desktop experience in favour of mobile-only audiences, like Instagram. Whereas in most cases this may be a bad practice, it is always important to consider what the product's end goal is and how it's trying to keep its audience engaged.
Generally mobile-first designs are scaled up to accomodate larger devices, which is why some websites and applications look great on your mobile phones, but don't feel right when you're viewing it on your computer.
Should I do it?
Big business are doing it, so the obvious answer is: it depends. Before deciding to make it all about mobile users, you must be careful. The most important question to ask yourself is - is it going to bring me more profit - and the answer isn't always obvious. As I've mentioned earlier, there are tools that can help you to decide whether a majority of your users are in fact using mobile devices and if so, how well those users convert, compared to other platforms.
Not all businesses will find themselves benefiting from this approach, in fact here are a few examples of projects I've worked on, where a mobile-first approach wasn't beneficial to the product.
- Administrative Dashboard Applications
- Content Management Systems
- Websites with a Dedicated Mobile App / Website
- Professional Software
On the other hand, there are plenty of use-cases where mobile-first methodology might just be the right fit. Examples include:
- Social Media Platforms
- Media Consumer Applications
- Messaging Platforms
- E-Commerce, Webshops, Online Retail
Even if you find your business in one of those categories, whether mobile-first is right for you will also depend on many other factors. A good agency will always keep your business in mind when helping you decide this.
How to do mobile-first?
At inlucent we have a process that involves carefully measuring and determining the importance of mobile for each of our clients' customers. Sometimes the choice is very simple but often it is an involving process, which includes a data collection and performance monitoring techniques.
You can read about some of the techniques we use measure performance of websites in our article:
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When we're in the initial design phase, we advise our clients on a lot of decisions, based on the data we collected. Here are some considerations we make, based on our approach to design:
- Media sizes and content, e.g.: images, videos
- Typography (font size, typeface, spacing)
- White-space - the spacing between different elements
- Features we should ship
The designs we create will reflect these considerations which will ultimately benefit the end product down the line.
We make use of user journals and user stories, dedicated specifically to the devices and device sizes we target. We then scale our design and user flows to accomodate all devices. It is almost never a good idea to neglect any device where there is a considerable user-base or potential market.
Once our clients are happy with our designs, we start the bespoke development process based on the same methodology we used when designing it. When we're using a mobile-first approach we will also create the given product (website, application, advert) for mobile devices first and then scale up from there. This helps keep us consistent and our process straightforward. In some cases it makes sense for a business to also have a mobile application as well as a website that's optimised for mobile. There are also other strategies, like turning the website into an installable application by creating a Progressive Web App.
If you're wondering if mobile-first design would benefit your business, don't hesitate to contact us.