Granted from perspective of producing pixel perfect designs, tacking the mobile UI first is more efficient from a production point of view. However focusing on a single screen size in user or customer experience design does not account broadly enough for a user’s situation or context.
By focusing on a single screen size means that we won’t start consider others in the same context. We start to constrain ourselves into creating the best option for that single viewport size. If we allow ourselves to think narrowly and to be led in specific direction, how can we ensure that our designs and layout will scale up gracefully enough to work on screens where there is more space for a design to breath. Increasing the size of an element is simply ludicrous; in short, we can’t.
If we try to squeeze these features into a small space we are not ensuring that these have the same impact when it comes to other sizes. The interactions in each case is also likely to effect performance, usability and accessibility too; think of fat fingers rather and specific pointing devices. Until we come to catering for these larger sizes we can not be sure that what is more usable on a mobile will translate well enough into a larger screen until it’s too late. This is an adaptive approach rather than a responsive one.
What we end up doing is starting down the adaptive route rather than thinking about building the parts that means becoming responsive. At its core responsive design is about C.O.P.E; create one, publish everywhere. Thinking small and building out works in many ways, but not when we need to think about how digital products are consumed.
We need to start encouraging each other to think more holistically rather just behaving in a particular way. The way to avoid this is by thinking of user needs at a page level and creating elements that flow within a journey. Being ‘mobile first’ does not allow us to think about building components in this way.
Frazer Cooper 