New Perspectives On Web Design

By Aaron Gustafson CHAPTER 7

Progressive enhancement keeps the design open to the possibilities of sexiness

in opportune contexts, rather than starting with the “whole” experience that

must be compromised.^2

Brick by Brick, Row by Row
We don’t know what the future has in store for us, but we know that what
has worked in the past will work in the future. That’s the promise of the
Web: future-friendliness^3. Embracing the past — real links, forms that
submit to an action page, body elements brimming with actual content —
doesn’t hold us back: it provides us with a solid foundation to build even
more incredible experiences.
When people get excited thinking about a Web interface, they are often
getting excited about some fancy animation effect or dynamic widget. I
have no problem with that. As designers — of content, data, pixels, interac-
tions or code — we should be excited about how we help people accomplish
what they set out to do. But often, we get caught up in trends, tactics and
technology — the things we think are cool, fun, interesting, or likely to
garner us some industry attention — and we lose sight of our users and
their needs.

I’ve been amazed at how often those outside the discipline of design assume

that what designers do is decoration—likely because so much bad design sim-

ply is decoration. Good design isn’t. Good design is problem solving.

— Jeffrey Veen, The Art and Science of Web Design

There’s nothing wrong with a slick interface for folks with the latest and
greatest browsers as long as we consider what the experience looks like
for someone without access to that technology. It’s tempting to focus on
building the flashy version and then go back to patch it to work reasonably

2 Ben Hoh, “From degradation to enhancement”: http://smashed.by/redesigning-society, Jan 30, 2012.
3 http://futurefriend.ly/