PWAs just work better than your typical mobile site. Period.
But bear in mind:
Maybe simply because the “A” in PWA stands for “app,” too much discussion around PWAs focuses on comparing and contrasting to native mobile applications. We believe this comparison (and the accompanying discussion) is misguided.
When I liveblogged Jason’s talk at An Event Apart in Chicago, I included this bit of reporting:
Jason proceeds to relate a long and involved story about buying burritos online from Chipotle.
Well, here is that story. It’s a good one, with some practical takeaways (if you’ll pardon the pun):
- Use HTML5 input features
- Support autofill
- Make autofill part of your test plans
Six UX lessons from game design:
- Story vs Narrative (Think in terms of story arcs)
- Games are fractal (Break up the journey from big to small to tiny)
- Learning loop (figure out your core mechanic)
- Affordances (Prompt for known loops)
- Hintiness (Move to new loops)
- Pacing (Be sure to start here)
An interesting proposal to allow websites to detect certain SMS messages. The UX implications are fascinating.
If you treat data as a constraint in your design and development process, you’ll likely be able to brainstorm a large number of different ways to keep data usage to a minimum while still providing an excellent experience. Doing less doesn’t mean it has to feel broken.
Use a toggle switch if you are:
- Applying a system state, not a contextual one
- Presenting binary options, not opposing ones
- Activating a state, not performing an action
- Obey the Law of Locality
- ABD: Anything But Dropdowns
- Pass the Squint Test
- Teach by example
The test results are in:
During our testing “Install App” banners were the direct and sole cause of several abandonments of some of the world’s largest e-commerce websites.
Read on for details…
This is an excellent UX improvement in Chrome. For sites like The Session, where page loads are blazingly fast, this really makes them feel like single page apps.
Our goal with this work was for navigations in Chrome between two pages that are of the same origin to be seamless and thus deliver a fast default navigation experience with no flashes of white/solid-color background between old and new content.
This is exactly the kind of area where browsers can innovate and compete on the UX of the browser itself, rather than trying to compete on proprietary additions to what’s being rendered.
1,841 instances of dark patterns on ecommerce sites, in the categories of sneaking, urgency, misdirection, social proof, scarcity, obstruction, and forced action. You can browse this overview, read the paper, or look at the raw data.
We conducted a large-scale study, analyzing ~53K product pages from ~11K shopping websites to characterize and quantify the prevalence of dark patterns.
Some ideas for interface elements that prompt progressive web app users to add the website to their home screen.
A very handy collection of design exercises as used by 18F. There’s a lot of crossover here with the Clearleft toolbox.
A collection of tools to bring human-centered design into your project.
These methods are categorised by:
- Discover
- Decide
- Make
- Validate
- Fundamentals
When we hide content, there’s a greater risk the user won’t see it. There’s a higher reliance on digital literacy and it’s generally more labour intensive for the user.
Worse still, sometimes we kill off essential content.
I’m so, so happy that Trys has joined us at Clearleft!
Here, he recounts his first day, which just happened to coincide with an introductory UX workshop that went really well.
A handy browser extension for Chrome and Firefox:
“Hello, Goodbye” blocks every chat or helpdesk pop up in your browser.
I like Tim’s definition here:
A performance budget is a clearly defined limit on one or more performance metrics that the team agrees not to exceed, and that is used to guide design and development.
And I agree about the four attributes required for a performance budget to succeed. It must be:
- Concrete
- Meaningful
- Integrated
- Enforceable
The point is not to let the performance budget try to stand on its own, somewhere hidden in company documentation collecting dust. You need to be proactive about making the budget become a part of your everyday work.
- Have a dedicated page for login
- Expose all required fields
- Keep all fields on one page
- Don’t get fancy
When in doubt, label your icons.
When not in doubt, you probably should be.
It’s our job as designers to bring clarity back to the digital canvas by crafting reading experiences that put readers first.
This is an excellent case study!
The technical details are there if you want them, but far more important is consideration that went into every interaction. Every technical decision has a well thought out justification.