Taking a Mobile First Strategy to Web Development

It is no news that the number of mobile phones users surpassed the desktop users way back in 2013 and the gap has been consistently widening ever since. But if you peek into the development side, you will notice that it is still broadly categorized into two parts- mobile application development and web app development. This may initially seem a fair division, but consider this- more than half of the traffic of web is actually driven by mobile devices. This means that the success of web development, which is generally regarded as development for desktop, now relies more on mobile devices than their intended platform.

To better manage such inconsistency and align the resources proportional to the value they deliver, the mobile-first strategy is the new addition to web development procedure. It's not that businesses today ignore mobile platforms during their web development but the approach they take is highly inefficient. For instance, most of them first develop a full-scale web application for desktops with rich user experience and extensive set of features. Then they proceed to strip down certain features and even compromise on user experience to create a separate mobile website. This creates two problems-

1. Mobile users are left with an inferior product;
2. The businesses have to manage two websites.

The mobile-first strategy completely reverses the process and not only solves these problems but also lends many additional perks.

To start with, the development procedure is first carried out keeping mobile platforms in mind and every essential feature and rich experience is first integrated. Then the same application is scaled up to include additional features, if any, with subtle interface changes. This approach optimally exploits the benefits of responsive design that apart from offing uniform experience to all users, also requires fewer efforts and resources for future maintenance.

As mentioned, these two positive aspects are a part of the larger set of benefits that mobile-first strategy has to offer. Apart from the interface, there is a whole range of new features and technologies waiting to be explored.

Take location for instance, since mobile devices can provide accurate user location, the businesses can create and tailor their services that exploit such data to offer more personalized and relevant services. To put it simply, what mobile-first strategy does is that it keeps your solutions at the leading edge of technologies and ‘not playing catch up.’

Below are some of the benefits you can leverage by adopting mobile-first strategy:

Payments

People do not use their mobile phones only to access social media, search queries or surf the web, but a sizable portion of shopping is also done through mobile platforms. And while card payments and other traditional transaction methods work very well on desktop applications, allowing mobile wallet payment seems more natural for shoppers on mobile platforms. So, if you are taking the mobile-first strategy that would involve transactions, this is the first thing you need to take care of.

Support

Mobile platforms are also much convenient to both avail and offer support. While traditional methods involve emails, chat support is much more efficient for mobiles.

Power of AI

Since mobile devices now command much more engagement than traditional systems, and they also provide access to much more relevant data about users, they are the optimum platform to deploy artificial intelligence. Though web applications can possibly match the capabilities of mobile apps in this domain, even the slightest of features like customized menu depending on their location can give your application an edge over competitors.

Sahil Miglani is a Content Specialist at Konstant Infosolutions, a leading app development company. He loves to learn about latest technology trends.