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I stated it in another comment, but the mobile-first strategy is more about user interaction design than implementation technology choices. The decision between

I stated it in another comment, but the mobile-first strategy is more about user interaction design than implementation technology choices. The decision between HTML5 or native app or HTML5 wrapped as an app will be different in a year, but the fact that users are using most services mainly from mobile or tablets won't. If you start a new startup today and you have resources to design a single user experience, it's a choice of designing for mobile/tablets or for laptops. Responsive design is not a solution here, as you have to think full user flows. It's questions like how much text a user is willing to input? How will they pay? How will they bring their own data to your service? If you are selling anything virtual, you should probably leverage native in-app payment methods instead of expecting user to input credit card details. If user needs to bring his data (photos, documents, Excel sheets) to your service, how he will do it? In the mobile-first world, things like smooth Dropbox integration mean much more than on a laptop/desktop world.

Silhouette 14y ago
I stated it in another comment, but the mobile-first strategy is more about user interaction design than implementation technology choices. I tend to agree, but for this discussion I'm trying to restrict my use of the term to the distinction in the original articles, which as I read them is very much about the technology platform choice rather than matters of presentation or user experience. (Perhaps I've misunderstood the author's intent and that is why I so strongly disagreed with the argument from the earlier blog post.) If you start a new startup today and you have resources to design a single user experience, it's a choice of designing for mobile/tablets or for laptops. Responsive design is not a solution here, as you have to think full user flows. With due respect, I don't accept your premise. We're doing it right now, with a web app that uses similar tricks to responsive design to present things differently on different devices. With the obvious exception of collecting payments, where a native mobile app probably has at least one major option that a web app doesn't, we aim for a very similar user flow regardless of the device used to access our service. This particular app is more about consumption than interaction, so of course we're not representative of the entire field and YMMV. However, I'd say the main thing that lets us present a user experience that is similar across devices is just keeping the whole model very simple and designing the interactions/controls carefully so they are viable on both large and small screens. We do occasionally adapt a certain part of the UI to present things in a more natural way depending on the device, but we don't find this is a problem very often in practice. We've been considering various more interactive/social features, and I would agree that these require more adaptation to suit different devices, but even so, I don't see us building two fundamentally different user interfaces any time soon. Until evidence shows me otherwise, if your user flows are simple and your underlying data/presentation models are good, I don't see why a single user experience with localised enhancements/adaptations can't serve many kinds of device well.
- dirtyaura 14y ago
  I agree that with apps that are mostly consumption, responsive design can go a long way. However, I think the biggest wins in the future will be for products that somehow crack the problem of easy manipulation for different application domains in mobile. (We are working on that, rethinking what spreadsheets are in the touch device era)
equalarrow 14y ago
Absolutely. There are so many trade-offs with mobile and the ones you described are spot on. I feel like the mobile first is a ruse in some ways that investors love to hype. I had a startup a few years back (mid 2007- late 2010) that got some pretty good angel money. A pretty decent amount to get everything launched and keep us going and keep us running over the years. We rolled out a web site first and slowly built our paying user base up. But as soon as the iPhone came out, my partner decided that we had to be a mobile company. He told me to remove the website, truncate our db, and start from a 'clean slate'. I was totally against it and years later, we never made anywhere near the money we had before we went mobile (company 'IP' was chopped up and sold off last year). But the thing is, our app really was location based, so from one point of view, it definitely made sense to have a very strong mobile presence. But we killed off our main revenue source to be a 'mobile company' - the stupidest thing ever and I'm a total business 101 fail. Sure, mobile (as per Mary Meeker and others) has not reached its full potential. But if I were starting a new project, I would definitely consider if mobile first makes sense. I am primarily an iOS developer, but have built on many languages/platforms on the server side for years. I love making mobile products and I believe that there's pretty much always a place for it. But the whole 'mobile first' argument only makes sense for products that rely on the unique traits mobile offers. Companies/apps like Uber, Wikipedia, News, Music stores, ticketing, Foursquare, etc, make most sense to go mobile first (even tho some may not have). They can be used away from the desktop easily and usually have a benefit in the real world. But unless you product fits into something like that, I would agree more with Vibhu and do mobile later. And whatever you do, don't kill your main source of revenue to be a 'mobile company'!
- dirtyaura 14y ago
  Interesting story. What was your product exactly? We were original doing Jaiku in 2006 with the full focus on mobile initially but pretty soon changed focus to web, because it was impossible to get mobile distribution at those days. We sold to Google in 2007, but had we continued, we would have faced a very interesting decision, when iPhone app store came out: move main focus back to mobile? Thinking about this alternative history is very interesting. Twitter was clearly ahead on the web, although we gave them some challenge when Leo Laporte and his fans switched from Twitter to Jaiku. But in this alternative history had we realized importance of iPhone early enough (very big question mark, as we were based in Finland, the land of the Nokia) we could have had chance to execute on mobile better than Twitter.

Silhouette 14y ago

I stated it in another comment, but the mobile-first strategy is more about user interaction design than implementation technology choices. I tend to agree, but for this discussion I'm trying to restrict my use of the term to the distinction in the original articles, which as I read them is very much about the technology platform choice rather than matters of presentation or user experience. (Perhaps I've misunderstood the author's intent and that is why I so strongly disagreed with the argument from the earlier blog post.) If you start a new startup today and you have resources to design a single user experience, it's a choice of designing for mobile/tablets or for laptops. Responsive design is not a solution here, as you have to think full user flows. With due respect, I don't accept your premise. We're doing it right now, with a web app that uses similar tricks to responsive design to present things differently on different devices. With the obvious exception of collecting payments, where a native mobile app probably has at least one major option that a web app doesn't, we aim for a very similar user flow regardless of the device used to access our service. This particular app is more about consumption than interaction, so of course we're not representative of the entire field and YMMV. However, I'd say the main thing that lets us present a user experience that is similar across devices is just keeping the whole model very simple and designing the interactions/controls carefully so they are viable on both large and small screens. We do occasionally adapt a certain part of the UI to present things in a more natural way depending on the device, but we don't find this is a problem very often in practice. We've been considering various more interactive/social features, and I would agree that these require more adaptation to suit different devices, but even so, I don't see us building two fundamentally different user interfaces any time soon. Until evidence shows me otherwise, if your user flows are simple and your underlying data/presentation models are good, I don't see why a single user experience with localised enhancements/adaptations can't serve many kinds of device well.

dirtyaura 14y ago
I agree that with apps that are mostly consumption, responsive design can go a long way. However, I think the biggest wins in the future will be for products that somehow crack the problem of easy manipulation for different application domains in mobile. (We are working on that, rethinking what spreadsheets are in the touch device era)

equalarrow 14y ago

Absolutely. There are so many trade-offs with mobile and the ones you described are spot on. I feel like the mobile first is a ruse in some ways that investors love to hype. I had a startup a few years back (mid 2007- late 2010) that got some pretty good angel money. A pretty decent amount to get everything launched and keep us going and keep us running over the years. We rolled out a web site first and slowly built our paying user base up. But as soon as the iPhone came out, my partner decided that we had to be a mobile company. He told me to remove the website, truncate our db, and start from a 'clean slate'. I was totally against it and years later, we never made anywhere near the money we had before we went mobile (company 'IP' was chopped up and sold off last year). But the thing is, our app really was location based, so from one point of view, it definitely made sense to have a very strong mobile presence. But we killed off our main revenue source to be a 'mobile company' - the stupidest thing ever and I'm a total business 101 fail. Sure, mobile (as per Mary Meeker and others) has not reached its full potential. But if I were starting a new project, I would definitely consider if mobile first makes sense. I am primarily an iOS developer, but have built on many languages/platforms on the server side for years. I love making mobile products and I believe that there's pretty much always a place for it. But the whole 'mobile first' argument only makes sense for products that rely on the unique traits mobile offers. Companies/apps like Uber, Wikipedia, News, Music stores, ticketing, Foursquare, etc, make most sense to go mobile first (even tho some may not have). They can be used away from the desktop easily and usually have a benefit in the real world. But unless you product fits into something like that, I would agree more with Vibhu and do mobile later. And whatever you do, don't kill your main source of revenue to be a 'mobile company'!

dirtyaura 14y ago
Interesting story. What was your product exactly? We were original doing Jaiku in 2006 with the full focus on mobile initially but pretty soon changed focus to web, because it was impossible to get mobile distribution at those days. We sold to Google in 2007, but had we continued, we would have faced a very interesting decision, when iPhone app store came out: move main focus back to mobile? Thinking about this alternative history is very interesting. Twitter was clearly ahead on the web, although we gave them some challenge when Leo Laporte and his fans switched from Twitter to Jaiku. But in this alternative history had we realized importance of iPhone early enough (very big question mark, as we were based in Finland, the land of the Nokia) we could have had chance to execute on mobile better than Twitter.