Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

Nobody would've made a Flash-only site but for some reason JS-only sites that shut out anyone with slow computers, old computers, mobile browsers that aren't Safari, etc. are totally okay.

It aggrevates me when a site that I try to open because of its textual content takes 30 seconds to render since there's too much Javascript going on. Then I'm typically sitting there thinking: "how hard can it be to display a piece of text?" Because of this, when I see my CPU spike as I try to open a website in a new tab, I very often decide to simply close the tab again and do without the information I originally came there to see. This happens a lot for me with online magazines, such as wired or techcrunch. One trick is to invoke the "Readability" bookmarklet if I can get to it fast enough, i.e., before the JavaScript has frozen my browser completely.

Of course I understand that I am part of a tiny minority. And probably I'm not part of your target group anyway. And the web is so much more in 2013 than pages with text on them.

If you do, however, want someone like me to come to your site, you better remember to keep it dinosaur-friendly.

- If you have a website that people will come to then spend a bit of time in different views (like gmail, facebook, or an analytics dashboard), it will usually pay off to dock the initial load time a bit in exchange for much faster loads of subsequent views. This is the base tradeoff made by switching to client-side rendering.

- If you have a website where most people will come check out one page then bounce (like a news site, a blog, a page with directions or info, anything where an article will be linked to rather than something that's used like an app), you won't want to make that same trade, since the extra blow to load time initially is going to hit most people and they won't see the benefits of the reduced load time for slowly adds up as you hit more views on the page, because they will read the info then leave.

Any page can be built as a single page app, and many people will do this automatically since it's the new hotness. But the question we should be asking ourselves is whether what you are building actually will be used as an app or not. I'll close out with an interesting example:

If you are building a news site, you should not build as a single page app because it's likely that you'll have a lot of single page views and a high bounce rate. Those single pages should be rendered as quickly as humanly possible. However, if you are building something like a feed reader, the situation would be the opposite. People will likely spend a bit of time in your interface reading a variety of articles, so the additional load time at the beginning will quickly pay itself off in faster renders for each item they read.

EDIT: An interesting approach for a news site would be to render single article views straight from the server or have them compiled, but render their homepage as a single page app. Tailor different parts of your website to the way that they are viewed. Has anyone written about this? Maybe I should write about it...

JS has many potential UI/UX benefits which should be used for the users' benefit: although they can also be used to users' disadvantage.

If your (static?) website shows blank with no-JS, I find it unlikely that you've considered UI/UX at all. I therefore assume that you are more likely to fall on the disadvantageous side.