The Design of Sites: Pattern Group L — Speeding Up Your Site
Pattern Group L of The Design of Sites — six patterns (L1-L6) for making a site download, and feel, fast: LOW NUMBER OF FILES, FAST-LOADING IMAGES, SEPARATE TABLES, HTML POWER, REUSABLE IMAGES, and FAST-LOADING CONTENT.
License: © 2006 Pearson Education / New Riders — all rights reserved, no open license; one of the book’s co-authors is a FuguUX founder, which is the basis for citing it here.
Key points
- L1 (Low Number of Files), L2 (Fast-Loading Images), L3 (Separate Tables), L4 (HTML Power), and L5 (Reusable Images) are primarily performance-implementation techniques: removing unnecessary files, image file-format trade-offs (GIF vs. JPEG vs. PNG, cropping/shrinking/compression ratios, progressive-scan vs. interlaced loading), splitting large HTML tables so the top of a page renders before the rest, using native HTML markup instead of images, and relying on browser image caching.
- L6 (Fast-Loading Content) distinguishes actual speed from perceived speed, with a taxonomy of progress indicators: a static text message, an animated “marching ants” indicator, a thermometer, and progressively displaying content as it arrives — each with a real trade-off (a thermometer is the most reassuring when accurate, but worse than no indicator at all when it isn’t). See Interface Design Principles‘s feedback principle.