I attended the AIGA event last night at the Pavilion to hear from Jamey Erickson, owner & creative director of Sevnthsin. He shared some great insights on how to tailor user experiences on the web. Focusing mostly on mobile, we where shown some of his current & upcoming projects to illustrate their strategies.

Erickson explained that knowing your audience before working on a website or app is key, and we couldn’t agree more. The gap between the tech savvy user and the average user is closing fast. I almost fell off my chair a few years back when I received a Facebook friend invite from my mother. Smart phones are becoming more and more prevalent in our society, we’re quickly realizing we can’t live without them.

Designing for mobile first was another concept that Erickson highlighted. In some ways, the mobile experience forces us to think in minimalistic terms.  When you are limited to a smaller form factor, those limitations can help build innovative interfaces (say that five times fast). With mobile, less, truly is more.

One of the ways to design for mobile is to use responsive web design. To be responsive, a website needs to shift it’s elements around to handle different platforms and browser sizes. For example, you’ll most likely see the latest stories or a list of categories in a side bar when viewing a news site on a desktop or laptop. This is great, when you have the screen real-estate. Those elements should disappear when you downsize to a smaller device and the articles themselves will be the only content viewable.

Tablets and mobile phones are invading our world. Yesterday, was definitely the time to start supporting a mobile market experience.