Luke Wroblewski on Designing for Mobile First
This summer I had the pleasure to review Luke Wroblewski’s O’Reilly master class on Designing for mobile first This title is also available on safari books online (best deal ever, get on safari). For those who follow Luke Wroblewski’s writing at http://lukew.com/ regularly & have read Tapworthy this might be a bit of redundant data. Even so, it’s nice to have it all nicely compiled in a 3 hours workshop.
If you haven’t started looking at designing for mobile device or even if you have this is the workshop you need to watch. It’ll definitely jump start you in the first case & round you on the second. In case you haven’t figured it out, mobile is not the next big thing, it’s the current big thing.
Aside from all the statistics & reasons on why you should care about mobile, what I liked about the workshop were certain design considerations. But that’s not all, Luke goes into the heart of how you need to think in terms of mobile design. To properly understand how to design for your user you need to envision him/her not at their desk but on the run, with a coffee on one hand and the mobile on the other. What are they trying to do? What is their goal? Because designing for mobile means being much more goal oriented. I love how he propose it: think about your user as 1 eye, 1 thumb. Partial attention = Focused design. (priceless advise)
Luke give a thorough overview of both mobile capabilities & mobile constraints. Some of the mobile constraints also are some of its strengths as well. He talks about how to align the design with the mobile behavior. He shows some very interesting approaches to the navigation (learned quite a bit). From high level stuff, user motivation/activities to the nitty gritty implementation details, touch target size, mobile form structure, css sprites etc. Luke covered it all. Added bonus, Luke shares his knowledge of how to structure forms (sequential, non-linear, contextual), mobile or not, for more on that read his book.
If you’re involved in designing a mobile experience you owe it to your customers & your company to watch this workshop. If you have a subscription to safari books online, search for this title as it is available there.
I cannot recommend this workshop high enough.
Update: Luke has come out with a book properly titled Mobile First published by a book apart. Also some free videos are available as well as many articles.