Anyone designing mobile first?

[bwood]

Although it pains me to say in my senior years, audiences are using smartphones and tablets to a very large degree. I thinking about designing mobile first, then expanding text and images for the 1200 variant.
I have to throw out my personal preferences of smartphone use to the demanding need for mobile websites.
Anyone designing mobile first, then moving to a larger format?
-Bill

[behzad]

Is that even possible with Xara? I surely prefer viewing sites on my large screen monitor. Mobile can have many features disabled and limited.

[pauland]

Personally I think it doesn't matter which format you design for first as long as you take account of the limitations of a smaller screen and have a variant specifically to address that.

Some people think that mobile is simply about small screen size and using landscape orientation as a get-out.

Besides the small screen, a lot of mobile usage is often on the move and one-handed, so the mobile version can be a distillation of the full-feature site to recognise how mobile usage is different.

[pauland]

Is that even possible with Xara? I surely prefer viewing sites on my large screen monitor. Mobile can have many features disabled and limited.

It doesn't matter what you or I do it's what most users do that matters. Many mobile users are sat on the couch watching TV, or on a train and not using large monitors.

[Acorn]

The practicalities are you go to Website Variant Properties and change Main to Mobile and set an appropriate Width.
Build your site.

Then in Website variants > Create: Main at full Width.
Make changes.
Ensure new items are not Shared across Variants.

Doing it this way forces content over gloss.

I go Main first and set out Guides for the index page.
If the content has a natural order then the site is paged.
If any page gets long I consider splitting into several sub-pages.

Main is typically Landscape but Mobile can go long, which is where the Xara model breaks down.

Acorn

[bwood]

It would be interesting to see any stats on mobile portrait vrs landscape. I’d figure that portrait would be the larger percentage.
W

[pauland]

It would be interesting to see any stats on mobile portrait vrs landscape. I’d figure that portrait would be the larger percentage.
W

https://uxcam.com/blog/mobile-ux/

https://www.perficient.com/insights/...-desktop-usage

Portrait orientation is the easiest to use one handed and the best designs consider that the thumb is crucial to one-handed operation. Landscape is harder to use single-handed.

Most people I see are looking at the phone in portrait mode.

[Initiostar]

I have the stats each day for each website I manage; one metric is usage by browser e.g.



This varies significantly across different websites and their target audiences; one can measure all this over time, but I have seen an increasing use of mobile across all my sites.

I don't think of mobile first, but when I start with desktop I always have in mind a clear view of how each content container is going to map onto the mobile variant. For example, I have a restaurant website https://theparsonage.co.uk. The menu was intentionally structured into 3 landscape columns that transitions to a single mobile column with added navigation to move up and down the menu in portrait mode. The design also uses square and Facebook post sizes which create visual synergies across the website and social media, each reinforcing the other. Using these sizes on a desktop provides for a natural transition to a mobile variant.

Lots to play with, but one has to recognise Google expects your website to display on all devices (and have an SSL).

Gary