Guest Blog:
by Don DePalma
Mobile-forward design: An emerging trend for global brand websites
Journal of Brand Strategy
Vol. 6, No. 2, 181-191 Autumn/Fall 2017
The following article is reprinted with permission of the publisher.
Here is a link to the digital reprint, free.
Don DePalma
Chief Strategy Officer & Founder
CSA Research
This article published in 2017 by Journal of Brand Strategy illustrates the vision and benefits of mobile-forward design for any application deployed anywhere – on the web, a phone, a laptop, a tablet, cable box, streaming console, game station, and things that have screens but haven’t been invented yet. It is the long-sought developer’s dream of “write once, deploy many” coding model. It allows companies to offer the same experience everywhere, scaled appropriately and responsively to the user and the device, and to maximize the volume and speed of content and languages published through a single, unified experience.
Studies have shown that adults averaged about three-and-a-half (3.5) hours per day on their phones – before the pandemic. For information workers, that was close to half the time they spent sitting in front of their workstations and keyboards. For teenagers and millennials, screen time estimates ranged from five to seven-plus (5 – 7+) hours. During the pandemic, anecdotal evidence suggest that those numbers ballooned for everyone. All that time people spend staring at 80 to 90 square centimeters of glass creates expectations about how computing and communications devices should work – quickly, with minimal training, and in their language of choice. Prescient developers internalized these requirements several years ago and switched to handheld devices as the design center of their work.
In 2016, as part of CSA Research’s analysis of the business requirements for global markets, my then colleague Ben Sargent identified the developers’ move to mobile-forward design. Ben now serves as Solutions Architect and Co-Founder at Group-Q. Growth in both developed and especially in populous developing markets put massive numbers of handhelds into hands, pockets, and car dashboards. The success of this mobile-forward approach wasn’t due to just the expectations set by all that screen time of mobile devices. It was also their usability, multilinguality, constant proximity, the immediacy of dealing with anything that happened on them, and the intimacy of their usage that accelerated the shift to the more responsive mobile-forward design. Developers adopted the smaller, more flexible model so that they could scale their applications to any size and use case in any market and language, a task that was difficult if not impossible with PCs and traditional websites.
About CSA Research
Since 2002, CSA Research has delivered independent and objective primary research focused exclusively on the global content and language services markets. The company’s unique market research insights help business and technology leaders create value while profitably growing their global businesses across borders, languages, and cultures. Learn more about CSA Research