In February, I tried out a new workshop two times—once at Webstock in New Zealand, and once in Hong Kong.
The workshop is called The Progressive Web: Building for Resilience. Here’s an excerpt form the blurb:
This workshop will show you to to think in a progressive way that works with the grain of the web. Together we’ll peel back the layers of the web and build upwards, creating experiences that work for everyone while making the best of cutting-edge browser technologies. From URL design to Progressive Web Apps, this journey will cover each stage of technological advancement.
Basically, it’s the workshop version of Resilient Web Design. If that book is the theory, this workshop is the practice.
Tim recently posted his tips for running workshops and there’s a lot in there that resonates with me. Like Tim, I’ve become less and less reliant on slides. In fact, this workshop—like my workshop on evaluating technology—has no slides. Instead it’s all about the exercises and going with the flow.
After starting with a warm-up, I canvas the room to see if there any specific topics, tools or technologies that people are particularly interested in covering. I’ll note those (on post-its slapped on the wall) for reference throughout the day, to try to make sure that those particular things are touched on at some point. Then I start with a thought experiment…
First of all, I get everyone to call out websites, services and apps that they use almost every day: Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Slack, Google Docs, and so on. Those all get documented on the wall. Then it’s time to ask of each product, “What is the core functionality?” The idea here is to get beneath the surface-level verbs like swiping, tapping and dragging to get to the real purpose of a service: buying, selling, sharing, reading, writing, collaborating, and so on.
At this point I inform the attendees that the year is 1995. And now we’re going to build these services using the technology of this time. This is a playful way of getting answers to the question “What’s the simplest technology to enable the core functionality?” It’s mostly forms, links, and lots of heavy lifting on the server.
Then the real fun begins. “Enhance!” Moving forward in time, we get to add styles, we add interactivity with JavaScript, then Ajax, and then we get to really have fun with technologies like web sockets, geolocation, local storage, right the way up to service workers, notifications, and background sync. And the beauty of it all is that, if any of those technologies aren’t supported in a particular browser or device, the core functionality is still available.
Next, we apply this layered mindset to a new service. I split the attendees into groups, and each of them gets a procedurally-generated startup idea …generated by shuffling some cards. This is an exercise I first tried when I was teaching in Porto:
I made five cards with types of sites on them: news, social network, shopping, travel, and learning. Another five cards had subjects: books, music, food, pets, and cars. And another five cards had audiences: students, parents, the elderly, commuters, and teachers. Everyone was dealt a random card from each deck, resulting in briefs like “a travel site about food for the elderly” or “a social network about music for commuters.”
The first few exercises are good creative fun: come up with a name, then a logo, then a business model. Then it’s time to build. It starts with URL design. Then it’s content prioritisation (for a representative URL). Then it’s layout (sketching!). The enhancements have begun. “How might this URL benefit from Ajax?” “How might this URL benefit from geolocation?” “How might this URL benefit from offline storage?” “How might this URL benefit from a service worker?”
At this point, we’ve applied the layered, progressive approach at the scale of an entire service, and at the scale of an individual URL. Finally, we apply the same approach at the level of a component. It might be a navigation, or a carousel, or an interactive widget. In each case, the same process applies: “What’s the core functionality? What’s the simplest technology to enable that functionality? Enhance!”
Along the way, there are plenty of rabbit holes we can go down. Whether it’s accessibility, or progressive web apps, or pattern libraries, I go along with whatever people are curious about. But all of it ties back to the progressive, layered mindset I’m hoping to foster.
By the end of the day, I’m hoping that an attendee has one of two reactions:
- “What a waste of time! Everything in that workshop was blindingly obvious!” (in which case, excellent!—they’re already thinking in a progressive way), or
- “That workshop has completely changed the way I think about building on the web!” (I’m being hyperbolic here, but at the very least I’m hoping to impart a new perspective).
Having given the workshop a few times, I’m really pleased with how it went (and more important, I’m pleased that people enjoyed it). If this sounds like something that your company or team would enjoy, get in touch and we can take it from there.
