Don’t do mobile-last

The last thing you should do is work on the mobile version when you have proudly finished your desktop version. Why ? Because you’ll spend your time struggling on how you will adapt your features. You designed a beautiful layout for desktop, and now, because you know it’s 2013 and you don’t want to ditch mobile support, you have to rethink everything again on tablets and mobile. Most of the time, it creates friction. You will prefer to hide your talent behind a brand new hamburger menu or some kick-asses media-queries. Main reason will be time, or exhaustion. But you know you can do better and it frustrates you. You should take mobile as an opportunity, not as a chore.

See things differently

You’re used to the classic process of making a website. You know already everything because you’ve learn this way and you built your experience upon it. But what if you start to see things differently ? From a new angle, a new perspective :

Imagine an artist working on a painting in his studio. You probably see him at his easel, maulstick in hand, beret on head, diligently mixing colors on his palette or gingerly applying paint to the canvas, working from dark to light to recreate what is before him. But, if you have ever painted, you know that this image is not a full picture of the process. There is a second part where the artist steps back from the easel to gain a new perspective on the work.

— Frank Chimero, « The Shape of Design. »

Get out of your comfort zone. Try something new. Take risks. Experiment. Fail. Learn. Repeat. You’ll gain new ideas about your work and how to make it good. You will show the world what you’re capable of. No one says it will be easy, but trying something new is definitely fun. Have the audacity to break the rules and the existant.

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

Constraint yourself

If you want to make good stuff, the easiest way is to set a framework. By framework, I mean limitations who will guide you in order to achieve your craft. Those limitations are not there to lock you away from creativity. Instead, they’ll help you focus on the user-experience.

Rules need to be set before starting so the work has a more focused direction to travel. These limitations are the fuel for improvisation, becoming the barriers that hold the sand in the sandbox so that we can play. The promise of a smaller scope makes us forget our fear, and the limitations become a starting point for ideas. Limitations and frameworks, however, need not be given to us only by someone else; they can also be a self-initiated set of rules that open the door to improvisation. Many of the greats have used limitations to encourage their work: Vivaldi wrote four violin concertos, one for each season. Shakespeare’s sonnets follow a specific rhyming scheme and are always fourteen lines. Picasso, during his Blue Period, painted only monochromatically.

— Frank Chimero, « The Shape of Design. »

In our case, we have an incredible limitation : the screen size. This little screen will help you more than you think. You will be led to drop some unhelpful or irrelevant features. It helps to prioritize what you want to display. You will get out of the comfort zone in order to rethink the navigation, the way you display items, the aesthetic choices you make. You will make something more uncluttered, and get the user engaged with your product. Going straight to the point. No bullshit.

Mobile-first process doesn’t stop at design. For developers, that means they have to focus on performance and set higher expectations in their work. For businesses, you lower the distractions in your sales process, there is no room for bad behaviors. For the user, that means they’ll have a great experience using your product, and they’ll enjoy using every pixel of it. Everybody wins.