Almost every next customer interaction is being scheduled on a smart device – mobile phone or a tablet, which ensures that the businesses confirm their brand experience and customers are more than inclined to incorporate it into their routine, and finally, make a purchase.
Consumers crave for (1) speed, (2) performance, (3) search output, (4) customer experience. For businesses to comply with the mobile-first digital transformation strategy, they need to provide a mix of all of these. This type of mobility-independence to make use of the device for any to every task can swiftly transform the business. Let’s have a look at how it is applicable at every stage of the software development lifecycle.
Mobile First Advantages
In addition to driving the idea of digital transformation to succeed, the mobile-first strategy has more to offer:
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- You have the option to carry your business anywhere.
- You can stay ahead of your competitors.
- Mobility eases cc
- Mobile devices help to know a business better as later tries convincing their customers in the language that pleases them.
Creating a Mobile-First Strategy
If a business decides to qualify for a mobile-first environment, they need to ensure customer experience in addition to being responsive. Mobile-First Design and Development refers to handling desktop designs first, proceeding towards addressing mobile design head-on, still working towards the desktop version as the project progresses. It is the ability to scale the technology to achieve the same results on a mobile platform that a user experiences on a website. It is the need to prioritize the features, capabilities that fit the mobile platform and progressively enhance the requirements for desktop. The features are added on to the existing ones and the collective is to make it fit the requirements for your platform. It opens up the opportunity to be creative and engage the audience subsequently.
Why is it Important to Implement a Mobile-First Approach?
Mobile brings in the mobility to work from anywhere, to shop from anywhere, to remain entertained, to check on with your doctor, to learn lessons, to and embed many more things in the daily routine. In addition to making it extra easy, mobile brings in the effectiveness and saves in lots of time and effort. Instagram is a premier example of following a mobile-first approach. The application that was launched to share images with friends, apply some filters to make them attractive has traversed through nine years and enabled its users to upload full-size images, videos, stories, apply geofilters, geotags, hashtags, emojis, etc. It can now handle community, collaborations, sharing, bookmarking, location searches, direct messages etc. It now utilizes almost all the features of the mobile platform and progressing for better with a whiteboard to perform common actions like fetching a photo from the server and saving a lot of time. This clarity and efficiency in performing actions give it an edge above the rest.
Conclusive: What it takes to Implement a Mobile-First Development?
Businesses need to follow some basic steps to make their applications mobile-first:
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- Detailing the scope of the work, create a prototype, vision board – to help ensure that prudency of the idea.
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- Technical Assessment – After checking the feasibility of the project, it is important to estimate the data fetch, the APIs, the platform and all other systematic elements to form the foundation of the application.
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- These basic steps are followed by usual SDLC steps to develop a mobile application, like: Design, Prototype, Development
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- Testing – This stage prolongs with monitoring the pre-production environments to offer a variety of benefits like giving insights to your app performance over a while, understanding of the viability of the key user behaviour, driving steady traffic to test the environment, understand the test environment. This gives the necessary success in the releases as these designs can be leverages as a starting point for the desktop platform.
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- Deployment and Monitoring – Once the application passes all the tests, it can be deployed with a condition to keep monitoring it on regular basis to stay on top of the game. This provides immediate insights into performance, availability, and functional correctness.
Thus mobile-first design culminates responsive web design (RWD), progressive advancement, graceful degradation (a web design with the most advanced version). To implement all these features, application development companies need to use a responsive framework, prioritize the user experience, and bring some speed to the process by installing plugins, installing a CDN, optimizing images and switching to HTTPS. An interactive user interface with simple navigation cannot be overlooked either.