Craig Federighi on, essentially, mobile first

I was watching John Gruber’s post-WWDC interview with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak and Federighi was explaining why Shortcuts for macOS look to be such a success:

The focus is make something that hits the right sweet spot for iOS; forces this pretty breakthrough level in simplicity.

If you’d started again [with] the next generation of automation on the Mac, you run the risk that it wouldn’t make the transition the other way to iOS. And that you’d end up with something that was not as simple as it could be.

By starting with iOS and pushing the kind of capability there, really developing something that’s very capable and yet really simple, and then taking it to Mac and then letting it spread its wings to tie into all of the different system capabilities the Mac has, I think was a really great path

This is exactly the principle of mobile first design:

1. Start with the tight constraints imposed by a small mobile device to make something very capable and yet really simple
2. When there’s the luxury of extra space on bigger screens, the interface will still be simple, easy to use, and, in most cases, accessible