This isn't 1972. Stop adding "...Gate" to anything vaguely scandalous. Nor is it 1978 and we're not in Jonestown. Stop drinking (laced) Kool-Aid.
We're equally guilty of language apathy in the enterprise software community. My biggest pet peeve is how we give good ideas marketable names then overuse them until they mean nothing. Case in point: "DevOps". There's no longer a consistent definition of what it means, when to use it, who it benefits, or how… yet countless Towers of Babel have been funded in the name of it. Two others: "social" (why? when?) and "big data" (how big?). Let's stop bastardizing these to rationalize lazy product design. From the (lengthy!) list, the one that's most bothersome is "mobile-first design".
MFD? WTF?
A decade ago mobile was new, intriguing, misunderstood, and undervalued. A chorus of Statler and Waldorf naysayers threw rotten tomatoes from the balcony because they lacked the vision to see that screen resolution and battery life would improve, touch screens would fix usability, and wireless networks would become stable and ubiquitous. As those changed around 2007, that chorus of boos became a round of applause. By 2010, any software project could be justified as long as it was available on mobile devices.
…and that's where the problem started. We got distracted by the mobile euphoria hailstorm and stopped asking basic questions:
- What's mobile? A device? Network? Lifestyle?
- Why does it need to be mobile? How can we make it better for disconnected users?
- What are the use cases? Who are the users? What problems are they solving?
It's product design 101 and yet the shiny object called "270,000 iPhones sold in the first 30 hours after launch" provided the veil we needed to hide design-last behind mobile-first. Google reveals the extent to which "mobile-first" has been bludgeoned beyond recognition: 505,000 search results and the first thousand or so are from authors, designers, and vendors preying on under-informed developers, product and project managers.
So we overuse and misuse "mobile-first". So what? It's 2014 and, ironically, we need to mature past mobile-first to restore the meaning and impact Luke Wroblewski intended when he coined it in 2009. He was the visionary who first published that "…designing for mobile first not only prepares us for explosive growth and new opportunities, it forces us to focus and enables us to innovate." Right on Jedi Master. Let's channel Luke and remember why mobile is so powerful.
Mobile is an essential complement to any well-designed product. At a time when 31% of consumers cite "mobile" as their primary method of accessing the web and there are nearly 6.6 billion mobile subscriptions (...and only 7.1 billion people!), it's redundant to "think mobile first". Heck, in the developed world, there are roughly 1.3 active mobile devices per person and the developing world which suffers from poor fixed infrastructure is gaining ground at a ferocious pace. We live mobile: first, middle, and last.
In the words of the CIO of one of our largest customers, "we stopped thinking mobile first… and started thinking mobile always." He volunteered that in a discussion about automating self-service. The conversation was unrelated to mobile yet he felt compelled to address it as part of his overall "Customer First" strategy. There's a reason why their stock price has appreciated 79% since he was hired!
"Mobile always" means never compromising the user experience and always adapting function to form. It means small screens don't suffer from limited features. They behave as if they're larger by incorporating contextual information like location and presence that are more valuable when leveraged remote. It means taking inspiration from brilliant apps like Sun and understanding why Color failed.
Mobile always means never needing to read a manual. It just works the way it should, the way other apps do, the way users think it should. Mobile first has become overused beyond recognition. Mobile always is the new mobile first.
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