Behaviour change and opting for smaller digital screens

I recently switched from a normal size iPhone 12 to the smaller iPhone 13 mini and it has me reminiscing about hardware that was built in the early 2010’s. This change may have many people scratching their heads as it’s not often that we downgrade on screen size. Over the last 10 years the drive has been to squash as much screen real estate into new mobile devices as possible, if I am honest I think it has lead the quality of great interface design to get lost in the noise as we have had too much screen space to play with. Less is more sometimes.

For some context. the iPhone 13 mini has a height of 131.5 mm and a width: 64.2 mm — it’s roughly the same size as the iPhone 5.

So why did I do it?

Working across the broader tech landscape I am fascinated by the intersection of design, behaviour, and human communication. Tech is a massive part of our lives and I spend a lot of time thinking about how we interact with our devices which have become our extended limbs.

Operating on a smaller device means that the software has a greater influence on the experience that we have and this offers me different thinking points when I ponder behavioural design.

Let’s see how this goes. I’ll write a longer piece with some other thoughts linked to this soon.