Mobile-first design: the questions we get asked most

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. The questions about mobile-first design that come up most often on our calls.

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Do we need to care about this?

More than half of most sites' traffic arrives on a phone. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here.

How do we know it is working?

Desktop layouts are easier to add than to strip back. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

The short version

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Three things worth confirming about mobile-first design before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• More than half of most sites' traffic arrives on a phone — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.