Hi everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm here today with Luke Robleski. He's currently a product director at Google, which acquired one of his startups. Previously, he had another startup acquired by Twitter. He worked at Yahoo. He's had quite a diverse background and basically as an expert on all things designed for mobile. I'm going to try to live up to that, but we'll see. Joining him for this conversation today is our partner, Connie Chan, who is an expert on many

things, but especially covers China.

So I thought today we could actually just launch right in and talk about what it means,

you know, to have this concept of mobile first design, which I think was the title of your

book.

Yeah.

So just a little background on where that came from. I was at Yahoo at the time,

and Flickr put out this iPhone-only website, because back then you couldn't actually make

native apps for the iPhone. You had to make these web sort of pseudo apps. And what I was

struck by was like how boiled down to the essence that product experience was.

If you looked at Flickr on the desktop, there was like four drop down menus, each with like

20 items in there.

And then there was like submenus.

They were talking about like 60 something things.

And when it came time to build the mobile experience for Flickr, we got it down to six things.

And it was like the things that people do the most, and this is what the core essence of

the product was.

And it stuck in my head that the small screen and the constraints really forced you to focus.

And at the same time, we had stuff where we could use your location, where it was before

we knew with 99% accuracy you were in the U.S. yay.

Now we knew down to like 50 meters where you were. So there's all this new opportunity. And that got me thinking these constraints that focus you in these opportunities that open up new things you can do. You got to a very different place when you did that than if you started with the desktop website, traditional view of things. It's almost the opposite of what playing out in China. Because when you describe and show some of these apps, Connie, it's almost,

instead of stripping it down to the basics, it's almost crowding everything possible into a small

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