The Main Thing: Bridging the Web and Mobile Divide

30% of respondents in our last survey were not familiar with Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). I think PWAs are going to be important so let's dive into this topic a bit further.

When phones first launched, native apps had exclusive features like push notifications, GPS, and camera access so it was a far better user experience than web apps.

Over the last decade, however, the web has caught up, integrating APIs that allow web apps to match native apps in speed and functionality. Despite Apple's initial resistance, aimed at protecting App Store profits, they've been forced to adopt these APIs in Safari recently.

There is one area where web apps still haven’t caught up: the installation process. Google is experimenting here with new patterns but I suspect Apple will not make it easier for people.

From a business perspective, having a single technology stack would dramatically reduce overhead costs and they wouldn’t be subject to the 30% Apple tax (although Apple is trying some bad faith implementations of their recent court case loss). I think we’ll see people experimenting with ways to encourage people to install PWAs over the coming months so usage is likely to grow but not explode. 

Rory

This Weeks Updates

Enabling the Team

Let's have a meeting about meetings by Daniel Stillmany
Conventional advice is to never have a meeting about meetings. Let's hear the opposing argument.  

How to Improve Your Soft Skills as a Remote Worker by Rebecca Knight
Without daily, face-to-face interactions with colleagues, learning the nuances of how to communicate and collaborate is just plain harder.

Product Direction

Product Managing To Prevent Burnout by Winston Hearn
Burnout takes far longer to recover from and it does to fall into. Winston shares his tips for avoiding burnout.

How To Build A Strategy, Not A Roadmap by Sepeda Rafael
Thinking of a design system as a product helps you to ensure that you are delivering the best value for your customers: the designers.

Continuous Discovery

7 Key Benefits of Opportunity Solution Trees by Teresa Torres
Opportunity solution trees help teams visualize and make sense of the twists and turns of product discovery.

Whither UX Research? by Peter Merholz
Siloed research leads to a fractured understanding of the people the business is serving. But where should UX sit?

Continuous Design

A Global Design System by Brad Frost
How many teams around the world are duplicating efforts by re-implementing the same core building blocks of websites and apps? Brad has released a call to arms for a global design system.

Scaling The Design Ladder: Seeing Like A Designer by Pavel Samsonov
The real value of design doesn’t come from building better products. It comes from creating better product-building methods.

Continuous Delivery

7 Reasons Why Developer Experience Is a Strategic Priority by Nočnica Mellifera
The problems a good developer experience can solve are often the problems that feel the hardest to solve any other way.

Monoliths, Microservices and Serverless by chubernetes
There is no one perfect architecture. Companies will likely have a mix of different patterns for different use cases.

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In this week's video, we feature the career journey of Ryan, Head of Design at Priceline, where he shares how career transitions allow us to take advantage of new opportunities. Learn how leveraging past experiences contributes to our constant improvement and increases our ability to adapt. 👇👇👇

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question was: Will 2024 be the year of the PWA?
Users responded:

The poll result is almost a perfect match for Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm. In his book he argues that any new technology goes through stages: Innovators (2.5%) Early Adopters (13.5%), Early Majority (34%), Late Majority (34%) and Laggards 16%).

Given that we have 22.5% who believe it will grow this year, I think we can say that PWA’s are in the Early Adopter phase. I suspect there is still a change needed to make the installation process easier before the technology crosses the chasm and becomes widely adopted.