Organizing Mobile

I will sometimes do QC testing across various screen sizes before the marketing company I intern for sets the sites live. I am usually looking for words that are cut off, inactive buttons or spelling mistakes. I usually start with my phone and then work my to a tablet and computer, each time usually reading more content. Before this type of task being assigned to me, I hadn’t thought about how the content displayed on a phone should be different from a computer screen. I noticed when I surfed the web on my phone that some sites were more user-friendly than others but hadn’t thought about the process behind determining what content should be shared on the mobile and what should appear when being viewed on a bigger screen. Yes the display is different, which is fun to see, but the strategic differences in content choice is most interesting. As this article states, mobile users usually have very specific reason for interaction – whether it’s to lookup or find, explore or play, checkin or create – they want to be easily directed without having to read a whole lot on their small screen or navigate through a confusing web of dead ends. Something that I really hadn’t realized or thought about is how we can’t just design a responsive site – we also have to design content differently depending on the screen.