There is a good chance you are reading this article from their mobile device right now. In fact, about 53% of visitors use a mobile device. The other 47% use a desktop. Still wondering “Why mobile first design?”.
According to the Office for National Statistics, in 2019, 84% have used the internet “on the go.” And 79% of them used a mobile phone or smartphone.
Table of Contents
what is Mobile first design?
There are two different concepts not to confuse here. There is Responsive Design (Mobile Friendly), and Mobile First Design.
Responsive design
A responsive design is a technical approach where you first design on a larger screen and use CSS (a stylesheet) to automatically adjust the elements to the device being used by the viewer. Which means the desktop viewers are still more valued compared to mobile device ones.
Mobile First design
Mobile First on the contrary, as its name suggests, everything is designed on the smallest screen first. The design is then extended to wider screens such as desktops and tablets.
Why is mobile first so important?
Now that we know the majority of the population accesses the internet “on the go”, it seems important to design a website for a mobile device first and foremost.
There are benefits of using this principle.
With mobile first, you focus on what’s important first, the content. So you remove unnecessary features/decoration. Doing so will improve the user experience but also reduce the loading time of your pages (an important concept of SEO).
How to create a mobile first design?
The key here is to focus on the content. You can use off the shelf design templates, or drag and drop builders to help you.
But for optimal results the best way to do this is to hire a web designer/developer to do the work the right way. This needs lots of code and design tweaking to get the best results.
After designing the mobile version, when extending the compatibility to wider screens, you can add more fancy features.
conclusion
Now you know why mobile first design is important for your users/clients. A mobile responsive design is not enough, mobile first is the principle you should apply in designing a website in 2020.
More and more users are using a mobile device nowadays, desktop browsing is slowly dying.
This approach will make your life easier, but will also ease the viewers.
