Progressive Enhancement & Mobile

A presentation at HOW Interactive Design Conference West 2012 in in San Francisco, CA, USA by Aaron Gustafson

For years, designers and developers have griped about the difficulties they encountered in supporting the numerous desktop browsers out there, but mobile is even more fragmented. Phones, tablets, media players, video game systems—each device (and in some cases each browser on each device) has its own dimensions, quirks and capabilities. It can make your brain hurt just thinking about it.

Thankfully, going mobile doesn’t have to be a painful experience. In this session, Aaron Gustafson will introduce you to the concept of progressive enhancement and demonstrate why it is the way forward for web design, especially on mobile devices. In the course of his talk, he’ll walk you through progressive enhancement’s layered approach and show you how the latest techniques—mobile first, responsive design, and adaptive UI—fit in to the process. Along the way, he’ll show you tons of examples and give you lots of great ideas you can put to use in your own projects.

Resources

The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.