Manifest Destiny
Are Progressive Web Application Destined to Expand Across Our Online Experiences?
By Anthony Topper and Ryan Compton
Progressive Web applications seem to offer a promise. A promise that they can encourage users to engage with our Web products more often.
A key factor of engagement is performance. Progressive Web applications, PWAs, contain methods for speeding up your mobile Web presence. And along with AMP can make for highly-performant experiences. On Android, they offer us the ability to encourage users to bookmark our sites through “Add to Home screen” banners.
Perhaps equally as important, PWAs allow us to build a more native-like experience using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS skills. And like Android Instant Apps, they can do this without requiring users to visit an app store and go through an install process.
There currently is already a good amount of knowledge around PWAs, but we still have many questions.
- Is this rapidly evolving set of technologies going to take off? When? And to what degree?
- When will our user’s browsers support all the best PWA features?
- What insights do we have that will determine how much effort to invest in progressive Web application methods and features?
- Where and when do we focus our efforts?
The way to answer these questions is by first attempting to answer this question:
Which components of progressive Web apps offer an improvement for our users?
Let’s begin trying to answer this question.
Socrates: “The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms”.
What is a progressive Web application?
The term progressive Web application has been around for some time now. There hasn’t been complete agreement on the definition either. This disagreement can be seen in answers to questions like, “What is progressive Web app solution for iOS?”
But its meaning seems to be becoming more discretely defined. The PWA checklist is an attempt to more thoroughly define the term progressive Web app. Another example of the evolution of PWA technology is the Web App Manifest. The W3c describes a Web App Manifest as “a JSON-based manifest file that provides developers with a centralized place to put metadata associated with a web application”. During much of 2017 the W3c iterated and refined the Web App Manifest W3C Working Draft.
In addition to Web manifests, the Service Worker API in JavaScript is a major piece to the PWA puzzle. And the Service Worker API is finally being added to WebKit for iOS, after being in Chrome on Android for some time now. A Service Worker offers ways for the browser to facilitate several native-like features. More on this later in our investigation.
So some new tech is out there for technologists to begin brain storming and crafting new experiences. Who’s done something with it so far? There is a compelling story about Flipkart, that Google is putting forth, that touts a “greater conversion rate” among PWA users. Twitter has turned their mobile website into a PWA experience they’ve dubbed, “Twitter Lite”. There are a lot more. PWA.rocks is a nice place to check out some more examples.
There are of course organizations that may be able to replace their native apps entirely. And in doing so obtain a significant reduction in development costs. While this won’t work everywhere it certainly can in some organizations.
So we’ve got new tech and promises of greater conversion rates. Is that really user-centered thinking though? We wanted to take a closer look at PWAs through a user’s lens. We actually wanted to look at PWAs from multiple angles, so we wrote a couple more posts. You can start by checking out “The Progressive Web App User Story”.
The Various Lenses
This story is part of a series of posts.
- Introduction — this story
- The User Story
- The Prototyping Story
- The Research Story
About the Authors
Anthony Topper
Tony has been designing and developing on the Web for over 20 years. He started out as a “webmaster”, aka full-stack developer and designer. Over the years he has touched nearly every aspect of producing for the Web, from sysadmin and database design to user-experience research and visual design. He’s now a design leader at eBay.
Ryan Compton
Ryan is a PhD student studying large-scale computer supported cooperative work. He originated within the field of psychology which lead to exploring computer science by working on citizen science and crowdsourcing technologies. He now focuses on utilizing quantitative methods to understand and improve human social and collaborative systems.
