What is Mobile-First Web Design?

      If you’re pursuing a website, you’ve probably heard the term “mobile-first design” thrown around. If you’re asking what this means, you’ve found the right article. Abstract has been designing websites for more than 10 years and employing mobile-first web design the entire time. We’ve learned a thing or two and hope to pass on to you why mobile-first design creates robust websites that make the most of your investment. 

What Mobile-First Means 

      At a base level, mobile-first web design refers to designing your website’s layout and user experience primarily toward smartphone and tablet browsers, and prioritizing desktop screen sizes after mobile design has been optimized. Ensuring your website can be browsed on mobile devices is crucial for capturing the majority of web traffic. As of 2024, more than 60% of all internet traffic originates from a mobile device, but you may be wondering, does mobile-first design sacrifice the quality of user experience for non-mobile visitors? 

      In some forms, mobile-first design can be entirely agnostic to desktop users, potentially leading to strange user experiences on desktop browsers. The inverse, mobile-last design, can cause the opposite problems: a perfectly tailored desktop experience but poor mobile experience. Responsive Web Design attempts to find the happy balance of these two, ensuring the site works well on mobile browsers and desktop browsers alike. 

Responsive Web Design 

      Technically a subset of mobile-first web design, responsive web design shifts the focus from optimizing for smaller screen sizes toward optimizing the site for any screen size. Responsive web design relies upon flexible components that resize as the screen size changes. You can test a website’s responsiveness easily by pressing the ‘restore down’ button (between minimize and close) on your browser. You can click and drag the sides or bottoms of the frame to watch the browser attempt to resize. Well-designed websites will shift their appearance and layout to fit the screen accordingly. 

Why Responsive Web Design is Important 

      The importance of responsive web design is ever increasing. Folding smart phones, VR web browsers, and new devices entering the market every year means websites must be able to adapt to any way they’re accessed. With responsive web design, any visitor will be able to view your site’s content, regardless of the device they access it with.  

      Responsive websites make the most of every investment you pour into your site, ensuring it reaches the largest number of people possible. It also ensures your user experience is optimized no matter how they access your site; a visitor comfortable with your site’s mobile layout will feel at home with the layout on their laptop.  

Avoiding Content Dispersion 

      One of the major concerns with mobile-first design is content dispersion. You may have noticed this effect for yourself when viewing a website you normally view on your phone on your computer. Content dispersion refers to sites where the elements on the page feel artificially spread or stretched apart. This can happen when sites are designed for a mobile experience; optimized for small screens and compact content delivery. When transitioning to larger screen sizes with more 'real estate', they seem overly minimal, nearly empty. As the screen gets larger, the content becomes sparse and broad, making the mobile-first design evident. 

      When pursuing mobile-first design, it's important to avoid this. There is a delicate balance between prioritizing your website for the mobile experience and neglecting your desktop experience. There are many ways to avoid this, namely layout breakpoints. These breakpoints reference specific screen sizes to decide when to shift the page’s layout. For instance, once the screen exceeds smartphone size, a page might increase the number of columns on the page from 1 to 2, and then again from 2 to 3 once the page exceeds tablet size.  

Abstract’s Philosophy 

      At Abstract, we believe mobile-first, more specifically responsive web design, is the best fit for the majority of our clients. We have been following this methodology for years; our developers have tablet and smartphone stands on their desk from the very beginning of the website design process. This philosophy is an underpinning of our core focus: customer satisfaction. Responsive web design is about pleasing everybody.