Perspective: Progressive Enhancement & Device Detection

The web and the devices which access it’s content are evolving every day. A common and unfortunate practice used during the planning and development of a web application is to only support the capabilities of web browsers that date back to around 2000. This ideology is formed from the notion that the content in you’re application or website needs to be seen the same way for anyone trying to access it no matter the platform it’s being viewed on. Doing this usually ends up with a broken product on dated or (and especially) mobile platforms. The birth of smartphones, advanced modern browsers, and various tablets has forced developers and businesses to rethink the web canvas. This new way of thinking is called Progressive Enhancement; a term coined from Steven Champeon.

In a Nutshell

The idea of Progressive Enhancement is simple; allow the user interface to degrade and adapt gracefully to the device’s platform it is being displayed on. With this practice, we as developers and designers can take advantage of the cutting edge technologies while falling back to tried and true techniques that allow for a very useable interface in even the oldest browsers. In some cases the device can be detected so that it’s unique features and screen resolution can be utilized.

Device Detection

The idea of Progressive Enhancement does not only extend to the desktop web browser. The Mobile Web has had an extremely rapid growth in usage. In the span of 3 years AT&T traffic has had a 4,932% mobile data increase and is consistently growing daily. This data allows us to believe that optimizing applications and websites for mobile devices is very important and something we recommend to all clients (this website included, check it out on your iPhone!). The overall strategy for successfully optimizing applications for the mobile web is to narrow down the visuals as much as possible and simply display what matters the most; content. We are firm believers in keeping it simple, and that’s exactly what makes the mobile platform beautiful and intuitive.

Conclusion

The constant change and growth in technology should not be thought as a limitation to your product, but as an advantage to reach a wider audience. With the right planning, development techniques and content organization strategies this can be successfully achieved and we’re here to walk you through the process. We are dedicated to staying on top of the wave and providing the most effective and rich ways to reach your audience.