Designer vs Developer #24: Designing a progressive web app

In this episode of the Designer vs Developer series, Google Design Advocate Mustafa Kurtuldu discusses the process of designing a progressive web app, designing for speed, creating icons and more

Designer vs Developer by Google Design Advocate Mustafa Kurtuldu is a series of videos aimed at improving understanding between what are often seen as two separate camps. Each video, in which Kurtuldu has a conversation with a different industry expert, is accompanied by an essay (below) which delves deeper into the topic discussed.

A progressive web app (PWA) is a website that has app like features, for example, it can work offline, send you notifications and provides more seamless integration into the native features & behaviors of your phone & desktop. There is a spectrum of PWA UX, with some PWAs focused on content websites that let users browse them when their network connection dies, and others offering an interactive, functional experience such as Spotify.

This blurs the lines of expected user behavior, as people have come to understand why a website doesn’t work when they are on a train and go through a tunnel. A while back my former colleague Sérgio Gomes and I decided that we wanted to design a Progressive Web App. You can see the end result, material.money here.