This article is dead-on on how responsive design is not enough, and web performance needed to be considered at the design, not just development levels. My suggestion for a meta-design principle, embodied over at http://sustainablevirtualdesign.wordpress.com, is to include web performance and responsive design (part of inclusive design) as Sustainable Web Design. Other disciplines (architecture, industrial design) already include adaptive design with performance, measured by carbon footprint and energy use. Similar ideas can be applied to web design. WPO needs to be pushed into the earliest layers of design, including UX wireframes and stuff done in Photoshop prior to prototyping in code. If we leave WPO to engineers, we get “streamlined hippos” – klunky, energy-wasting websites that a site engineer can only partly fix.
Pete Markiewicz
This article is dead-on on how responsive design is not enough, and web performance needed to be considered at the design, not just development levels. My suggestion for a meta-design principle, embodied over at http://sustainablevirtualdesign.wordpress.com, is to include web performance and responsive design (part of inclusive design) as Sustainable Web Design. Other disciplines (architecture, industrial design) already include adaptive design with performance, measured by carbon footprint and energy use. Similar ideas can be applied to web design. WPO needs to be pushed into the earliest layers of design, including UX wireframes and stuff done in Photoshop prior to prototyping in code. If we leave WPO to engineers, we get “streamlined hippos” – klunky, energy-wasting websites that a site engineer can only partly fix.