I have been thinking about how to explain the mobile first concept to designers in my industry that obviously do not understand what it is. It bothers me when they don’t want to try, and quote “we will never be a mobile first company”. It makes me think about different ways I can explain the concept, so that even the stubborn will start to learn.
Have you heard of the “tiny house” fad/movement? People are foregoing the traditional size homes and basically living out of a shed. The small square footage is maximized to accommodate modern amenities. You have everything you need to live in just a few square feet.
Now, imagine you live in a tiny home. If I were to ask a tiny home dweller “what are your most important possessions?”, I would expect them to reply with something like “toilet paper”, or “toothpaste”. The home is so small, there is no room for anything non essential, therefore you learn to live with just the bare minimum. Now imagine asking someone in a larger home what their most important possession is. I would expect them to look around the room, and say something like “large flat screen TV”, or something similar.
So do you think toilet paper is less important to the large home dweller because they didn’t list it? No. I think we can safely bet that toilet paper is just as important to the large home dweller as it is to the small home dweller. Why the difference in answers? Because there is so much room in the larger house, it can be easy to overlook what’s important because there is so much more to evaluate in the larger home. The toilet paper is lost, or overlooked.
It is imperative to prioritize what things can occupy your shared space in tiny homes. It forces you to make decisions about the worth of something vs. the amount of space it requires. You are deciding the hierarchy of importance.
Once you have lived in a tiny home, you will instinctively know that what is important to you in the tiny house will also be important in the larger house. It doesn’t work too well in reverse, you can’t expect the large home dweller to get the hierarchy correct because they are too preoccupied with the big screen TV. The tiny home guy doesn’t have that distraction.
The tiny home dwellers are synonymous to mobile designs, while the large home dwellers are synonymous to desktop designs. Once you have lived in the smaller space, you will more clearly see the hierarchy of importance because the large distractions are removed. The same principal applies to design. The mobile space needs to be defined with a correct hierarchy defined. This is not to say that once you lived in the tiny home, that you could not upgrade to a larger space (via media queries) and then once we are in the bigger space, you can bring the TV into play. One must realize, though, that you can’t bring the big screen TV to the tiny home, there is just no space for it. So if there is no space for it in the tiny home, then it becomes far less important an item.
But you wouldn’t know that until you lived in the tiny home FIRST. 🙂
