Three myths about mobile-first design

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. A few things about mobile-first design that get repeated more often than they get checked.

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

“It only matters for big sites”

More than half of most sites' traffic arrives on a phone. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens.

“Our platform handles it”

Desktop layouts are easier to add than to strip back. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

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
• Desktop layouts are easier to add than to strip back — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.