By Marine Leroux, Thomson Reuters
Are we being a mobile first company? What does it mean anyway? In this short video, Luke Wroblewski, author of the book “Mobile First” and speaker at a recent employee session on the topic, speaks about the three fundamentals that led to the birth of the Mobile First approach:
- Mobile will eat the planet (as said in 2008). There are new users online. Be prepared to deliver your content to them.
- The large screen form factor has made us lazy, by giving us space for 50 options on the screen. Mobile loses 80% of its screen space, forcing us to really prioritize what we choose to display.
- Mobile offers unique capabilities like the phone, GPS, camera, gyroscope. These give us opportunities to create a special experiences on those devices.
Most companies say they’re mobile first, but in reality they’re still stuck with the big screen in their head. Mobile first implies thinking differently, with only a small screen in mind. So how are we faring?
Most of our mobile applications and sites are products of existing desktop applications, featuring as many desktop options to satisfy the ubiquitous need to access everything on mobile. This is the case of apps like Eikon, Reuters, Elite, WestLawNext, Trademark Analysis, EndNote, Checkpoint Learning, and some Tax & Accounting Professional Suite apps like MyPay and NetClient CS. These apps have done a good job of being intuitive and easy to use on mobile.
Checkpoint Learning (iPad web)
The Wider Image
True “mobile first” products are rare because they have to be unique to mobile at first, where they were thought out on small screen before (if at all) they were thought out on large screen. An excellent example of this approach is The Wider Image iPad app, which has reinvented photo-journalism for mobile devices by identifying new photography formats and taking advantage of the device’ video, notifications, sharing, gestures, and retina display. The Wider Image started as an iPad app, and its success led to creating a responsive desktop web site.
Proview
Another one in that success category is ProView which is expanding from an iPad app to Android. ProView started from an idea to bring legal reference material from print to digital. The first and only delivery platform was the iPad.
Convene
With hundreds of conferences organized by Thomson Reuters various businesses each year, some of which providing precarious mobile access to sessions, it became clear that a customizable “conference app” was needed. And so was born Convene, a platform for conference sessions, speakers, attendee profiles and networking. Backed by a solid CMS, conference managers feed in content and provide a customized access to the conference to their attendees. This mobile first product exists only on mobile iOS and Android with no desktop version.
Reuters London 2012 Olympics
This one-off iPhone and iPad app was created exclusively for the London summer Olympics in 2012, with no pre-existing desktop app. It used Reuters feed and photography, taking advantage of app notifications, gestures and retina display, ensuring people followed the games from their desk on the iPad or at the games directly with their iPhones. The success of the app is opening up the opportunity to leverage the platform for future sports events brought to a device.
RefScan
RefScan is an iPhone app that lets you use the phone’s camera to scan a DOI, access the references’ bibliographic information from Web of Knowledge, and save them to an EndNote Web account. It’s a quick way to collect references on the move.
So, the verdict? Many companies remain shy in their efforts to think truly mobile first. The effort is still focused on replicating desktop products onto small screens, iterating and incrementally improving them, before thoughts are put into creating products exclusive to mobile. As Luke writes in his book, the world has embraced mobile devices so dramatically that starting design on the desktop first is increasingly risky and backward. “Designing for mobile first now can not only open up new opportunities for growth, it can lead to better overall user experiences for a website or application.”
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