UX coaching is my core activity.
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Point 4 is completely wrong. UX is not the same as UI. Every time a developer is expected to do anything to do with UX, the business is in for very troubled times. UX is a much broader discipline which requires insight into business operations, strategy and users' needs and aspirations. This is nothing to do with what developers should be responsible for ... ever.
Basically the answer is always the same in UX design. Go back to users to understand what would/could work and get the inspiration from there. Often a time I will be doing things like ethnographic observations to see what and how people do things in real world and what problems they might be experiencing. You might even do this by watching various YouTube videos of real people doing things that you are designing for. User testing is a great source of this 'inspiration' as well. You can look at how others have solved the problem and try and do it better. You can drink more RedBull and hope for inspiration! ;-) You can also lobby to have me work with you in the company (jason@flexewebs.com) and I can coach you to become a person who always has at least 4-5 ideas for every problem. I'm available at the moment. Hope that helps. Best regards.
When there are value adding (user and business) cases for people being able to use the app offline. Web is catching up with being able to give you these capabilities, but either way complexity of implementation (as well as UX) goes up with creating these. Be really critical as to whether you really would need such capabilities. To give you an example, there is no reason why Instagram (a multi billion dollar business) shouldn't be able to 'post' a photo while I'm offline to some sort of a local storage and sync that up to the web once the app comes back online. But it doesn't do that. They basically haven't felt it's a strong enough use case for them. I think it is, but there you are.
You should use it as otherwise making things work properly across all types of devices in a meaningful way is a lot of hard work and I've seen developers try and be 'smart' about things and get things buggy on various smartphones (especially Android) and they don't know how to fix it. Reason why frameworks are there is to make responsive web stuff work properly across many different devices. Use it. It's good for you. Also remember that you are likely to have to recode a web app every 2-3 years or so, for one reason or another, unless you keep it all really, really simple.