Taking a Reverse Approach to Design with Mobile-first Strategy If you are of the opinion that mobile is the future, you are living under a rock. This notion was valid until about, say, 3 years ago; the world has moved on quite a bit in the past few years when it comes to internet usage and web interactions. Looking at a few statistics, we can see that there are more than 1.2 billion mobile web users around the world and 25% of the entire population of the USA browse the web using mobile ‘only’. With this kind of mobile usage, it would be more justified to say mobile is not the future, but the present. And such insane levels of mobile interaction inherently calls for a paradigm shift in design strategy. Responsive design, although still prevalent, is gradually becoming a thing of the past and “mobile-first design” strategy is taking over.
As the name suggests, “mobile-first” means designing for mobile first and gradually magnifying the web elements with respect to the desktop. It is opposite to responsive design, where the focus primarily rests on the desktop, and websites are regressively adapted for tablets and mobile devices. The approach is quite different here, not just in terms of the workflow but the use and presentation of different web elements as well.