GoKawiilHow building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
This is a story of how building HTML-first doubled a company’s users literally overnight.
My client was a utility company, and they had a big problem. To apply for their services, customers could either use an old ASP form on the website, or follow a manual process. The manual process was more expensive for the company, of course. Adding a lot of pressure, this was a regulated monopoly, and if their customer satisfaction dropped below 96% (if I remember correctly) it could result in millions of pounds in fines.
There were two previous failed (and very expensive) attempts to solve the problem. In the most recent, contractors in another country had built a React app. The React app was online for 3 days before being pulled because of customer complaints. I took one look at it and told my boss “we can’t take ownership of this.” It was a mess of loading spinners and global javascript states. It was not accessible. Image upload was a vital part of the form, and it attempted to store images (along with all other form data) in localstorage which has a 5mb limit!
I took a very bold decision and built a new version of the site using Astro. It was HTML-first. Javascript existed, in web components, but only to progressively-enhance a website that worked perfectly fine without it.
My logic was thus:
This is a public service It should work on every machine possible It should work when connections are poor The forms must never lose data once it is entered
I was very moved by this anecdote from Terence Eden:
A few years ago I was doing policy research in a housing benefits office in London. They are singularly unlovely places. The walls are brightened up with posters offering helpful services for people fleeing domestic violence. The security guards on the door are cautiously indifferent to anyone walking in. The air is filled with tense conversations between partners - drowned out by the noise of screaming kids. In the middle, a young woman sits on a hard plastic chair. She is surrounded by canvas-bags containing her worldly possessions. She doesn’t look like she is in a great emotional place right now. Clutched in her hands is a games console - a PlayStation Portable. She stares at it intensely; blocking out the world with Candy Crush. Or, at least, that’s what I thought. Walking behind her, I glance at her console and recognise the screen she’s on. She’s connected to the complementary WiFi and is browsing the GOV.UK pages on Housing Benefit. She’s not slicing fruit; she’s arming herself with knowledge. The PSP’s web browser is - charitably - pathetic. It is slow, frequently runs out of memory, and can only open 3 tabs at a time. But the GOV.UK pages are written in simple HTML. They are designed to be lightweight and will work even on rubbish browsers. They have to. This is for everyone.
Some requirements I derived:
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