The silver lining to this design approach can best be described with a little more history. In 2000, that online grocery site Matt was working on finally realized that its monolithic approach to the user experience was not going to succeed. The more features that were piled on, the more unwieldy the core of the experienceâfind item, add to cart, check outâbecame. When users woke up one morning to an entirely different experience as the result of a merger, they lost all they had learned, causing them to lose patience and interest as well.
At the same time, people had begun to ask about using the site via their mobile devices, over the primitive WAP, a protocol that displayed âdecksâ of content one screen at a time, on devices that could usually handle only four lines at a time. With a site that relied all too heavily on JavaScript, frames, and layout tables, there was nothing there that could be repurposed to enable other devices to do anything useful on the site.
And yet, even back in 2000, it was possible to practice universal design. It all started by taking each user action and breaking it down into atomic tasks that took place in a determinable order. Beginning with these basic building blocks, it was possible to reconstruct the entire online grocery site in line with each of these tasks. The product was a simple site that used standard HTML, textual links for every action, and basic HTTP requests for each interaction with the server.
Using this as a starting point, any kind of user experience was possible. The core site worked with screen readers, as well as the first generation of mobile phones that supported HTML. Using the strategy of progressive enhancement, which we will discuss later, it was possible to create the same experience for existing customers, more cleanly and more quickly, while giving them the same look and feel they had before. A focus on universal design is what allowed us to stop working around HTML and start working with it.
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