1.2. Putting Universal Design to Work

The silver lining to this design approach can best be described with a little more history. In 2000, that online grocery site Matt was working on finally realized that its monolithic approach to the user experience was not going to succeed. The more features that were piled on, the more unwieldy the core of the experience—find item, add to cart, check out—became. When users woke up one morning to an entirely different experience as the result of a merger, they lost all they had learned, causing them to lose patience and interest as well.

At the same time, people had begun to ask about using the site via their mobile devices, over the primitive WAP, a protocol that displayed “decks” of content one screen at a time, on devices that could usually handle only four lines at a time. With a site that relied all too heavily on JavaScript, frames, and layout tables, there was nothing there that could be repurposed to enable other devices to do anything useful on the site.