Josh Clark on going beyond mobile

This article first appeared in issue 232 of .net magazine – the world's best-selling magazine for web designers and developers.

"I have a dirty little secret," Josh Clark tells us. “I had no interest in mobile before the iPhone. It was phones pretending to be computers and doing a bad job. When the iPhone came out, it was a computer pretending to be a phone: it brought a new model of computing that was personal, ubiquitous and social – something I got really excited about. It opened up new avenues of design and information interaction we’d only been talking about for decades. Suddenly we could do it all.”

Josh Clark is the author of Tapworthy, a design guide for iPhone apps he wrote two years ago. The ideas of that book still hold true, but an important piece of thinking that’s emerged since then is his conviction that the mobile use case just doesn’t exist. “It’s something that’s slow in being acknowledged by a lot of people in the industry. We’ve inherited this set of assumptions from the early pre-iPhone era that mobile is for light, companion computing – information snacking. You have to anticipate that; it’s part of our mobile experience. But mobile is also on the couch, in the kitchen. It’s the three-hour layover at the airport where we have plenty of attention to spare. That assumption that we have to design for stunted attention spans leads to a lot of bad experiences.

“We have to provide full access to content – not necessarily the same presentation – but full access, no matter what device you’re on.”

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Tanya Combrinck

Tanya is a writer covering art, design, and visual effects. She has 16 years of experience as a magazine journalist and has written for numerous publications including ImagineFX, 3D World, 3D Artist, Computer Arts, net magazine, and Creative Bloq. For Creative Bloq, she mostly writes about digital art and VFX.