Mobile first!
If I walk into a conference room for a meeting and one or more of my colleagues rolls their eyes, sighs, and says, "Mobile first," then I know I'm doing my job. I'm a broken record when it comes to prioritizing mobile, and I'm fine with that! People definitely need to be reminded of the important of mobile all the time.
A mobile-first approach to designing responsive media is the industry standard. We must design our responsive work mobile-first. This is something I've been talking about to creative teams and clients since 2012. This doesn't just mean thinking about mobile from the beginning; it means that when we design a responsive piece (website or email) we must lay out the mobile view first, and desktop after.
I'm going to say this again in stronger words:
Mobile-first is the only correct way to design a responsive piece. Period.
Why?
Mobile usage is huge and always increasing. For many of the digital pieces I've worked on in the last five years, views on mobile are often 50% or more — and as high as 80% in some cases! I started seeing mobile usage at greater than 50% for some digital pieces back in 2015. So this is not new.
Mobile users have less patience than desktop users. If the mobile experience isn't great, you risk losing them quickly. So it's critical to first get that mobile experience right, and then adjust for desktop afterward.
A good mobile experience is easy to extend to desktop. The inverse is not true. Taking a desktop layout and trying to convert it to a good mobile experience is often difficult, or even impossible without completely overhauling some parts of the experience for desktop.
Mobile-first design is cheaper. This is directly related to the previous point. When we design a good mobile experience, extending it for desktop takes very little time. When we design desktop-first, the mobile design usually has to be treated as a whole new design, meaning much more time and effort, and a lot of problem-solving.
Any good digital agency should be bragging to their clients about their mobile-first approach, and making them understand why it's so important. I definitely do. Imagine a bunch of agencies are pitching to a client for a piece of business, and one of the agencies says to them, "If you have another agency pitching today who doesn't mention that they do all their digital work mobile-first, you should not give them your business." Guess what, I'm the one saying this. It benefits both us and our clients when we educate them about why a mobile-first approach is so important — and then it's critical that we live up to it ourselves.
A revolutionary concept
This may sound extreme, but I sincerely believe we should think about our digital work this way:
We are an agency that makes digital materials for mobile devices
(... which are also a great experience on desktops/laptops.)
The above might sound a bit overboard; an exaggeration. But I truly believe that if we can calibrate our brains to think about our digital work this way, it puts us on the path to enhanced success for our clients. The world is mobile. There's no denying that. Our approach to our work must reflect that if we want to call ourselves digital experts.
Do you want to be an agency professional who really gets digital?
Do you want to be an agency professional who creates excellent, engaging digital work that produces results that your clients will love?
Challenge yourself to change your thinking about digital. Thinking digital means thinking mobile.
– Manning
Questions/comments? Feel free to contact me at manning@manningkrull.com. I update these articles pretty frequently — best practices evolve over time as the world of digital quickly changes, and I always welcome insights from others.