Should we design for mobile by default?

Interesting argument for not rushing into designing for mobile, from Richard Millington of The Online Community Guide: When To Design For Mobile – The Online Community Guide.

He analyses the figures for mobile use in the US, and the traffic via mobile to his blog. With the figures at <10%, he figures that there’s no rush to design for mobile, and that it’s better to focus on the platform that the majority of users are using.

And that’s certainly one view – and he has evidence to back to it up.

If you think about designing online information points as if you were designing a meal, how would you start? If I invite people over for a meal, I’m not just going to cook a roast if I know that a guest is vegetarian. I’ll sort out a meal that offers a great experience for everyone, not cook a chook, and quickly add on a shop-bought nut roast as an afterthought.

So, in terms of designing for all devices, including mobile,  how about the view that:

• If 10% of folk want to access information via a device of their choice then they should be able to.
• If a disability or other reason that might limit your web access means that you are reliant on mobile, then you shouldn’t be disenfranchised from using it.
• Mobile access is often the cheapest – sometimes only – form that people can get their hands on, so they should be considered, too.

Ultimately, I guess I am thinking about the philosophical argument that, when we design information for others to read, we should start by designing for everyone, as a starting point. This is a key idea in Universal Design for Learning (UDL) (and thanks to Chrissie Butler at CORE Education for all the great conversations on this topic).

But whatever you call, it, I still think we should design for all, not just the majority, whatever the data tells us.

Thoughts?

[Image source: Wrote]

Backwards Planning

In preparation for a workshop this week on how to plan for and manage differentiated learning in the English classroom, I have thinking about the challenges of design by concept.

Erickson (2007) explores in great depth ways in which deep, cognitive learning must be deliberately planned for from a conceptualised viewpoint. For example, if you are to teach Macbeth, the ultimate conceptual goal is to have your students understand the power relationships, how ambition can be one’s downfall and so on.

In a neat synergy with my thinking, Dana Huff (huffenglish.com) has recently been blogging about backward design – explored by Wiggins and McTighe in Instruction by Design - which essentially does the same thing. She has posted some really interesting resources on the UbD wiki site; one on Macbeth lists its ultimate unit goals as:

Understandings: Students will understand that…

Shakespeare’s commentary on power, corruption, and blind ambition is still relevant to our own politics today.
Things are not always as they appear.
People have often relied on superstition and frequently still do today.
Our perceptions and interpretations are based on a variety of factors.
Literature is a comment on the human condition.

I have been trying to make connections between this kind of approach to learning, and the revised curriculum. With its focus on critical thinking and the discovery of knowledge through the learning process, it seems to me that a concept-driven approach to planning learning for our students would enhance the opportunities for us to make links beyond texts, to students’ own prior knowledge, to contexts that have meaning for them, to the wider world of which they are a part…

Planning in this way gives a coherence and meaning to a unit of work, far beyond, “We are doing this because it will help you with your NCEA essay”.

References:

Erickson, H. L. (2007). Concept-based curriculum and instruction for the thinking classroom. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.