It’s difficult to predict how users will access your designs and your content. More and more, people are connecting to the internet through some sort of mobile device. Using the latest advances in HTML and CSS can leave aspects of your site incompatible with some browsers. How do you ensure that you’re providing a good experience to your users over a broad spectrum of scenarios?
Aaron Gustafson, author of Adaptive Web Design, believes that progressive enhancement can help. He says that progressive enhancement is a great way to get designers to think about the user first. As he states in the podcast, “the best browser is the one you have with you… so why are you making it impossible for me to do something super simple?”
Approaching your designs in this way, you avoid putting technical restrictions on your users. You end up delivering a rich experience appropriate to them in their context. You can employ CSS3 and JavaScript to create a robust experience for those who have capable browsers. But you can also remain accessible and able to perform on older browsers or less capable devices.
In this podcast, Aaron and Jared Spool discuss adaptive web design in more depth. It’s a small taste of the daylong workshop Aaron will be presenting at the User Interface 17 conference in Boston, November 5-7, 2012. Learn more about UI17 at uiconf.com.
As always, we love to hear what you’re thinking. Share your thoughts in our comments section.