Good Day. Apple shipped a telephone a few weeks ago, and I have not stopped thinking about it since. I am two years into this work, and I am quite certain I have just watched the ground move under all of us. It is the most exciting thing to happen to my trade since I entered it.
Here is what thrilled me. It renders real websites. Not the stripped, grey, text-only mobile pages we have all been grudgingly making, but the actual site, the one I designed for a monitor, sitting in the palm of a hand, and you pinch it with two fingers to bring it close. The web has come off the desk, and I do not think the trade has fully grasped yet what an opening that is.
Every site I have ever built quietly assumes a person seated at a desk, with a mouse and a wide screen and a little patience. Every one of those assumptions just became optional, and I find that liberating rather than daunting. The screen is now four inches across. The mouse is a thumb. The patience is gone, because this person is standing in a line or on a bus, deciding in seconds. That is not a problem to fear. That is a cleaner, more honest constraint to design into.
We do not have a name yet for how to design for this, and I love that we do not. The clever people are already talking about building small web apps that feel like they belong to the device, and I intend to be among the first to try. The old comfort, it looks fine on my monitor, quietly stopped being good enough this summer, and that is precisely the kind of moment a designer should run toward, not away from.
My instinct, and I trust it, is that this rewards restraint, which happens to be exactly where my whole craft is already heading. A small screen punishes clutter instantly. It has no room for the ten things we usually pile at the top of a page. It forces the one question I build everything around: what is the single thing this person came to do? The desk let us dodge that question for years. The phone makes it the entire job, and I could not be happier about it.
I would far rather be early and right than late and safe, so I am going to start designing as though the small screen is the real screen and the desk is the luxury. I suspect that before very long that will simply be the work, and I intend to have been building it since the first summer.
Two years ago I was printing a racetrack at the City Centre Airport, learning what it means to make something at full speed and get it right the first time. Today I am holding a sheet of glass with an entire website living inside it. The trade is accelerating, and I mean to be at the very front of it.
Jonathan Ellis · Edmonton · July 2007