No one would do that on mobile…

Shopping, banking, blogging... are all things we never thought we'd do on mobile.

I wrote yesterday's post (I don't know) on my mobile phone. That was the first time I'd ever done so and it wasn't that bad. I found myself with an hour or so to spare whilst out of the office between meetings. I took up residence in a coffee shop (wouldn't want to let the stereotype down) and pulled out my laptop only to discover it had no charge and there was no power nearby. I had the time and the inclination to write, so I dove in and tackled it on my phone.

It's not the most intricate post in the world, but does have some basic styling, links and a not insignificant amount of text. This site (at the time of writing) runs on Wordpress and the admin UI is fully responsive. I had no issues logging in, creating a new post and getting typing. There was some friction with the fact the text area has it's own internal scrollbar which made navigating the content a bit of a pain. Also, text highlighting (for copying and making links etc) was a bit fiddly but that's more of an Android issue than anything else. Otherwise the process was all in all, pretty manageable.

Certainly, to be able to type the post on my laptop would have been quicker (as I'm doing with this post). But I've been conditioned to typing on a keyboard for many years. I could well envisage "digital natives" (young people who grew up with smartphones rather than adopting them in adult life like us oldies) or people in cultures that have completely bypassed PCs could be much better conditioned to the mobile experience and create content far quicker.

Mobile first

We have development approaches well enough defined now that we really shouldn't be considering whether complex computing tasks are actually going to be done on mobile. If they aren't already, it will only be a matter of time so best embrace it now and make mobile-first, responsive development your default approach to any digital project.

Got an example that doesn't fit this assertion? Throw it at me on Twitter.

#adventblogging post 3 of 24 see the rest.