It's a few years since the term 'Mobile First' started to be thrown
around. It was probably first coined by LukeW in 2009 and rapidly
adopted industry-wide, most notably by Google CEO Eric Schmidt when he
proclaimed a new focus for the industry, and announced Mobile First as
Google's new doctrine at Mobile World Congress in Feb 2010. Schmidt
said “Your phone is your alter ego, an extension of everything we do. Here, right now, we understand the new rule is 'mobile first' in
everything.”
So what does Mobile First mean? At its most basic,
Mobile First means you switch your thinking around and create for Mobile
first, then scale up for other platforms.
Although originally
coined as a software development philosophy, mobile first thinking could
be applied across the entire digital space. Rebuilding your website,
launching a new product, brand campaigns, lead generation, setting
marketing budget, engaging an ageny? Think Mobile First!
There
will always be cases when mobile is not relevant, when your customers
are not tech-savvy or prefer not to engage with you via mobile. But how
can you know this if you don't consider mobile first before ruling it
out? These days we always consider web. It's time to move on. Web is
now mobile.
Mobile usage speaks for itself. We could go on about
the fact that mobile internet access will surpass PC access globally by
2014, that Smartphones now outsell PCs or that 75% of Australian
smartphone users don't leave home without it.
Mobile first makes you focus. Gone are the days of mobile friendly and mobile optimized. Mobile first is a complete paradigm shift. It means thinking about the
experience - from the ground up - with a mobile customer in mind.
When
we move away from optimising desktop experiences for mobile, and start
creating experiences for mobile users specifically, we are forced to
focus. We have to focus on the context of the user, where they are,
what they are trying to achieve and what is important to them in that
moment. We are forced to strip away the irrelevant content and features,
and bring to the front only the ultimate user experience.
That
mobile experience can then be drawn out to respond to the needs of other
users, in other contexts. From the mobile experience, you can build up
and out to create the ultimate tablet experience and the ultimate
desktop experience.
Mobile first means rearranging your
brainstorming, your creative strategy and your product development to
put it first. It means thinking about the way your customers
engage with their mobile device and figuring out how to insert your
brand at that moment.
Mobile first takes advantage of unique opportunities. When you think about mobile first, you start to realise
the wealth of opportunity present in a mobile experience, that is simply
not there in a desktop experience. You will have heard the mobile
catchphrases of Location. Context. Social. Always on. Always with you.
Wherever your customer is, and whatever they are doing, their
smartphone will almost certainly be there too!
Thinking mobile first removes the constraints of designing for a desktop engagement (and
then adjusting it for mobile) and sets you free to take advantage of
the unique opportunities of mobile.
In a nutshell, soon all of
your customers will pick up their smartphone and expect to find your
brand and have a better user experience, with more features than on
their desktop. To put it another way, your customers will be thinking
mobile first, and if you don't go on the journey with them, they will
end up being someone else's customers.
Emily Rogers
Blogger and Mobile Evangelist
Snakk Media
Soapbox: Why you should be thinking mobile first
11 July 2012