What is the Mobile First Era?
The “Mobile First Era” tends to shift the focus on a wide variety of issues that are being constantly faced in the IT industry by the people working in it. Often, mobile workers must work on a fully customised application that are mostly a PC version. But it might not be helpful to them since the mobile applications focus in narrower in focus than their PC counterparts and desktop interfaces that are basically not designed for the touch interfaces. The Mobile First strategy accommodates use of desktop computing in a way that it fits more into the task specific, flexible work styles of the mobile era.
How is the mobile first strategy designed?
The mobile first strategy is a sort of progressive advancement. The most important feature that could bring in a revolutionary change in the ‘Mobile First Era’ was the responsive web design. This is a method that enables web to fit to the screens of different devices automatically displaying the content in a way that a lot of people would feel comfortable with. This greatly reduces the user operations of panning, zooming and scrolling the web.
Various methods of introducing the Mobile first Strategy.
In the process of introducing the responsive web design, there are two methods used to achieve the goal.
- Progressive Advancements: This is a simpler task to achieve. The main goal is to build a version for relatively lower browser (like that used in a mobile phone). This version basically includes the most basic functions and features. After this, it is much easier to work an advancement and enhance the feature to make it compatible for a tablet or PC.
- Graceful Degradation: This method is just the opposite for the Progressive Advancements method. In this procedure, the design starts to be built for an advanced end like desktop and then it is degraded to adjust or fit into smaller and less compatible devices such as smartphones. It is a more complicated process since developers need to focus on cutting function and feature to make it mobile compatible. The mobile era mentions product design keeping in mind the use of mobile phones and smartphones with more restrictions as well as growth opportunities.
Importance of Mobile First design
There are a lot of viable reasons to support the mobile first design.
- Mobile internet usage has overpowered the desktop usage in 2016.
- People intend to spend more on mobile phones.
- Smartphones sales overtook the PC sales in 2012. All the above facts help us deduce that the market is flooded with mobile phones rather than the bulkier PC and desktop and therefore it is more reasonable to focus on development of software that are more mobile friendly so that people could use mobile phones to generate value.
