If you are part of a large team that delivers experiences to multiple digital channels at scale, one of the things that you are confronted with is the fragmentation in capabilities of the audience accessing your digital channels and varied experience outcomes.
Historically, this used to be an engineering only challenge and invisible to groups requesting features, design or simply providing direction. However, my argument is that since it affects outcomes for anyone who proposes, details, builds and tests these features the responsibility to remedy is with all these groups.
You could argue that this is the en
I see recent notes by multiple speakers in this area, take for example Cliff Crocker's note to product managers - or Addy Osmani's argument for progressively adding high end features.
The sentiment isn't new but how it needs to be handled has to dramatically shift due to couple of drivers
- The environment that a customer interacts with your brand's channel (e.g: A mid-tier laptop, phone) is not factored in when customers receive a poor experience - This invariably leads to feedback in the form of customer support calls or poor reviews - It takes an average of 15 reviews to remedy one bad review.
- Companies that aid discoverability measure and infer your site's performance based on their understanding of prevalent user experience factors and available data. More on this below...
The above are definitely triggers for ardent conversations between multiple teams. Sample conversation below that is not limited to these groups:
Product : "We are receiving user feedback about slow experience across our channels, we need to step up quality and engineering efforts to fix the issue.
Engineering : "This is due to the intensive features we've added, we need to cut down features and simplify the requirements for our mobile users, oh BTW we need to add more engineers"
A Decade of Responsive Design, new learnings and familiar challenges
On May 25,2010 Ethan Marcotte popularized the idea of Responsive design, while its intent was design oriented it led to a movement to make sure features were designed mobile first and features between desktop and mobile platforms were equal.
A decade later most of the Internet runs on sites that are designed while keeping a mobile first design thought process and full features as browsers and hardware have moved ahead or equivalent but more widespread.
In the early days, features that mobile devices could not render where simply excluded, leading to an outcry for equality - Remember the m.yoursite.com domains?
Meet your Audience : Latest browsers/OS Mid-Tier hardware
Most device manufacturers ship with browsers that support the latest web technologies, even browser manufacturers support really old OS versions and hardware.
This poses a distinct challenge, take features such as high resolution images, most low to mid-tier browsers struggle with rendering these images leading to slow down but support them
Meet your Reviewers
On the web channel, Web vitals takes more importance in 2021 as search engine rankings maybe impacted on how your site performs - While the Google team has given mixed signals on how much it matters, I respect the intent and it provides incentive to those responsible for experience (not just developers)
It is well known that the Google bot/smartphone emulates a low tier Android browser (Moto G4), this means performance scores will be similar to a low-end device accessing your site.
On the app channel, customers can expect even more fragmentation as usually there is no mechanism to target or distribute builds for lower/mid-tier devices - some App Platforms do not even allow the ability to target or report on specific OS or Hardware versions
Of all the people experiencing your product, customers are inherently affected by the outcome of an experience and they cannot upgrade their device to use your platform and definitely not go to a larger screen to use it!
Why not make it all fast?
One argument that I routinely hear for those that do not want to get into the weeds is let's just make it all fast - This simply means every site would have very little features and we would see content limitations per view as we develop features for those devices at the lower end of the spectrum - Hardware challenges will continue to persist as users adopt varying technology due to choice or simple economics ( not everyone has the latest iPhone)
The ownership of performance is not just with the developers, it extends to multiple roles
If you have come this far, Congratulations - you are ready to understand who needs to respond and how.
Depending on what type of a service/product you offer the outcomes are differnt
Are we back to Adaptive or m. website Design then?
The Role for Product Owners
Engineering and product work together
Adaptive loading considerations
Automated solutions vs Business priorities
The challenges with personalization and AB testing or opportunities
A simple blueprint for common eCommerce components
Maintenance considerations
Where to Next