What to ask your agency about offline-first design
There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on offline-first design, these questions are worth asking early.
The version of the app your customers are running is rarely the one you just shipped. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
Questions worth asking
- Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
- How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
- What happens if it needs changing in a year?
- What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?
What a good answer sounds like
Connections drop, and the app should keep working. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
Show sync state so people trust what they see. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
In practice
You do not control the device, the network, or the operating system version, and the design has to accept that. Three things worth confirming about offline-first design before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Conflict resolution is the part teams forget to design — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.