Mobile Is Now Everything
When I started speaking and writing about mobile design, I led every talk with some charts about market share, installed base, and usage rates. It was always necessary to explain that mobile was a massive opportunity.
That’s no longer true. The growth of mobile-device penetration is no longer massive because it’s already happened. The mobile market is not just huge; it is everything. Today. Right now. Are you designing for that, or for the “traditional computer user” still?
Because they don’t exist. When I say “mobile” I am sure you think of these. Touchscreen smartphones. About half the world population has them.
But they didn’t magically appear. People have wanted on the go data resources forever. The PDA led to the PDA phone a decade before iPhones appeared. Oh, and you know that Android has around 75% of the installed base worldwide, right? They even lead in the US. iOS is second place.
And half the world uses featurephones. Don’t say dumbphone unless you also have a workplace culture that uses racial epithets freely. Featurephones are powerful, app-enabled, camera and GPS carrying, smart, connected devices. People read email, share to Instagram, and are trying to read your website on featurephones. Why are you ignoring 4 billion potential customers?
Computers might as well not exist. Something like 60% of all PCs come with touchscreens, and essentially all laptops are no more that, but are convertible or dockable tablets. People use them at the desk, and on the go. They use them with keyboard and mouse/trackpad, and with touch. Often, switching from one interaction to the next.
There’s no such thing as a mobile user or a desktop user, and no way to tell if any interface is being used by touch or mouse at any moment.
iPad doesn’t dominate the tablet market. Android is around 60% of the traditional tablet market, and the Chromebook — a minor offshoot of the Android OS — is so large fully 40% of the PC market in some quarters is Chromebook sales.
The traditional computer died and was replaced with the touch, mobile paradigm and no one noticed.
Or maybe, there never was a traditional computer.
SAGE—Semi-Automatic Ground Environment—was a giant system of networked computers that combined radar detection, radios, and command centers for the US Air Force. It was the first real computer project ever and developing it fully created the entire field of software engineering, analysis, and project management.
The semi-automatic part means the computer did lots of stuff for you. So way back in 1958, an operator could select an item on screen then the computer provided more information or could be told to pass that info to others.
The operator selected it with a light gun, not a trackball or mouse. By the 1960s, there were public production environments using light pens for real work. By the early 80s you could go to a store and buy a touchscreen computer.
The mouse didn’t exist until the Mother of All Demos in 1968, and cost as much as a car until Apple decided to ship them with the Macintosh and make them mainstream in the mid 80s. The normal computer, of windows, mouse pointer, and so… on is a quite recent phenomenon.
And maybe, was an anomaly. Maybe the real normal has always been direct screen manipulation. Pens, and touch. And we’re now coming back to the way things should always have been.
Make Everything a Mobile Device
How do you use this information to design better products? Simple. Just assume everything is a mobile device. Whether a handset, touchscreen tablet/computer, or switching between them, just design everything to function:
As a glanceable user interface—People are distracted—both because they are tied to information at all times and because they might be moving or otherwise interacting with the real world. Glanceability means users might look at a device’s screen or your app’s part of the screen for only a moment. Make things easy to find, group them sensibly, and do not move them around. Make text easy to read and persistent. Avoid toast messages or other disappearing information.
On the go—Ad hoc work environments have noise, crowds, and poor lighting conditions. Don’t rely on sound or color to alert the user. Glare or poor viewing angles could cause colors to disappear or even change.
With touch—Make the user interface large enough to interact with safely and effectively using touch. Touch-friendly user interfaces work fine for mouse devices and trackpads as well. Providing whitespace around touch targets ensures easier reading as well.
Read More
Learn more about how much the digital world has changed, and how you can start thinking about it for your product design. Just read the whole article at UXmatters.
https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2020/09/mobile-is-now-everything-1.php