A List Apart has a great piece called For a Future-Friendly Web by Brad Frost (@brad_frost) that I highly recommend reading.
Some highlights:
Over the years, we’ve become the virtual equivalent of hoarders, tacking on content and features without stopping to clean house. As a result, sites and services have become obese and sluggish to adapt to this fast-moving landscape. Users bear the burden as they slog through slow page loads, awkwardly huge navigation, sidebar clutter, and a kitchen sink full of half-baked features.
Using the phrase hoarders here is the best characterization of that unique problem (a.k.a. the Frankenapp) I’ve heard. It really captures the psychological attachment we product people have to features and the effect they have on users.
Whether we’re prepared or not, people are already interacting with our creations on devices that in many cases didn’t exist when we originally built them. This realization led mobile interaction designer Josh Clark to proclaim that we need to think of our content like water that can be poured into a multitude of containers.
Another great metaphor here, encouraging designers to think of content as water, very applicable to the tenants of responsive web design and mobile-first thinking.
Anyway, hit the link; it’s well worth the read, even if you’re not a designer.
