New York City welcomes Webvisions this week, a 3-day conference to explore the future of design, content creation, user experience and business strategy. Webvisions kicked off yesterday with a series of workshops covering topics from building HTML5 games to Adaptive Web Design. Conference goers ranged from hard-core developers to visual designers and the workshops seemed to offer something for everyone.
Three morning workshops held simultaneously initiated the conference. Aaron Gustafson led Adaptive Web Design, guiding us through different ways to think about how a site works in a variety of browsers, on a range of devices.
Small teams set out to define the information hierarchy with a single content set on four different devices: an iPhone, a 7" tablet, a 10" tablet, and a desktop computer. Gustafson questioned our placement navigation on a mobile device, asking, "Would it be better for the user if the nav was as the bottom of the page, after they looked at all the content and are ready to move to another area?"
Gustafson introduced us to Progressive Enhancement (PE), a methodology that encourages web developers to tackle issues based on each user-agent. PE follows the principle of starting with a strong default foundation and if a user-agent can handle it, the developer can add enhancements to improve the experience.
Gustafson is passionate about about this, "Progressive Enhancement isn't about browsers. Browsers and technology come and go. You have to think about your users," he says.