The Wastefulness of Mobile First Design

Reading Time: 2 minutes
For a few years now I have noticed a worrying trend, one that sees content become so sparse on a web page that you see one tweet or facebook post per screen height.

Before mobile first design, and the proliferation of React websites you would find pages that had twenty to thirty tweets per page. The same is true of Facebook. Now it’s barely one post per screen height. This means that you see one tweet, facebook post, instagram image and more.

I really dislike this trend because Twitter, Facebook and other content heavy websites show one bit of information at a time. You’re forced to look at content individually, before moving on to the next, and the next. We might be in a single page app world, but it’s also a single piece of content. I miss the old way of displaying content, where you could see ten to twenty articles, and choose the one that you find most interesting.

YouTube now shows 6 videos per screen height, compared to 20-30 videos at a time before. This means that if you’re browsing you’re doing so more slowly.

It seems paradoxical that a time when we worry about the energy spent on light or dark screens, we are wasting an enormous amount of power, relatively, to display just one tweet, one post, 6 videos at a time. We are wasting time and energy by designing for mobile phones, without considering that people are browsing on desktops.

It does get worse. Mobile phone screens are huge now, so when you design for mobile first you’re designing to display one tweet on an a 5.5 inch screen. We see less, in 2023 than we did in 2007. We’re wasting space.

Of course there is a clear reason for being so wasteful. It means that people see one advert or influencer post at a time. We’re guaranteed to be forced to see individual pieces of content.

We need to correct this error. We need to provide more content per page, once more. I’m using Day One to type this blog post and this use of screen space is better. We need to design websites so that we see ten more more articles once again. I’m typing this blog post in Day One and I see 30 or more lines of text.

We should see 15-20 tweets and posts per page. Even 8 would be an improvement. A post or tweet should only take up the entire screen when we select it.

And Finally

If people’s attention is measured by how little information you show on a single screen height then Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are awful. Their users are as distracted as kittens on a hike, discovering life outside of an apartment for the first time. We need to stop being so wasteful with website and content design. We need to return to using space more effectively. What is the point of having a screen in dark mode if we display one tweet per screen, before we need to scroll?