What to ask your agency about mobile-first design
Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on mobile-first design, these questions are worth asking early.
Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
Questions worth asking
- Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
- How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
- What happens if it needs changing in a year?
- What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?
What a good answer sounds like
More than half of most sites' traffic arrives on a phone. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
Desktop layouts are easier to add than to strip back. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.
The short version
The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. 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
Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.