Mobile First and Foundation 4

Article: Source

The other day, our friend and advisor Luke Wroblewski stopped by for a chat with Jonathan, Chris and myself. We’re in the midst of working on the finishing touches to Foundation 4, polishing the chrome and making her seaworthy. And Luke’s visit was a pleasant distraction.

Luke turned us on to Mobile First and his work has greatly influenced how we’re approaching Foundation 4, which we talked about during our conversation with him. While we talked, Chris was furiously pounding away on the code — he can pat his head and rub his tummy at the same time.

Some good stuff was said and we didn’t want you to feel left out. Here are a few snippets from our conversation:

Mobile First and Responsive

Luke: Step out to any street corner and people have their face in a smartphone. That trend doesn’t show any signs of letting up. In fact, it’s constantly growing. I think the whole idea of Mobile First is reaching all these audiences anywhere and everywhere. ‘Cause you can pull out your mobile device anywhere and everywhere. All the kinds of things people are doing are all the kinds of things we used to make websites about — buying things, looking up information, taking to their friends, killing some downtime, anything and everything is now mobile.

Mobile First, in a responsive paradigm, for me, forces you to focus on the stuff that matters, front and center. So what you see is people designing things desktop site down. What you end up is that they cram everything and the kitchen sink into the site. They make it huge and bloated in terms of performance, in terms of content, in terms of features. What they end up doing to get down to a mobile view, they stack everything into one long list. It’s huge and it takes forever. It basically creates a crappy mobile experience.

Shifting Paradigms

Jonathan: We’re doing something different with 4 than we did with 3. When we did 3, we said “2 is dead.” With 4, 3 is still there. Because even with our clients, it’s going to be another year of us beating the drum as much as we can to get our clients to sign up doing things Mobile First.

The nice thing about Foundation is we’ve always built Foundation so that it’s probably six months to a year ahead of where we are.

Luke: That’s an interesting philosophy. Sorta building ahead of where your clients are and bring them there over time and learn the lessons.

Jonathan: We have to drag them kicking and screaming. On the way, we get there ourselves.

Luke: I talk with a lot of companies around this sort of stuff. All of them know the terms. They know responsive web design. They know Mobile First. They know that they should be acting on it. But what’s really holding them back is their existing properties and processes. To be clear, what makes people uncomfortable is that it’s a different way of working. It’s different than what we’ve been doing for 20-plus years.

My counter argument to that is that it’s a pretty different web, pretty different world than it was 20 years ago. If you’re expecting things that worked for you 20 years ago work today, I don’t think that’s a viable way to run a business.

The other argument that I hear is that it costs more, takes more time. My response is: OK, so you can keep making a desktop and laptop site and just not have all these new audiences on tablets, on smartphones and all that stuff. If you want more usage on these more devices, more online time, you have to invest a little more. It’s not going to come for free. Nobody just comes hands you a pile of money or customers if you do nothing.

Jonathan: At some point, it’s just going to be the cost of doing business.

Forward the (Mobile First) Foundation

Jonathan: Luke got us turned on to the whole thing. We had lunch … how long ago?

Chris: Back in November … maybe September …

Jonathan: About six months ago, we had lunch with Luke. And Luke was like beating us over the head with “Foundation ought to go Mobile First”. And we talked about it before but that was the first conversation where we got to the end of it and was “like OK that makes some sense.”

Chris: He made us look at Zepto too.

Jonathan: He turned us on to Zepto. So that was a good conversation. I think it was a confluence of — he made a pretty good case for it. Honestly, I think, at last to me, the best case so far. Since we’re doing things mobile first, technically, we have the capability with Foundation to build experiences that don’t suck for like really old phones and feature phones. We’re not going to inherit all the styles we try to cram in there. It will actually be a mobile site.

So we can broaden our appeal by simplifying what we present for devices like that or older browsers like IE6 or 7. You could reasonably say you can build a site for IE6 using Foundation 4, which wasn’t the case with Foundation 3. That was a win.

Luke: To build on that. The promise of tomorrow, for me, is more and more multi-device web. There’s no shortage of devices.

Toward Tomorrow and Beyond

Luke: I think that it’s encouraging to see that more and more people are understanding this opportunity and jumping on it. You guys, potential working with clients, using Foundation — it’s a great vehicle understanding kind of what they’re inevitably going to have to do on the Web. I appreciate that you guys are moving it forward and pushing it past where the clients are right now. In the end, I think it’s going to be good for you and for them. It’s not a negative thing for me. I do agree that change is hard. It’s inevitable to deny that the mobile thing is here. And you’re going to have to deal with it. And eventually deal with it in a good way.

Jonathan: Pretty stoked to where Foundation is going. We wouldn’t have taken the direction we did if you hadn’t badger us for the last year and a half.