Progressive Enhancement and Graceful Degradation.
Usability pundits often talk about “graceful degradation” and “progressive enhancement” as if they are opposites. They argue that graceful degradation implies you’re leaving it until later. If there’s time, you’ll get around to providing an alternative method. They argue for “progressive enhancement” instead because this implies you’re building in accessibility from the beginning. While they’re correct that you should use the progressive enhancement approach, graceful degradation is a very important part of the user experience.
Progressive enhancement is professional. It’s what separates experienced, professional web developers from less experienced ones. A college student may build you a cheap web site, but many of them have no idea what a screen reader is or what it means to be colorblind.
Progressive enhancement is all about choosing the right colors from the start and being aware of how they will work in different contexts. It’s all about actually planning a screencast with a script so that you can easily provide a transcript to your deaf users. It’s about planning your writing so that you remove extra unnecessary words so that more people can comprehend and connect with your message, and it’s about designing systems that work without Javascript so they can be used more easily with screen readers and mobile devices without Javascript support. All of these are examples of graceful degradation brought about by progressive enhancement.
You should progressively enhance. Your applications should degrade gracefully.
I’d not considered the idea that graceful degradation and progressive enhancement can be married philosophies in the way you suggested. I appreciate the way you put this in a new light, and kept it short, sweet, and to the point. Do you have any tips for someone at the beginner-intermediate level still learning about a lot of these philosophies?
[…] doing a little more digging I found a post by Brian Hogan on the relationship of Progressive Enhancement and Graceful degradation, where he suggests the two […]