Talking PWAs at UX Camp Brighton

Next month I'm running a short session at UX Camp Brighton introducing and discussing progressive web apps (PWAs).

This will be a collaborative session in which we plan out and discuss ways to improve the user experience of existing websites through progressively enhancing them to become comparable to a native app, or even, better than a native app!

I'll be introducing some common characteristics of PWAs such as:

• Availabilty offline/poor quality connections (utilising ServiceWorkers)
• Discoverability in search engines (via Manifest)
• Re-engagement through push notifications
• Installability adding a home screen icon

A few topics of conversation that might arise from this process could include:

• To what extent do the UI features of your PWA match those of the user's platform versus a separately designed UI?
• Should you convert the entire website into a PWA or keep a separate version to serve desktop users?
• What UI features of native apps would you like ...and could feasibly incorporate into a PWA?

I hope from this session that together we learn what benefits, limitations and challenges there are in designing PWAs.

Reference + reading

• A fantastic source for inspiration with an ever growing list of PWAs now live PWA Rocks
• Inspiration and research for this session, a post written by Jason Grigsby, Designing Responsive Progressive Web Apps