Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

In all this talk of responsive design, responsive content, a lot of us have understandably taken a the highly simplified approach of saying “what do we need to get rid of for the mobile version?”.

But Karen McGrane talks about the rise of the mobile-only user.

Meeting the needs of the mobile-only user doesn’t mean agonizing about “the mobile use case,” trying to determine which subset of content would be most useful to users “on-the-go.” Google reports that 77 percent of searches from mobile devices take place at home or work, only 17 percent on the move. Mobile users should get the same content. It’s frustrating and confusing for them if you only give them a little bit of what you offer on your “real” website. If you try to guess which subset of your content the mobile user needs, you’re going to guess wrong. Deliver the same content as your desktop user sees. (If you think some of your content doesn’t deserve to be on mobile, guess what — it doesn’t deserve to be on the desktop either. Get rid of it.)

Karen backs up her argument with a bunch of US oriented statistics (which would probably apply pretty well here in Australia) but we need to think about this more globally as well. Unless of course you are “just fine” with your content and products only being used by the digital elite, moving seamlessly from desktop to laptop to tablet to mobile as they glide through life like those replicants you see in an Apple video.