By Christian Heilmann CHAPTER 3uSefulneSS beaTS ConSiSTenCY aCRoSS bRowSeRS
Instead of attempting to give everyone the same experience, we should always find
the best way to ensure people can use what we build.
Something that adds to the obesity of the Web to a very large degree is
the misguided notion of giving every browser and every environment the
same experience. Again, as creators of the Web we know this is foolish, but
many a time we are asked to bow to this pressure by our project plans or
our managers. We need to take a stand. It’s an outdated and infuriatingly
shortsighted idea that just refuses to die. When Web development began,
we were often given print designs and asked to make them work on the
Web by any means necessary. This is how we ended up with text as graph-
ics and, later on, Flash being used for everything that needed “to meet
design specifications.”
Nowadays, we try to create beautiful, interactive and immersive mul-
timedia experiences with the tools HTML5 offers, and then make them
backwards compatible with environments lacking even the basic means
to display a video. And we create massive, Flash-like sites and hide ele-
ments that can’t be shown on a mobile screen. We still load all the content,
though, and move from large to small. When high-resolution displays
came out, we started to send over the wire huge, high-resolution images
that could never be displayed on the low-res hardware receiving them.
This does not make sense. If we want the Web to succeed — and as it
is the simplest worldwide distribution platform, we have this as a good
cause — then we have to rethink our approach and build interfaces that
are not just resized but also tailored to the context they will be displayed
in. We need to start seeing design and UX as context-dependent tasks,
and not take a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead of showing only part of
the design on small-screen devices and more on larger screens, we need to
think about what people want to do and what they can do best in a certain
environment.