Design for Tightest Constraints First
When designing, sometimes you create variants — multiple designs to meet the same goals in different situations. Usually you begin with the “full” version, and then you redesign to produce a lesser variant. But then you end up with Travel Battleship, and nobody likes those damn things.
Some background. Lately I’ve been following @whitneyhess on Twitter, whom I found by listening an episode of the Big Web Show on 5by5. She then attended An Event Apart in Minneapolis, which is this convention that @zeldman puts on, based on the kind of things that you read on A List Apart. She listened to a talk by @lukew called Mobile First. I wasn’t there and I don’t really know the content of the talk. But, synthesizing Whitney’s tweets with my experience as a developer yields this:
Design the variant with the tightest set of constraints first. Then, the other variants will be at least as good. Instead of crippling your product on each iteration from the outside in, you can adjust and embellish from the inside out.
If you’re making a website or web application, @lukew says, do the mobile version first. Since the constraints are tighter, anything that your iPhone can do, your desktop can do too.
Reading List is an app I’m developing as a hobby. It’s on its fourth version, and I’ve mostly made incremental changes so far. I’m hammering out the rough spots on the iPhone before I extend it to other platforms. That means soliciting feedback from users, using the app myself, and lots of thinking in the shower.
But it’s the constraints that determine the details. They are steep:
- A tiny screen
- Limited memory, disk, and CPU
- Sporadic Internet access
- One and two-handed users
- Users who like portait, users who like landscape
- Users who sit, stand, walk, and dodge traffic
- Users at the bookstore, at lunch with friends, at the library
- Users with too many books for their time, patience, and memory
Moving to iPad, some of these constraints go away. On a desktop PC, they’re almost all gone. On the web, there are some new constraints, but fewer overall.
If I ported Reading List, it would not be a matter of redesigning, or of trimming features. It would be a matter of tweaking the design to suit the strengths of each platform.
New platforms are new opportunities. New design variants should be too. So if you anticipate creating variants of a design, start with the worst challenges and make something great. After that, you can’t do any worse.
