Your Privacy

This site uses cookies to enhance your browsing experience and deliver personalized content. By continuing to use this site, you consent to our use of cookies.
COOKIE POLICY

Skip to main content

Are you designing for Unicorns?

Are you designing for Unicorns?
Back to insights

It seems as if technology continues to become more innovative by the hour. Most computer products and gadgets are smarter and as small today as they have ever been. The days of clunky desktop computers and large hard drive boxes are dying quickly. If you find yourself only browsing the internet on your desktop PC throughout the week, congratulations…You’re becoming a unicorn. According to several studies and reports, people are using their desktop systems to browse the Internet less and less.

Consider the impact on development teams and processes.  If you are designing a new site and primarily considering the desktop experience, you are missing a large component of your audience who may only experience your site via mobile.

Internet usage during 2016 on desktop computers has been below the recorded amounts for the same time period last year. The decrease in usage directly correlates with a large spike in mobile Internet browsing. Mobile devices alone seem to be the preferred method of online browsing for people nowadays. Mobile capabilities can increase the amount of time that people spend online, but doesn’t cannibalize the amount of time people spend on their desktops browsing the Internet.

The “Millennials” age group is a large demographic and market for the tech industry and has a big impact on the drop in these figures. A small percentage of them have ever even seen a desktop PC at all, much less own one. A large percentage of them are users of mobile devices, whether they use their mobile devices exclusively or consider themselves multi-platform users.

It’s tough to believe that Internet browsing on desktop PC’s will ever become obsolete. With the evolution of technology, it’s hard to imagine what the future holds in that regard. One thing is certain, the demand for Mobile Application Developers will continue to increase and we all must continue to reevaluate our strategy for building and maintaining desktop web applications.

Don’t design just for unicorns, make sure you have a comprehensive approach to multi-platform design.

Digging In

  • Software Engineering

    Creating Reusable Code Templates to Reduce Client Project Startup Time

    In consulting, one of the least visible but most expensive phases of a project is the beginning. Teams can spend days or weeks setting up repositories, agreeing on structure, wiring basic infrastructure, and solving problems that have already been solved many times before. Code templates are a practical way to reduce overhead while improving consistency. […]

  • Software Engineering

    Player Three Has Entered the Game: How AI Is Finally Bridging the Divide Between Design and Engineering

    As AI begins to become more prominent in our day-to-day lives, I find myself in a unique position. As a practicing software engineer and UI/UX designer, I am genuinely happy to see the introduction of AI tools begin to take shape in our industry. But more importantly, I am happy to start seeing the effects it is having on what has historically been a pretty challenging relationship: the […]

  • Software Engineering

    The Disappearing Middle of Software Work: Why the Bookends – Strategy & Impact – Matter Most Now

    Here’s a question nobody in enterprise software wants to sit with: what happens to the middle? Not the middle of the org chart. The middle of the work. The vast, expensive layer of effort that has defined enterprise software delivery for thirty years—translating what the business wants into working code. The requirements-to-implementation pipeline. The “build phase.” […]

  • Software Engineering

    Zero-Code Telemetry with OpenTelemetry’s OBI

    Full distributed tracing and exception capture for any application — without writing a single line of instrumentation code. View the source code on GitHub → The Premise Observability is essential for understanding what’s happening inside your services, but instrumenting an application by hand — adding trace spans, logging calls, and metric counters throughout your codebase […]

  • Software Engineering

    Building a Consultant in the Trenches: How Playing Offensive Line Shaped My Consulting Career

    People often ask me the same question when they find out that I played college football: “Do you miss it?” On the surface, it’s a bad question with an obvious answer. Yes. However, if I give myself a minute to sit with that question, the answer is more nuanced. Yes, I miss playing football, but […]

  • Software Engineering

    Modernization That Sticks: Why Adoption, Not Just Architecture, Drives Success

    Modernizing a legacy sales platform in a large enterprise isn’t just a technical challenge, it’s a cultural and operational one. On a recent project with a Fortune 500 organization, several past attempts to replace the aging ERP system failed. Why? Because those efforts treated modernization as a software delivery exercise, not an adoption journey. When […]