The best job we can do is to be invisible

-By Dennis Harry
As a Digital UX (User Experience) and UI (User Interface) Designer, my challenge is to best express a brand or personality through web design. Part of the challenge is working out how this can be maintained from the desktop website through to a mobile version without interfering with the users experience in any way.

The following are my four foundation principles that inform my approach to content strategy and design for web and mobile.

• You have no control over how people visit your website. We have a responsibility to ensure we deliver a great experience to the user, no matter the device or platform they choose to use.

• Providing a consistent experience across the desktop web and mobile web should be the foundational goal. Content parity is too often ill considered and we fall into the thinking that mobile should be the “lite” version, offering a subset of content and features. I believe mobile content should never be made different just for the sake of being different.

• Unless your experience is built around a great idea, it will flop. It’s not a strategy if you can’t maintain it. Lots of great ideas fail in the execution, because no one took into consideration the needs of the people who will have to maintain the site.

• Simplification of GUI (Graphical User interface) and design on both the web and mobile is very important. Less is more. It is our job to ensure the content is easily digestible using a simple clear layout and that the brand values are conveyed in an unobtrusive yet engaging manner.

In this day and age, mobile and tablets have quite naturally and irrevocably become ancillary to our existence and the necessity for brands to be able to communicate effectively via this medium is very quickly becoming paramount.

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