Starbucks is known for its quirky marketing strategies, as well as being a great supporter of upcoming technologies. So when they announced that they had doubled their daily active users using Progressive Web Apps, it got our attention.
As we studied more and more about PWA’s, we kept reading about stories of how they have made a huge impact on businesses.
For instance, Housing.com, one of India’s leading online real estate platforms, saw their bounce rate reduce by a whopping 40% after they introduced a PWA.
Commonfloor groups saw a 10% increase in overall traffic and a 2x increasein daily active users once it tried its hands on PWA.
Uber designed its PWA to load fast, even on 2G networks, and it now takes less than 3 seconds to load the core app.
Having been part of developing a few PWAs ourselves, we at SoluteLabs decided to write a comprehensive post on the state of PWAs in 2020, which you can find here.
When a few people wrote in asking for best practices while developing a PWA, we decided to dig deeper and find out the nitty-gritty details that contribute to the success of a PWA.
So without further ado, here are 15 UX tips that will help you build a great Progressive Web App.
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
The quote, by Leonardo Da Vinci, however, is relevant to a lot of things, ranging from Apple products to PWAs.
To put things in perspective, a mobile screen is roughly 3–5 diagonal inches, compared to 20–30 inches on a desktop screen. Also, keep in mind that the mobile phone has much less processing power when compared to a desktop computer.
Also, apps generally use a far lesser amount of content than a mobile web page, meaning you will have even less to work with.
So curb your enthusiasm when it comes to impressing the user with an intricate layout and complex design. No one wants to look at how much fancy artwork you can cram into their tiny mobile screen.
Remember, your ultimate objective is to serve the customer, rather than making them go gaga over your design. If an element in your PWA shows lower engagement compared to others, consider removing it altogether.
A PWA is expected to behave more like a mobile app from a UX point of view, and a website from a technological point of view. Treat your approach to developing the PWA the same way as you would while developing a native app.
A good starting point is to avoid web-based interaction elements like footers completely. With a PWA running in a full-screen mode, you don’t have browser functionalities to help the user.
To overcome these challenges, it is best if you use an easy to use the navigation bar in your app, preferably a small one that doesn’t take up a lot of screen space.
Touch gestures should be used sparingly, since they are hard to code and not worth the effort, from a UX point of view.
As a rule of thumb, keep some sort of navigation element at the bottom of the screen. Again, tie navigation back to the first point we wrote about keeping things simple.
As mentioned in point no.1, with PWAs, it is always better to use simple fonts, which will help decrease load time.
Fonts are notorious in slowing down your website, as explained in this article.
As a rule of thumb, use device default fonts wherever possible.
Only use the fonts you really need and try not to load any font-weight you are not using. Limit the font files to a maximum of three (including different weights).
Stacking together all the fonts that a modern platform uses, tweaking the app’s typography so that it is consistent with the user’s operating system, will also help speed up load time on your PWA.
Users of your PWA will transition smoothly between your PWA and your app since they are already used to the fonts. The default fonts are Roboto on Android and San Fransisco on iOS.
This technique is being used by Medium, which is populating its user interface with device fonts.
Try avoiding custom fonts, as they create distractions and slow down the performance of your PWA.
One of the key advantages of a PWA is the ability to enhance and polyfil a host of features when the browser lacks the ability to natively support them.
The term “Progressive” in Progressive Web Apps is itself since the app works well in all the browsers, and a user is presented with an enhanced behavior whenever there is an update in the browser.
When designing a PWA, it is important to be aware of each browser’s capability to be compatible with the PWA features.
While the common browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox support almost all of the PWA’s features, Safari still does not support a few key PWA functionalities such as Web push notifications.
Our friends at Good Barber have put together an impressive checklist when it comes to the compatibility of different PWA features with different browsers, which you can check out here-
Keep these limitations in mind while designing your PWA.
Designing your PWA means making all its features available to your user, whether they have a good internet connection or not.
A study by Trivago, a leading hotel search engine, showed that once they implemented their PWA-evolved site, 67% of users whose connection was interrupted, continued using the site once they came back online.
The trick here is to replace the loading spinner with something relevant, like a small game that the user can play while waiting for the content to be loaded (Remember Google’s infamous Dinosaur game?)
Another great trick to keep users engaged in times of a lost internet connection is the use of Skeleton screens. Skeleton screens give a sneak peek to the user as to what to expect and guides them to the point of interest on a page.
Executed correctly, a skeleton screen can trick the user into believing that the screen is loading faster.
Another technique that PWA’s can implement is the use of Service Workers. Service Workers enable you to store and cache user data even in the absence of a working internet connection.
Konga, a leading Nigerian e-tailer, used this technique to enable access to their websites to users even when they did not have good connectivity.
Design for offline compatibility, and remember that while creating a PWA, there is only one correct opinion, that of the customer.
While designing PWA’s, keep in mind that you should retain some of the features of a regular website, including making the PWA discoverable and SEO friendly.
Google requires Javascript rendering in order to see the content on your page, but this process uses up a lot of resources and time since it has to be parsed, compiled, and executed. Google indexes Javascript sites in two phases, fetching the server-side content in the first wave, and client-side rendering is done in the second wave.
We wrote a detailed blog stating the differences between client-side rendering and server-side rendering, which you can find here-
These challenges can be overcome by configuring your server to respond to requests of deep URLs with fully-rendered HTML.
You can also keep the following points in mind while making your PWA SEO-friendly.
When using your PWA, users should be able to switch between a variety of input methods, be it keyboard, mouse, touch, or stylus. Input methods should not be dictated by screen size.
Enhancing experiences by allowing input-specific controls, such as pull-to-refresh, is also a good practice while designing a PWA.
If you have a particular event triggered by a hover, make sure the user can also activate the same by a click or a touch.
Make sure that you use the correct semantic elements(buttons, form controls, etc.) to support both touch and keyboard, and are not using non-semantic HTML.
Also, ensure that the keyboard does not obscure the user’s message, which usually happens in certain PWAs in landscape view.
In all probability, the primary input method for a PWA will be the touchscreen, so build the PWA by denoting correct touchpoints.
When creating a PWA, developers, and designers usually fall into the trap of over-complicating the application, leaving a lot to be desired by users of the native app.
Remember, a PWA delivers the best of both worlds, which is easy accessibility like the browser and a user interface resembling an app.
When we say “accessible,” we mean that your web application is available to all the users, and anybody can operate it.
To give a more specific direction for companies to improve accessibility, the Web Accessibility Initiative defined a set of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
You can find the detailed WCAG 2.0 guidelines here.
Then four pillars of WCAG are:
Being compliant to WCAG guidelines is not just to add a fancy footnote on your website, but a sensible business decision. Because being disabled-friendly gives you access to a market of about 35 million people, according to this report.
That is a lot of people that your PWA can reach out to, by just adding minor tweaks.
The performance of PWAs can greatly be enhanced by using the PRPL principle.
PRPL Stands for:
For repeat users to your website, your PWA can make use of Service workers to fetch data directly from the cache. This means reducing the reliability on the server to provide assets, and allows your users to navigate through the PWA offline, as is the case of Konga described in point no. 5 (offline mode).
Google Lighthouse is an open-source website auditing tool launched by Google in early 2018. It uses a set of five parameters to rank a website on a scale of 0 to 100. PWA is one of the categories that Google Lighthouse uses to classify your website.
The PWA score also ranges from zero to hundred and is based on a baseline PWA checklist, which lists 15 requirements.
The major criteria that Lighthouse uses to judge your PWA include speed, responsive design, security, offline performance, caching, push notifications, indexing, and user experience, among others.
The Lighthouse performance score report tells you exactly which areas your PWAs need to improve upon, and which areas that are good to go. Redesigning your PWA based on Lighthouse reports means increased user engagement, speed, and, ultimately, more paying customers.
Designing a PWA involves thinking a lot from the customer’s point of view, and this means multiple tests to test all possible ways the end-user will use the PWA.
Scrolling is a tricky gesture to implement in a PWA. Usually, when a website has infinite scroll or a large feed, it leads to annoying scrolling glitches.
Using a virtualized list that shows elements to users based on where they are scrolling at the moment will help solve this problem.
A good tip to remember while designing a PWA is never to let it scroll horizontally. Implementing skeleton screens will also help provide a seamless experience.
Push notifications were initially envisaged as a method to keep our end customers up to date with our latest content/features. But as the developers and website owners got greedy, more and more websites started asking user’s permission to send them push notifications, making them annoying.
But push notifications are a powerful medium to get your message across since it offers the flexibility to send content you want at your discretion.
A push notification can essentially replace any email that you send to a client, with a CTA that will link them back to your webpage.
Here are a few best practices when it comes to Push notifications:
Remembering that your PWA should always resemble your native app, even though it runs on a browser, can greatly help improve the way your end-user interacts with your PWA.
Aiming for consistency in your visual elements in the first critical step in improving your PWA. Maintaining visual standards of your basic elements such as fonts and app icons, so that they look similar to the ones in your operating system, helps make a first good impression.
Whether you are running Windows, iOS, or Android, make sure the visual elements are similar to the ones the user is already familiar with. A fancy font may lead to lesser user engagement, even though it may look pleasing aesthetically.
Tappable areas are also tricky elements that your PWA needs to handle carefully. One hack for this is highlighting the tapped area with a colour/ instant start of page transition.
Being relatively new, clickable icons can confuse users while interacting with PWAs. To avoid this, make sure your user is easily able to grasp what your icon means.
Blue flashes to indicate that the user’s tap has been recognized, and they now have to wait, also tend to distract them. A good UI practice is to avoid blue flashes.
While designing your PWA, always keep a simple sentence in mind, “ The more hoops the customers have to jump through, the greater are the chances of them walking away.”
Reducing friction goes a long way in converting casual browsers on your PWA to paying customers.
Providing lightning speed loading time helps reduce this friction, but if the customer then has to go through a lengthy checkout process, then the chances are high that they will opt-out, bringing all your efforts to naught.
Do an audit of all your PWA pages regularly, to identify and eliminate spots of friction.
These spots include long and difficult processes, poor readability, unanswered questions, bad error validation, etc.
To overcome these, consider using solutions such as autofill, one- tap signup and integrated web payments, improving the UX, and answering their concerns about privacy and security.
Our last tip to develop world-class PWA ties back to our first tip, which is to keep things as simple as possible while developing your PWA.
There is a concept in Psychology called “Decision Paralysis,” which is a result of too many choices that a user has to make before getting to their result.
Research shows that if you have too many choices, you end up being less happy with your choice, as against a choice you make if you have fewer choices, to begin with.
If you want to learn more about this Paradox of Choice, check out this TED talk by Barry Schwartz.
In a fast-paced world with a host of options for everything under the sun, from insurance policies to a simple coffee at Starbucks (there are 80,000 options to choose from), the average user is bombarded with choices at every step of his day-to-day life.
When using your PWA, the users should be presented with the information they are looking for in the least possible time. Minimizing text, reducing the number of clickable buttons, and clearly articulating what the PWA aims to achieve, will all help tip the scales in your favour.
Remember, the user is spoilt for choice when it comes to the solution to his problem, and it is your job as a PWA designer to convert a casual browser to a paying customer.
For more information about PWAs and the development process in general, check out the SoluteLabs blog. Happy designing.
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