Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

Not Just Mobile First... Mobile Enhanced

Mobile-web

The phrase "mobile first" in the context of web design seems to be everywhere now. The idea of course, is that with the incredible surge of mobile devices and the quantity of people accessing the web via mobile, the web design initiative should be focused primarliy on mobile first.

The problem however, is not that the mobile web should be prioritized differently, like one browser channel over another browser channel (mobile + desktop + tablet etc...), but the mobile device is really a different animal.

The mobile device has a lot more features then a desktop computer. It is used as a phone, MP3 player, chat device, location detecter, GPS, etc... the idea would be to build websites on mobile phones that incorporate these features.

So... using a 'graceful degredation' model... a website strategy starts with mobile first, but includes an enhanced mobile perspective. Then the feature set degrades (responds) based on the device.

So, it's not just about designing/building websites that view properly on mobile devices, that's a good first step - it's about enhancing that experience. It's also not about building downloadable apps that are specific to devices, but real standard driven 'web sites' that are agnostic to any mobile device.