A short guide to mobile-first design
Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Everything we would tell a client about mobile-first design in the time it takes to drink a coffee.
Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
Why it matters
More than half of most sites' traffic arrives on a phone. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
How we handle it
Starting narrow forces you to decide what actually matters. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.
What to watch for
Desktop layouts are easier to add than to strip back. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.
What this looks like day to day
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.