Mobile First is the mantra currently dominating the design and development community, including mine. The truth is that the Mobile First is a much better guess about what I want, but it is still a guess. Assumptions about what Mobile means are increasingly cloudy. As smartphones and tablets come to dominate the device landscape, their usage is expanding beyond the simple “on the go” assumption typically associated with mobile.
People are increasingly using these devices as substitutes for the PC. Recent statistics suggest that over 80% of tablet usage occurs at home. Another study estimates that 68% percent of smartphone usage is at home. Based on these figures, it is perhaps unsurprising that 1 out of 3 users prefer to use the full site on their mobile devices when given a choice. So it is increasingly hard to characterize mobile device usage as an “on the go” experience. To assume it is more time-constrained and transaction-oriented will become less true as these devices continue to replace PCs as the primary Internet device.
The real goal for developers should be to work towards Moment First design. The principles surrounding Adaptive Design and the Contextual Web point to the next challenge in experience design. Being in the moment requires making better use of the multiple hints we can gather about how people are engaged when they look for content. It will take into account more than the device, but also the location, time, behavior patterns and other situational clues that can gear the content to the best perceived need for that moment. Building a Moment First architecture will continue a pattern in which the technical development for content delivery becomes increasingly more complicated so that the experience itself can be simpler and more intuitive. This provides an opportunity for toolmakers and experience designers to find ways to harness that complexity in new development models.
The Ryan Report 