Part 2: Think like a playwright and mind your 'bytes'

You've written that a designer should think more like a playwright, in what way should they do that?
A playwright will draft up a script, and include some direction for how the script should be delivered. But then they let it go. The actors interpret the script, and every performance is slightly different. The same thing happens to our Web pages. Rather than thinking of our interfaces as sculptures chiseled into stone, we should consider them like a script or musical score. They are going to be delivered differently every time they're accessed. We should embrace that rather than fight it.

Why is it so important for webmasters to "mind their bytes" when it comes to speed and loading issues?
Well, first there is the user experience. No matter how well designed and usable your site may be, if nobody waits around for it to download, it will be wasted. Speed is the most important factor in the success of any site. Make a slow site, and people won't use it. It's as simple as that.

But there is a purely financial aspect to it, as well. Bandwidth costs money, money that comes out of your bottom line as a company. I was once talking to a CTO of a very large website who explained that they had done a cost analysis of their bandwidth. They found that with the amount of traffic they had, they were spending 16 cents per month PER CHARACTER in their HTML source code. So it made good financial sense to pare down as much as they possibly could.

In your book you say that database driven websites aren't just the realm of the Fortune 500, why do you believe that?
It sounds complicated. Keeping a Web server running and sending out simple HTML files is easy. Configuring a middleware system to run a scripting engine that will access a big database can be daunting. So many small sites don't even consider it.

But in the book, I show how a small church website was created using very simple and readily available tools to create a dynamic website that they can maintain very easily. The overall point is to not fear the technology. Just try it. It's actually quite a bit of fun to get a system like this working.

And do you think that designers should exploit things like usable content and template systems?
I already talked about how liberating it is for a designer to stop thinking about HTML tags and pages and start thinking about system architecture. But there is a user benefit as well. By using a template system, your interface will become inherently more consistent from page to page. You simply eliminate the possibility for your interface to be different by mistake.

And if there is one thing that users appreciate from an interface, it's consistency. Our testing has shown that users will feel more confident with a website that religiously puts the same interface elements in the same spots on page after page.

What is the greatest obstacle to good web design today?
After all this time on the Web, we all still get enamored with sexy technology and forget why we're actually building websites for people. I see so many corporate sites that still try to be "cool" when all their users want is to accomplish a simple task. This may be a problem we never solve, unfortunately.

In an ideal design world, what would exist as a tool that doesn't today?
Well, I'm still looking for the application that writes Web design books for me. But failing that, I guess I'll just have to keep working.

Seriously, I would love to have a tool that helped visualize how a website works. Currently, we have tools that will do simple site maps and other tools that do reports on the traffic that runs through sites. But nobody has successfully merged the two.

I'd like to be able to instantly see an overview of my website with as much detail as I'd like, from a simple schematic to actual page renderings and then be able to overlay different traffic patterns on that overview. It would be an amazingly powerful way to make decisions about our websites based on what users are actually doing at this instant. That would be cool.

Thanks for all your insight Jeffrey!