Designing offline browsing experience. What to consider?

Question

Starting with strategy for offline mobile experience, I don't want to set arrows loose in the darkness and expect it to hit someone but rather follow some principles and guidelines to better understand how you guys design the same experience for a user.

And, are there any usability guidelines anybody might have worked on? also, to a level, I love offline experience of Pocket & Twitter (these two examples come to my mind)...

Note: Would love if anybody would like to edit this question to fit the community guideline in case it doesn't follow any... But would really like this question answered. Thanks!!

EDIT: As suggested by Kristiyan Lukanov... Product brief: The product is mostly content based (Articles and videos, which user can also save and like) with a section dedicated to Q&A and a section for Utilities(like checklists, calender etc.)

Answer 1

1. Found this article on Medium which outlines some points as principles and are helpful. Listing Principles below:

   • Aggressive caching is a better User Experience.
   • Let People Interact with Content. Always.
   • Make error messages informative and consistent.
   • Don't let people start something they can't finish.
   • Son't show contradictory information.
   • When caching, choose breadth over depth.
   • Design your empty states well.
   • Never show the raw error message.
   • Remember what users were doing last.
   • Never purge the cache while offline.

2. Other articles on medium: Article 1 and Article 2

3. Offline considerations listed by Google Developers

4. Article on IBM's page

5. Question about offline representation on UX-SE

6. Article on A List Apart.

7. Article on Gigaom.

8. Article on Bricklin.

Also, understanding from Dev point of view: Article on Medium

This is all I have for now and will update it more in future. And if you guys have anything solid like some work from Nielsen-Norman or anything, do post!

Answer 2

informing the user Tell the user that he is offline. Check for reconnection automatically and tell the user about the change of his connection status.

funcionality It's hard to say what functionality you should keep during offline mode without concrete examples. Here are some considerations

1. search Let the user search and show him the locally available results but tell him that there are most probably more results. If you want to nail it let him set a reminder that informs him about new results for his search when back online. I can also imagine that if you're database is not too big you can load all posts with just the title and the excerpt through ajax in the background while browsing online. That way he will get all the search results and se all the posts. Give the possibility to mark them as read later and again inform when user is back online.

2. User actions / Changes Save them locally and synchronize when back online. A small reminder that his actions will only be available across devices after getting online will be enough.