Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

NATIVE OR WEB?
One of the biggest systems issues all web developers and designers must grapple with
today is whether to use web technology or native design technology—do we want to build
a website or an app? The system rules that we have to follow when designing apps are
different from those for websites.
My students often ask me which they should use, web or native? My answer depends
on what kind of experience they want the system to support. If the users’ needs are
informational, such as location, hours of operation, and the menu for a restaurant, or if the
client is publishing a stream of articles all in the same format and wants to reach the
largest possible audience, I would probably say they should go with web. With responsive
design, websites can be viewed well on mobile devices, and designing for the web makes
you accessible to a wider user base. The web can be called on by any device with a
browser, but apps can only be used by the owners of the devices that support that type of
app, i.e., iOS apps don’t work on Android. You can, of course, design apps for all, or
most, devices, but that’s extra time and money.
If, on the other hand, interactivity is key—say you’re designing a game, social
network, or activity tracker—then I’d probably say an app is the better way to go, because
the web doesn’t handle interactivity as well as apps do. It would require supplemental
frameworks to do so.