Intro to Adaptive Web Design

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.

Note: If you plan to take participate in Aaron’s workshop, Adaptive Web Design: Layer by Layer, you will want to attend this session or read the first chapter of Aaron’s book (free download) in order to get the necessary background.

What You'll Learn:

• What progressive enhancement is
• How it’s different from ‘graceful degradation’
• How progressive enhancement leads to a better user experience