A mobile first approach isn’t enough anymore

When designing for the web, one of the most popular terms we still hear has to be “mobile-first design”. The practise of starting with and prioritizing your mobile designs over anything else. The term first came to life more than a decade ago. But, is this way of simply approaching a web based product from a single device view still the way to go?

The philosophy of mobile-first design

Back in 2009, mobile-first design was introduced by Luke Wroblewski. He found that designing with the constraints of small screens helps us to prioritize content, which leads to a better experience for the end users.

At the time, mobile usage was exploding. There was a need to shift to prioritizing a site’s elements to eliminate features and content that made them unusable on mobile devices. And so, creating a website or application with the mobile viewport as the starting point made a lot of sense.

Fast forward to more than a decade later, we’ve arrived in 2021 and we’re still very much so assuming that every project needs to be started from a mobile-first approach. And why shouldn’t we? Most if not all website traffic show 50%+ mobile traffic compared to other devices.

But, while mobile usage today is higher than ever, a lot has changed since it all started.

What has changed

While 2009 made us design for mobile screens not much bigger than the average credit card, today’s mobile screens have drastically increased in size. This primarily means that we have a lot more screen real estate to work with. Furthermore, technological developments have increased our possibilities in providing better mobile experiences tremendously and content has become more important than ever.

Besides a change in device size and possibilities, our mobile behaviour has changed alongside this. Mobile has become a much more integrated part of our lives. No longer do we use separate devices for isolated actions, but are we using a variety of devices to assist us in tasks like exploring, buying, posting content and entertainment.

There is more than just mobile

With its large number of users across the web, mobile is and will most likely always be an important focus point in designing online experiences. Yet, it shouldn’t have your only focus. 

Too often, mobile-first means mobile only. In these cases other devices that could very well be part of your customers journey are insufficiently optimized. By solely optimizing your website based on primary device traffic sources, you could be completely missing the optimization of important parts of your customer’s journey. Nowadays, you can’t assume that the primary device used to visit your website, is the device on where your important conversions take place. 

Your user could click through on one of your Instagram ads and browse through your sale items while on the bus. When coming home that night, they could grab their tablet and order some items they added to their wish-list earlier that day.

The example above shows that although a visitor can initially visit your website on a mobile device, the important conversions could take place on an entire different one. Not only does this strongly depend on your target audience and sector, but also on the contextual use of your website or product.

Taking into the account the entire journey

The key takeaway here is that instead of solely building your web products from a mobile-first approach, a much better strategy would be to build from an approach that follows the user journey. By prioritizing the design process on where users will perform the most important actions, all devices are taken into account holistically. 

Although mobile will always remain an important part of any web related design, it's good to look beyond and make sure all devices within the journey of your website or product get the attention they deserve.