Redefining Mobile-First: Design Principles for Real UsersRedefining Mobile-First: Design Principles for Real Users
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Brian Makumi
• May 11
Mobile-first is one of the most repeated principles in product development.
It is also one of the most misunderstood.
Mobile-first is a CSS strategy. It tells you where to start writing your stylesheets. It tells you nothing about how people hold their phones, what they are doing while they use them, or what happens when they get interrupted mid-task.
A product can be fully responsive, pass every mobile audit, and still be genuinely frustrating to use. Because it was designed with desktop assumptions baked in and scaled down, not designed for the person who is one-handed, distracted, and might not finish what they started.
That is a different design problem. And most products never solve it.
I wrote about the five principles that change when you ask the right question, and the one test that reveals whether your product actually passes.
https://www.brianmakumi.com/blog/mobile-first-is-not-enough-designing-for-how-people-actually-use-phones
#MobileDesign #UIUXDesign #ProductThinking #Frontend #WebDevelopment
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Mobile-First Is Not Enough: Designing for How People Actually Use Phones

Mobile-first is a CSS strategy. It is not a user behaviour strategy. Here is what designing for how people actually use their phones looks like, and the test that reveals whether your product passes.

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