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by janl 4604 days ago
We are trying to get people to talk about offline-first app design for when it makes sense.

Weather is a great example, being offline could communicated as an error, leaving the user with an abysmal experience. Or some older content could be shown with the note that it is likely that the accuracy is off, but if the user just needs a general idea of the weather, that suffices and is not at all an “error” in the networking sense.

We have no common UX/UI language for these things and we’d like to change that. ;)

2 comments

Good luck. Anecdote: after finding a small scorpion on the bathroom wall in the Honduran jungle, I had a huge compulsion to tear everything apart to make sure there's no nest. The only thing that calmed me down was access to offline, text-only Wikipedia on my Nokia n800. It was 2 a.m., slept like a baby when I found out this species was harmless. To this day, I never travel without it. (Edit: Wikipedia, not the n800 ;)
We got by with weather information that was hours old on the past, shouldn't be a problem now.