For the greater web, usability is no longer a debate. The Web 2.0 manifesto argued for a rich user experience, and now the need to provide the best possible user interface has reached a consensus across the Internet.

With an ever evolving marketplace filled with different operating systems, devices, form factors, screen sizes, interfaces, and even input mechanisms–the question raises: how do you bring this user experience to the forefront in such a mix-and-match computer ecology?

Each year, the number of devices, platforms, and browsers that need to work with a given site grows; as a result, responsive web design represents a fundamental shift in how we’ll build websites. The need to access applications anywhere/anytime, and on any device has become fundamental to cultivating good user experience. These situations today are based on different types of equipment and mobile devices. To simplify, we can distinguish desktop computers for desktop use, laptops and tablets for stationary-mobile use, and smartphones for on-the-go small-screen mobile use.

The pattern “Device Agnostic” is essential to provide the best possible ergonomics regardless of the situation and use the device. Paul Lewis, Developer Programs Engineer, and Peter Beverloo, Software Engineer, Google describe how Device Agnostic development at Google is helping developers to create grand unified products, how to implement it in code, and what that means for developers at the recently concluded Google I/O 2013. See the full video below.

According to a survey by Google, more than 96 percent developers are supporting desktop applications, 68 percent mobile and 69 percent supporting tablet applications. The same case is with prioritizing applications with 81 percent developers prioritizing their application for desktop, 12 percent for phones and only 7 percent for tablet.

Lewis and Beverloo explained that if developers will only prioritize one form factor (i.e. desktop) then they will lag behind the “mobile experience” or the mobile form factor or even more form factors. So, developers should start looking at just “the web” irrespective of the desktop web or the mobile web.

Device Agnostic development is a way forward in the direction everyday consumption of apps and media is moving. Both the Google engineers explained that Google’s Device Agnostic development is based on the grand unified theory of devices namely Network, Compute, and Render.

Page Load Time (PLT) is an important factor in determining the Device Agnostic development. As per Google study, 57 percent of visitors leave a web page of the PLT time is more than there seconds on a mobile device. Moreover, 46 percent visitors will not return to the web page again and 22 percent will inform their friends not to visit that page. In addition, more than 60 percent of web traffic is images, which lead to more PLT time.

Lewis then explained that changing image format to WebP could save the Chrome Web Store several TB of transfer, and instead of using JPG, SVG is a better option to use images. The mod_pagespeed plug-in available for Apache and in beta for nginx will automatically speeds up your site and reduces PLT time, track performance and provide an adaptive experience.

When using Google’s Chrome development tools, developers can load the total frame of a web page in just 16.7ms. Lewis said that the computing power is reduced for any devices if developers can limit style changes to the DOM, avoiding layout thrashing, removing unnecessary scripting language like JavaScript and reducing image overhead and finally reducing the complexity.

Google DevTools are designed to minimize many of these constraints. Both Lewis and Beverloo said that in addition to the Google DevTools, developers can clarify their constraints before they start working on a product, and they should reduce the number of requests, paint time, layout and style calculations without affecting the aesthetic approach of web. Google is advocating creating responsive web design.

Google offers some must see resources for developers at http://jankfree.org site.