How Glitch uses inclusive design to make a better product for everyone
Expanding a bit on a Twitter thread earlier this week, I wanted to share a bit about what makes Glitch special. I also wanted to point out some lessons of inclusive design, and how designing for the margins makes a product that’s better for everyone.
The problem
Once upon a time, making the web was easy. You dashed off some HTML and used an FTP client to put it on a server. You could view source to see how something worked, and then put your own spin on it. Hosting of these resources was free from many providers.
This was the 90’s and it was a time more innocent than our own. In the years since, the web has become a complex, multi-layered beast. Viewing source can get you, at best, a fraction of the picture of why something works as it does. Building for the web requires an understanding of application frameworks, shell interfaces, and programming languages. Even for the most savvy and experienced of us, the process of building a new web application has a decent amount of yak shaving:
- Create a new server instance
- Set up a new sudo user
- Install frameworks and packages
- Check out any existing git repositories you want to use as a starting point.
