A Mobile-First Approach (aka, Death to the Separate Mobile Site)

Good UX Means Good Business

In a world where technology is rapidly advancing and user expectations are rising, it’s no longer enough to have an average user experience; to delight your users and surpass your competition you must strive for the exceptional.

Get the Guide

Over the course of the last four years, I’ve worked on many “mini-mobile” websites—that is to say, a client tasks us with picking a half-dozen “important” pages from the full website and building them out in mobile-friendly ways with an m.website.com URL. The crucial point here is, who is to say what is “important” to a mobile user? They are just like any other user; they are just accessing your content from a different container.
There are many experts in UX design that agree the day of the “pared down website for mobile” is going the way of the Commodore 64. In his article Mobile SEO is a Myth, Ryan Jones very astutely points out, “The whole ‘multiple screens need multiple sites’ theory just doesn’t make sense. We have never designed separate TV commercials for 13″ CRT screens and 70″ plasmas – even though people watching them are usually in very different places/situations… Mobile screens are nothing more than smaller computer screens.”
Mobile users will do anything a desktop user will do if it is presented in usable way (key to that sentence being “usable way”). Thanks to the proliferation of fluid layouts and adaptive design, this is becoming increasingly possibly.
One of the best ways to achieve this kind of cross-device experience is to start by designing for the small screen. This approach also helps you “trim the fat” of your website, staying focused on things that are truly necessary due to the small screen real estate. The temptation here is to add the fat back on as you expand the screen size, but where is the benefit of that? Sure, you can improve image resolution, etc as the speed and size of the device increases, but why limit what users can do on a mobile device in the first place? Or for that matter, why add a bunch of unnecessary fat to a desktop version?
Mobile device interfaces tend to be more task-oriented than corresponding desktop ones. Is this because desktop users don’t like easily accomplishing tasks? (That was facetious, in case you missed the subtlety.) Does content really need to change based on the mobile context? On a mobile device, you might change the order of elements (elevating things like phone numbers or addresses/maps to more prominence) and ditch the fancy animated sliders, but that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice the mobile user’s ability to, for instance, see your “Careers” section or read a related article. This certainly requires some creativity and a touch of restraint in designing an overall interface, but your users (both mobile and non) will be happier for your effort.
As Stephen Hay so wisely said in Great Works of Fiction Presents: The Mobile Context, “Let me make a long story short: just make quality, relevant content with appropriate tasks, and offer all of these to all users, unless said content or functionality is dependent upon device capabilities (such as a camera). Users are ultimately the experts in deciding what they want to do on your site. Make it possible, make it easy, then get out of the way and let them fill in the blanks.”