Last Thursday was the first Tweakers.net Developer Summit took place. At this meeting, spoke to several experts about the need for and the design of good user interfaces.
On Thursday, march 24, organized Tweakers.net for tweakers with a job as a developer, the first Developer Summit. A small 130 visitors had in the Tweakers.net HQ collected for four speakers and each other to hear. Especially for the Developer Summit flew interfacedesigner and developer Aral Balkan to the Netherlands to talk about the importance of a good user interface.
Balkan told that the importance of an easy-to-use interface by businesses yet is often forgotten: “Often all attention is given to the graphic design and not to the interaction with users.” He asserts that the graphic elements of an interface to understand a part of that interaction is: “Graphic design is very important, and not just a coat of paint.” Balkan compares a good interface with a Ferrari: “He is beautiful, but also works very well.”
“It comes to communication with people. That can that is positive and negative.” As an example of a negative experience – that on the internet often prevents – called Balkan a form that imports only validates when the submit. Therefore, there appears only an error message as a user the whole form has already been completed. “Compare that with someone who you find an error later and then you laughing at.” Of course, this experience nowadays is very easy to prevent the input of each field immediately after filling to check.
According To Tweakers.net-ontwikkelgoeroe Tino Zijdel, the second speaker at the Developer Summit, is speed important for a good user experience. That plays among other websites a large role, he said during his presentation: “At the time that the load takes too long, to wander from the thoughts of the user.” Users are, according to Zijdel tend to their salvation, than to seek elsewhere: “it already happens after three or four seconds. It is, however, whether a user targeted is looking for, or just passing by.”
To make a site fast to load, it is important that the pages are not too heavy, so browsers they can quickly render: “To the number of objects to reduce, you can, for example, the images in a sprite folder, so you have only one image need to get to multiple areas on the page to fill.” Also, the retrieval of content with ajax can make a difference. Static objects can, according to Zijdel, the best on a separate domain will be placed that no cookies are dropped; otherwise, indeed, every request sent, whereas with the static elements are often redundant.
Also the open connections is important: “When a user has more elements at the same time, the server asks, you can http-keep-alive apply, so there not for every request a new connection with the server need to be laid.” That is, however, only interesting for static objects from high-performance web servers are served. On the server side, it is often necessary to caching; Tweakers.net for example, we use memcached to prefetching data in the memory. “Therefore, there is no roundtrip to the database server, more is needed.”
Also told the developer Ivo Jansch about the scalability of websites, which the server capacity with an increase of the number of visitors without too much effort can be expanded. Also should as peaks in the visit can be accommodated, without that there is a constant overcapacity.
“That may be, for example, with graceful degradation, where you have certain functionality turned off if you suddenly have a lot of visitors,” says Jansch. Winfred Peereboom, manager of online technology at Tweakers.just-owner VNU Media, underlined in his presentation finally, the importance of careful choices for software and architecture for the development of internet applications.