Mobile First Design: What it is and How to Implement it

Mobile-first design is important for customer engagement. With more than 60% of overall web traffic coming from mobile devices, a mobile-first approach is a must for web application development.

This guide will help you incorporate the mobile-first design strategy for building device-friendly apps and websites that prioritize mobile user experience.

What is Mobile-First Design?

Mobile-first design or Mobile-first approach enables web designers to start product design for mobile devices first. This can be done by sketching or prototyping the web app’s design for the smallest screen first and gradually working up to larger screen sizes.

Prioritizing design for mobiles makes sense as there are space limitations in devices with smaller screen sizes, and teams need to ensure that the key elements of the website are prominently displayed for anyone using those screens.

Designing and developing for small screens compels designers to remove anything that isn’t necessary for seamless website rendering and navigation.

How Mobile-First Design Strategy Came To Be?

Earlier, websites were often developed with the assumption that they would be primarily accessed from desktops. Eventually, developers made an attempt to modify these websites by cutting down some functions to enhance browsing on mobile or tablet devices.

This approach of scaling down the websites is popularly known as Graceful Degradation or Desktop-First approach.

• A downside to this approach is that several web elements do not adapt well to smaller screen sizes. Consequently, this degrades the visual appearance of websites on smaller devices.

To address this problem, developers came up with another approach – Progressive Advancement or Mobile-First Design.

• A mobile-first approach encouraged designers to begin the website designing process for the smallest devices first and then add more functionalities for bigger screen sizes.

Why is Mobile-First Design Critical?

Mobile devices have become an integral part of the present web landscape and will continue to be vital for the future as well. As mentioned in the beginning, mobile contributes to approximately half of the overall web traffic.

One must also bear in mind that the number of mobile users has surpassed desktop users. As per Statcounter GlobalStats, overall mobile users continue to grow with a leading market share of 64.25% as compared to desktop users.

Smartphone Usage Statistics addresses a few stats to reconsider the mobile-first approach:

1. Smartphone users tend to spend an average of 3 hours and 15 minutes on their phones.
2. Millennials spend more than 5.7 hours on their smartphones per day
3. People check their phones 58 times a day on average

The stats above clearly reveal how users across the globe are slowly shifting from desktops to mobile devices. Naturally, it would make sense for web designers to prioritize their efforts and follow the “mobile-first” rule in product design.

Advantages of a Mobile-First Approach

Here are some of the notable advantages of having a mobile-first approach for web development:

• Improved User Experience: Prioritizes essential features and functionality for mobile users, leading to a streamlined and intuitive design.
• Better SEO Performance: Mobile-first designs align with search engines’ mobile-first indexing policies, improving rankings.
• Faster Load Times: Optimized designs reduce file sizes and improve performance on slower mobile networks.
• Broader Accessibility: Ensures usability across diverse devices, enhancing reach to a larger audience.
• Cost Efficiency: Reduces the need for costly redesigns by addressing mobile constraints from the outset.
• Future-Readiness: Prepares websites for the increasing dominance of mobile traffic and emerging mobile technologies.
• Focus on Core Content: Encourages prioritization of essential content and functionality, reducing clutter.
• Seamless Scalability: This makes it easier to progressively enhance the design for larger screens.

Link between Mobile-First Design and Accessibility

Mobile-first design simplifies interfaces, prioritizes essential content, and enhances readability with legible fonts and high contrast, making it easier for users with disabilities to navigate and interact. Touch-friendly elements like larger buttons improve accessibility for those with motor impairments.

Google’s Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) and Core Web Vitals play a vital role by measuring real-world user performance, focusing on metrics like loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. These insights ensure mobile-first designs are fast, responsive, and accessible, aligning with WCAG standards and enhancing usability across all devices.

How to Implement Mobile-First Approach in Product Design?

Now let’s understand how designers can bring mobile-first responsive design into practice.

Let’s assume a web designer needs to work on a website for a restaurant. Since the designer needs to follow the mobile-first approach, they must think about what a user will expect from a restaurant website on a mobile device.

Designers must identify the primary things that an end-user is looking for while accessing a restaurant website on a mobile device. Given the user is on mobile, it would be safe to assume that they are mainly searching for – operating hours, exact location, and contact details (or click to call button given it’s mobile). On the basis of these assumptions, the page can be designed precisely as follows.

Source

In the case of tablets, users have more space and probably more time to explore the website. Designers can leverage this by adding more functionalities or information regarding the food menu (images), or chef details as displayed below:

When it comes to desktops, web designers have all the required space to showcase more details. These details can include blog posts, images of party events recently hosted,  the ambiance, or contact forms to promote the restaurant better.

Following the approach above will help designers build websites keeping the mobile audience in mind. Additionally, expanding functionalities for larger screen sizes will also be easy to accomplish for teams.

Difference Between Mobile-first and Responsive Web Design

The table below highlights the key differences between Mobile-First Design and Responsive Web Design to help you understand their unique approaches and applications.

Best Tools for Mobile-First Design

Here is a list of tools that help you accomplish a successful mobile-first design:

• Sketch: A vector-based design tool for creating mobile-first UI and UX mockups.
• Figma: A collaborative design platform ideal for prototyping and mobile-first workflows.
• Adobe XD: A versatile tool for wireframing and prototyping mobile and web applications.
• Bootstrap: A CSS framework for building responsive, mobile-first websites.
• Chrome DevTools: A browser-based debugging tool for testing and optimizing mobile designs.
• Google Mobile-Friendly Test: A tool to check if your site meets mobile usability standards.
• Google PageSpeed Insights: Analyzes and improves the performance of mobile-first websites.
• BrowserStack (for testing): Provides cross-browser and device testing for mobile compatibility.
• Foundation by Zurb: A responsive front-end framework optimized for mobile-first designs.
• Webflow: A no-code platform for designing responsive, mobile-first websites.

Best Practices for The Mobile-First Approach

For complex and layered designs, web designers UI/UX experts must bear in mind the following best practices to ensure a mobile-first approach effectively:

1. Prioritize Page Content 

When it comes to mobile-first design, designers must bear in mind the fact that content is the key. As there are space restrictions on smaller screens, web designers must ensure that the most critical elements are prominently displayed since those are the ones users will actively look for.

2. Deliver Intuitive Navigation

Intuitive navigation is of utmost importance when it comes to delivering a neat and clean user experience on mobile devices. Web designers can leverage features like navigation drawers (using Hamburger menus) to display secondary elements of the website. This will help users to find the necessary information easily.

Speed and intuitiveness go hand in hand. SpeedLab by BrowserStack instantly provides you Page Speed Score out of 100 for both Desktop and Mobile platforms. With these insights, your design team can optimize for a mobile-friendly interface across different mobile devices and browsers.

With BrowserStack, you also get actionable recommendations and insights to improve your overall design and website layout.

The report generates accurate mobile and desktop scores along with key metrics like Navigation Timing API, Page Resource Summary, and more, to help you align your mobile-first design approach with actual performance.

3. Avoid Disruptive Pop-ups 

As mentioned frequently, mobile devices have space constraints and no user likes to be accosted with sudden pop-ups or advertisements taking over the screen. Website owners or designers must only focus on what’s important for users and provide them with the things they are looking for in the first place.

4. Test on Real Devices Under Real Conditions

The most effective way of ensuring that a website delivers optimal user experiences across devices is by testing them on real devices. This helps designers verify whether the website renders as expected across mobiles, tablets, and desktops. BrowserStack’s real device cloud provides teams and individual testers with 3000+ real devices and browsers for instant testing in real user conditions.

BrowserStack also offers individual users or teams an intuitive Responsive Checker tool. This tool allows users to instantly view their websites across different device types like mobiles, tablets, and desktops. This enables users to verify whether their websites render correctly as expected on specific devices.

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Conclusion

Increasing numbers of web users across the globe have shifted from desktop to mobile devices for accessing the web and the trend shows no sign of stopping. Consequently, it makes sense for designers to develop websites keeping the mobile audience as a priority.

Incorporating a mobile-first design will not only help businesses reap the rewards of mobile growth today but will also prepare them for the explosive growth that is predicted in the coming years.