The UX Of Offline-First

Chrome had shipped ServiceWorker, and Firefox was close behind, when Jake Archibald, developer advocate for Google Chrome, gave this talk at the Smashing Conference in Oxford in 2015. ServiceWorker opens the door to a range of features that were previously available only to native apps.

The first of these is network management: the ability to treat the network as an enhancement, which is the core of offline-first design. Push messaging and background sync were set to follow.

Archibald’s focus is less on the technology than on the user experience: how can these capabilities be used to make things better for users? Native apps, he argues, haven’t quite figured this out, so the web has a chance to get there first.