iPhone 5 image from apple.com
Business Insider just published an article with the misleading headline Marissa Mayer Just Gave Every Yahoo Employee an iPhone 5. Every Yahoo employee worldwide is getting a new smart phone. The choices do include the Apple product mentioned in the headline, but are actually these:
- iPhone 5
- Samsung Galaxy S3
- HTC One X
- HTC EVO 4G LTE
- Nokia Lumia 920
Mayer stated the reason for these company issued phones – which are replacing Blackberries – by saying,
Ideally, we’d like our employees to have devices similar to our users, so we can think and work as the majority of our users do.
My headline for this article was a bit of an overstatement as well. (Sorry.) I don’t really think every web dev needs to work for Marissa Mayer. But I do think she’s on to an essential principle of creating for the modern web: mobile rules the experience for many people.
Her move is fairly dramatic and will emphasize to all her employees that the mobile experience should be considered in everything they do. The mobile first, responsive design notion is gaining ground in the web design world, to be sure, but a dramatic move such as Marissa’s on the part of web educators to emphasize the concept is called for as well.
In computer labs all over the world, teachers could show budding developers how to put a shiny new web site on a server. Show them how to find it in a browser. And, as a standard practice in the classroom, have them look at it in their smart phone too. Students and front end developers need to look at their web sites with devices similar to their users just like Yahoo employees.
Are any web educators out there already making like Marissa Mayer and doing this in their classrooms?
From the web design sales side we are seeing more of our clients and recommending to our clients the optimisation of their websites to mobile browsing. W are seeing in our usage statistics already that over 40% of visitors to our clients site are viewed, mobile. This figure has been rising at an exponential rate over the last 2 to 3 years and will soon be the preferted method of website surfing we believe aver the next one to two years. This move by Yahoo is the way of the future and i believe that the next wave of web developers must as you have said take this into account. From web designer employers perspective “are you experienced with mobile design and optimisation” will be one of the first questions asked at an interview. Thank you for your article.
Thanks for sharing your experience with this.