Nieman Foundation at Harvard
At Digiday, Josh Sternberg asked a number of digital publishing types what “mobile first” meant to them. Good answers from a number of them, but the answer from BuzzFeed’s Jon Steinberg (the headline of this post) stood out. (Plus a Vivian Schiller near-haiku!). Gawker CTO Media Thomas Plunkett:
At the high level, mobile-first means build where users are and where technology is going. In practice, we build features mobile-first. We simplify the product. It forces us to think about what is essential; extend features to desktop. We have a ton of work to do on the mobile-optimized payload front, but it comes down to tailoring dependencies (images, javascript, css, etc.) for mobile. It means adaptive design. We’re staying away from mobile specific templates.
Even within this small group of forward-thinking individuals, you can start to see the difference between the ones that are thinking mobile first and the ones who are acting mobile first.
