A transcript of S02E03, (313) of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom discuss the need for low-carbon and sustainable computing and detecting user preferences to creating more inclusive experiences.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Cristian Pavel.
Transcript
Computer voice
Season two, episode three.
Per Axbom
Hello, everybody! Welcome to UX Podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden. We are your hosts, Per Axbom.
James Royal-Lawson
And James Royal-Lawson.
Per Axbom
Balancing business, technology, people and society with listeners all over the world from Ecuador to South Korea.
James Royal-Lawson
And today, we have for you a link-show.
Per Axbom
Yay!
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, but you know, this is “Season Two” now and we’ve got new theme tunes and stuff. So I thought, I’d do the little link show jingle. Do you want to hear it?
Per Axbom
Link show jingle?
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, do you want to hear it?
Per Axbom
Play the jingle, James.
James Royal-Lawson
Okay, here’s what I’ve done.
[James singing]
“It’s a link show…”
Per Axbom
So this is what you’ve been working on?
James Royal-Lawson
Oh, yeah. I have spent all my holiday producing that little clip there.
Per Axbom
Wonderful.
James Royal-Lawson
But anyway, so a link-show… What this is, is where Per and I we have collected or picked two articles that we’ve read, and that we think is interesting, inspiring, or conversation sparking. And we’re going to walk you through them and talk about them in today’s episode.
Per Axbom
And what I love about both these shows is that we pick articles, and they are rarely directly related or on the same topic, but we managed to connect them in a way that creates something new and interesting.
James Royal-Lawson
Or maybe there’s just some kind of like, hidden bias and where that we know what is happening.
Per Axbom
We are just really smart, James.
James Royal-Lawson
Clearly that. So the two articles we’ve got for you today. The first one is “Frugal computing, developer perspective”. And this is by Wim Vanderbauwhede.
Per Axbom
Oh, well done pronouncing that.
James Royal-Lawson
Thank you. I don’t know if it’s right, but I try.
Per Axbom
And what does frugal mean, James?
James Royal-Lawson
Frugal basically means being conservative with the use of something or reducing how much you use something. Often, you’d use frugal in connection with money. You’d be frugal with your money, you don’t spend very much.
Per Axbom
Yeah. And the second article is “CSS and accessibility, inclusion through user choice”. And that’s by Carie Fisher on the Smashing Magazine. We’ll be talking a bit about how you can use CSS media features, to give users more options based on things like well, I’ll get to that actually.
James Royal-Lawson
Both of these articles sound quite developer-related and technical.
Per Axbom
Yes, they do.
James Royal-Lawson
But bear with us, we’ll hold your hand.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
First up, “Frugal computing”, by Wim Vanderbauwhede, who is the professor of Computing Science at Glasgow University in the UK, where he is the lead of the low-carbon and sustainable computing activity. Now, even though the article I’ve chosen is developer’s perspective article, is actually a follow-up to one he wrote previously called just “Frugal computing”. I think originally, these two articles were from 2021, or 2022. But he’s updated them a couple of times since and it’s still thoroughly irrelevant. But both articles share the same intro. He outlines the problem space and outlines suggested solutions in a similar way, in both of them. So, read both of the articles. Well, the one I’ve chosen is the developer perspective one, because it actually has actions to take. Now, you may be thinking “Yes, developer actions to take”. We know how it is when we work with developers, it’s a team game, and so on. And many of the things that developers do, maybe we can help influence them or in some ways, I think our design design decisions are part of that anyway.
Per Axbom
And we need to understand all the options and possibilities and what we can do to actually reach our goals and one of those goals may actually be to reduce energy.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. So I’m going to, well, first off in “Frugal computing”, Wim lays out the need for low-carbon sustainable computing as a proposed solution. But first off, he outlines the main problem areas in frugal computing, or with the emissions that come from, or lack of being frugal. One of which is emissions from computing are 2% of global emissions. And I believe these are the 2021 figures. But they’re expected to rise really steeply. Which isn’t really surprising, I suppose, when you think about the the computing power needed for large language models and all the AI and so on and video streaming.
Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly. I mean, the numbers are so large, I’ve been reading up on this as well. And when you hear that number, it may not tell you much, when you say “It’s 2%, or even 2.4% of the world”. But that is the same amount that is produced by cars, the carbon emissions from cars globally so the data centers are emitting the same amount of carbon.
James Royal-Lawson
A quote here from Wim: “By 2040, emissions from computing alone will be more than half the emissions level acceptable to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees.” I mean, we know we’re not that far away from 2040. And, you know, that’s quite a staggering thing. If computing alone will be half the emissions… I’ve not double-checked, how these figures are beeing calculated. But to be honest, I’m not really so worried that it’s going to be massive, we can’t avoid the fact that can be massive, or rather, we maybe can avoid, being massive.
Per Axbom
Exactly. At the same time as new technology like AI and machine learning is actually making us use even more energy.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. So the other way Wim says emissions are problematic, or computing is problematic within emissions, is the production of the devices themselves. And the emissions from producing the devices actually far exceed the emissions from using them. So Wim sais: “So even if the devices are more energy efficient, producing more of them, will make the emissions problem worse, therefore, we must extend the useful life of our computing devices.”
Per Axbom
That’s something that a lot of people don’t think about it actually, I believe, is that you produce something that is more energy efficient, yet to produce that you actually make things worse.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, it’s kind of the sunk investments and the investment you make, in making things better, sometimes can be way much better than just making the existing thing, slightly better. So the high-level solution, this is from the first article about “Frugal computing”, the high-level solution, he says is: “As a society, we need to start treating computational resources as finite and precious to be utilised only when necessary, and as effectively as possible. We need frugal computing, achieving the same results for less energy.” That was the original one. And in the “Developer perspective” article, he goes on to propose five actions for developers to take. And I think when you read these five out that you’ll get what I mean about how, you start to get what I mean, that developers or designers, whatever, all of us who work in the digital space, they’re not exclusively developer things.
James Royal-Lawson
So here’s the five: “Make software that works on older devices, the older the better. Make software that will keep on working for a very long time. Make software that uses the least amount of total energy to achieve its results. Make software that also uses the least amount of network data transfer, memory and storage. Make software that encourages the user to use it in a frugal way.” Before we say anything else, it’s software the whole time here. Now, I don’t want people to get hung up on the word software, because for me, that just means app, website, digital thing, widget.
Per Axbom
Everything is software these days.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I mean, we get it.
Per Axbom
I have to say, as you’re reading these, this story comes to mind. And because when I first met my mother-in-law, she was doing bookkeeping for my father-in-law. And she did this on software loaded from a 3.5 inch floppy disk directly from an MS DOS prompt. So it was all like white text on a black background. And from my perspective, it was ancient and she was doing this for years. But of course, for all intents and purposes, the software worked for her. The way she did bookkeeping didn’t change. So it’s always the same. And she didn’t have to learn anything new. But I wasn’t thinking about at the time, the environmental benefits of this, because this was this is a perfect example of what he’s suggesting in this article, just make it work for a very long time.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, it’s definitely something really interesting to think about. I mean, that is one of the things that comes up a lot, if something feels, we see it in usability testing, or observations and studies and so on, that when something, a device feels sluggish, it doesn’t respond quick enough, then people get frustrated. It worsens the user experience. And one of the consequences is that apart from the fact maybe they don’t use your service, or don’t buy the thing from your website, or sign up or whatever it is, a consequence, a more holistic consequence is they start thinking of upgrading the device. “Oh, God, now is like, everything’s so slow. I need to get a new iPhone, I need to, you know, get a new mobile, need to get a new laptop”. And just as your story says, these devices aren’t obsolete, they aren’t useless. They just don’t have the capacity to do the demanding things that websites, apps, and software, is demanding of them.
Per Axbom
The fancy stuff, the things that, I guess we argue that we are trying to improve the user experience by adding motion and adding call interactive features that aren’t always necessary. But we include them because we can argue for their marketing, they help in marketing and helping people actually accept your product. Because you’re showing them something new and exciting, which is perhaps something that is more appealing. But, you could still accomplish the exact same thing, if you think about the user goal with much less of that fancy, interactive features.
James Royal-Lawson
That actually makes me think about a topic that’s been in the media recently is how fashion trends at the moment, have been for, you know, oversized clothes, baggy clothing. And what we’ve seen recently is that the amount of waste related to clothing is increasing the amount of resources. And also the amount of waste has been increasing recently, because of that trend. Rather than having a trend where clothes fit, the trend is now oversized clothes. So using more resources, than you need because of a trend.
Per Axbom
Oh, that’s so fascinating.
James Royal-Lawson
So you know, thinking about that as well in relation to web design or app design or digital design that, you know, I think now it’s over 10 years ago, I wrote an article about sliding banners, carousels, dissing them, dismissing them and saying we shouldn’t be using them. And I listed quite a number of points of why you shouldn’t be using them. One of which the main one, of course, is that people never saw the second or third picture on these banners. So they were pointless in that sense. But at the end of the article I half-jokingly said they damage the environment. 10 years ago, I was half-joking. Looking back at the article, I’m not joking at all.
Per Axbom
No, you’re right.
James Royal-Lawson
I was actually right. That was a point that was really quite irrelevant. Just I guess I joked about it, because 10 years ago, it wouldn’t have been a serious point. We wouldn’t be taken seriously.
Per Axbom
Right?
James Royal-Lawson
Well, that was a trend. The banners or sliding banners and carousels was a trend and made my laptop fan go crazy at the time. So it was clearly using more power. So it was a trend that caused environmental damage.
Per Axbom
Exactly. And I think images if we’re speaking from a designer perspective, now, images are one of those areas where you can do so much difference by just selecting a different image format, and making sure that you have the size. You don’t need a bigger image than is needed for the interface that you’re designing. But some people like I’d see this so often, they always take the highest quality image and that is what they want online because it looks the best on their particular screens.
James Royal-Lawson
Then we know there are several ways to reduce the quality of images rather than having any noticeable, sorry, reduce the size of images without reducing the quality of them. And now that we’ve been talking about .WebP format as a way of reducing them, it’s becoming more widely supported. Another way there is that you maybe don’t need to use multiple versions of the same image, it’s always been quite standard, that you just crop something a different way, or you clip something a different way. And then you end up with five or six images that are effectively the same. They’re just meant for different situations, you can actually develop it anyway. They can use CSS to position things from one image.
Per Axbom
Exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
So you could actually have one core image and then make it reused in all these situations. So you don’t need to download several resources.
Per Axbom
So you don’t need to store that many images.
James Royal-Lawson
Store them, download them and cache them, all those kinds of things. So that’s definitely something to look into. The point about video to, that video is just a series of images. So, Wim says that one of the things that impacts data transfer, storage, the environment, is streaming video. And if you, for example, can reduce the quality or the streaming bit rate of your videos, then it makes a substantial difference to how much they’re contributing to emissions. I’d like to add there as well, that things such as not playing things automatically.
Per Axbom
Exactly, yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
And lazy loading. These are kind of things that you maybe could encourage your developers to look at to make sure is the case. So you don’t unnecessarily get something ready for playing. I mean, one of those things, is you don’t want the video to lag and all the rest of it. But maybe you just don’t want the video to play automatically, full stop.
Per Axbom
But I think the hardest part of this is specifically make it work for a long time on older computers. Because we are always asking our users to upgrade. I mean, you and I used to design for Internet Explorer 6, back in the day, and people hate that browser. So we want to move away from it, so we’re asking people to upgrade, move browsers. And new features pop up, and new ways of writing HTML and CSS pop up and you need to upgrade your browser. You’re always being asked to have the latest version, even on your phones, you need to upgrade your operating system to be able to download the latest apps.
James Royal-Lawson
And I think this is one of those really difficult conversations in teams, is that there’s often a push for the latest trends. You know, you get pushback as well, and saying: “Well, it works on the latest iPhones”, or like you said about Internet Explorer, “It works on Edge, so I don’t need to worry about an older one”. And yeah, we know, I know what you mean, you were celebrating the death of Internet Explorer 6, because it was really hard work to work with. But, which it’s maybe not quite the same thing as making sure it works on all the devices, all the browsers, is a slightly different thing, I guess. But, you know, those conversations are difficult in your team, so how do you convince them that we should be trying to make something work on like an iPhone 4? Not just an iPhone, what are we on now 14, 15? I’ve lost track…
Per Axbom
iPhone 14, yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
I mean, that’s a tough conversation. And what do you do Per, what do you say?
Per Axbom
I mean, you need to start to conversations by having examples like this and put them out there and discuss it. And because we need to be open about it, and the consequences of what we’re doing. Because we are contributing to this. We are making things, we are making stuff, which means that we are part of the problem unless we’re also addressing the problem.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, thinking as well about, there’s a number of tools are available to estimate your carbon footprint, especially websites, which might be a useful tool to have in the conversations. We talked about PageSpeed before and so on, but showing how much of a carbon footprint your page has and maybe how much bigger it is than the competitors, maybe? That might be something that you could utilise in conversations.
Per Axbom
You need to be proud of low-energy use. It needs to be something that people show that “We were doing this”, so that people start talking about it.
James Royal-Lawson
I think maybe as well as consumers we move it to start demanding it. And this is a little bit of a segway into the next article. But maybe I, maybe it would be good if I had the ability to communicate to a website I preferred low emissions. And, you know, if I could say or if I could flag: “Give me the low emission version of your website from the off”. Just like you would reach that “Do not track” when was a thing that you could say: “I don’t want to be tracked on”, that never really took off. It was another media feature that can, we’ll get into in the next article. But, if I could signal that to the website, or even you know, like we have “Dark mode” and so on, you can say: “Less use of data, less use of this”. And that would be good for the environment.
Per Axbom
Yeah, make it more transparent.
[Music]
Per Axbom
So you almost teased the next article, James. I love how that actually moves us on to this concept of CSS media features. So this article by Carie Fisher, in Smashing Magazine, it’s entitled “CSS and accessibility, inclusion through user choice”. And Carie is a freelance accessibility and UX consultant. So in this article, from an accessibility perspective, Carie is arguing that we need to give users more choice. And she has some examples in her introduction to her article about how many different choices we make each day. And we actually feel autonomous and in control of our lives. And it’s funny because she has this example of now, today, when you’re a web developer, and web designer, you have access to over 650,000 web fonts, and a hexadecimal system capable of representing 16,777,216 colours. And that number is so interesting because when you and I started out, we had access to 216 colours.
James Royal-Lawson
No, no, no, when I started out, it was 16.
Per Axbom
Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
Actually, no, to be honest, it was probably 8, thinking about it. In some modes, it was 2.
Per Axbom
Well, yeah, depending on how far we go back, it was monochrome.
James Royal-Lawson
Exactly, it was black and white. Yeah, so it’s a very, very big number.
Per Axbom
It’s an extremely big number. I don’t even understand why the number has to be that big. But so well, this is great news for professionals, I’m not sure it is, as she writes. What choices are we giving the actual user? Shouldn’t they have a say in their experience? And so, while we may have some insights into user needs, it’s challenging, she says, to understand the actual user preference of 7.8 billion people at any given time. So the benefit of this would be that if people can actually tell us what they want, we will be able to provide a better experience by giving them a voice. And that voice can be given now through CSS media features by listening to what the browser’s and the user agents are asking for. And I think to understand this, from a designer perspective, I think one aspect of CSS media features that you’re familiar with, is page width. So if a page is wide, content should be placed in one way. And if a page is narrow, like on a phone, it should be placed another way. And this is the foundation for responsive design. And what Carrie Fisher is talking about in her article is that there are several more opportunities beyond this, for adapting to user preference using CSS. And even if you’re not a person, this is the same point that James was making before about being a developer, and this being quite a technical article, is that even if you’re not a person who actively codes the CSS, you should be aware of these so that you can, cater to different user needs, and know what conversations you should be having. Because talking about these features actually makes you more aware of the types of different needs that are important to have in mind. And you don’t actually need to always be implementing all of these that we’re talking about today. But you need to be thinking about the needs, that are causing people to request these types of issues, which are related to colour, contrast, motion, and actually also to data and data download speeds like we were talking about before.
James Royal-Lawson
And I think that as a designer, being aware that some of these media features are available or coming, maybe it means that you can actually bake in some variants into your deliverables or into what you’re working on, from the off, from the start. Because some of these things, when you’re in the space dealing with something, it’s kind of easier to make two variants than it is to go back and do with a second variant, you know, further down the line.
Per Axbom
Exactly. So I think the first one that she mentioned, relating to colour is one of the most popular and mostly used ones today. The “prefers-colour-scheme”, CSS media feature, it helps you identify whether users prefer light or dark colour themes. So users can indicate this through settings in their operating system. But also sometimes you have a setting like I know I have for my iPad, it actually changes my preference across the day. So at night, it will prefer the dark mode. And for websites that have this turned on, I will actually get a dark colour theme for that website.
James Royal-Lawson
This is actually interesting, Per, because what happens at least with this, is it’s a cascade of preferences. So you’re taking a preference from the operating system level, and it’s then been fed down to the browser, and then the browser is communicating that to the code on our website effectively. So you’re saying, on your telephone, for example, that I want it to be dark mode after sunset.
Per Axbom
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
So then, the telephone, in its browser says to the browser, this person now wants dark mode. And then the browser, when it’s presenting the webpage, it will check prefers-colour-scheme, and implement it when it’s displaying the webpage. it will implement dark, the bits in that CSS, that are relevant for dark. So look, “dark mode”.
Per Axbom
I mean, even I think I downloaded a theme at one point that had the dark mode, I didn’t like the dark mode, so I disabled it. So essentially, you still have control as a designer. But you need to be aware that does exist. And people have this preference, because a lot of people just, it’s so much easier for them to read in dark mode. And then of course, contrary to what I have, they maybe have it turned on all the time.
James Royal-Lawson
And prefers-colour-scheme is really widely supported. I think it’s in 94% of browsers supported now. And you know, a lot of websites do make use of it too, but a lot of them don’t. And here we got the whole testing thing, you can see when a designer hasn’t been aware of dark mode when they develop the sites because sometimes it gets forced.
Per Axbom
Exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
And you know, whether you define something or not, you can end up looking inverted or darker anything, and your colours, you haven’t made it into a choice, then maybe the colours aren’t quite optimal.
Per Axbom
Oh, that’s a good point, if you don’t make a choice, things may happen. If you’re not aware of all these things.
James Royal-Lawson
Design choice. If you don’t make a design decision, then some of these things might be made for you.
Per Axbom
And I love that you use the word “forced” because the other CSS media feature is actually “forced-colours”.
James Royal-Lawson
Look, yeah.
Per Axbom
I thought that was an interesting one, because I’m not entirely sure how that would play out. So that’s something I would want to test more with. Because this does not strictly fit into the lower high-contrast categories. It can, but it doesn’t have to, it means that the colour adjustments aligned with a user choice that they in the browser can actually set their own preferred colours. And those will be forced into the website. Which means that you can actually take that information and use it to set a new background based on if they are using their own colours.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I wasn’t sure about this one, how it would play out, like you say. And the article talks about how Windows does actually offer you the ability to make custom high-contrast mode. I think is effectively what you can do to achieve a similar situation, but for what it sounds like, it’s like you choose certain colours for certain situations, and they will be used.
Per Axbom
I would assume that one of those examples would clearly be that somebody wants all links to be blue and underlined, whatever you’ve designed.
James Royal-Lawson
Well, yeah, so I’m interested…That one I’m going to read more about that, Per. Because I don’t see how, I’m not sure at the moment how I would, how we would deal with that, what I’m expected to do.
Per Axbom
Exactly. And that’s the interesting thing, what I was alluding to in the beginning there is that, if you’re aware of this, you’re aware that some people will actually want other colours on your website, and you have the ability to accommodate that. But whether you do it through this technology or some other technology, that’s a design choice.
James Royal-Lawson
So you’ve got preferred, the prefers-force-colours.
Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
So then you could actually, okay… I’m starting to think I understand a bit more about it. But it’s a bit more tricky to understand that one compared to…
Per Axbom
It si tricky to understand.
James Royal-Lawson
Dark mode, and compared to, if it is okay to move on to the next one, inverted colours. So that I can get my head around quite easily. But it’s the opposite.
Per Axbom
Yeah. Yellow on black or black on yellow. Which is quite a common one. Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
But this gives the opportunity for you to adjust the opposite. Because I mean, we know, we’ve all been there that you’ve kind of sometimes when you invert something, the inverted combination doesn’t feel quite right, doesn’t have quite the same feeling that you get from the original. So inverted colours, allows you to just make those little adjustments that you do, as a designer: “Okay, I’ll have that blue, just slightly lighter”, and feels better, fits better. Maybe contrast-wise sits better. In the inverted-colours, media CSS feature, allows you to do that.
Per Axbom
Exactly. Another aspect of the interface that people can have an opinion on, and actually set in their browsers in some way, either by choice or by other circumstances in the operating system is contrast. So if someone actually wants higher contrast, they will probably have set that in their operating system. And that can actually then also carry over to the browser in the similar ways that James was talking about before, which means that then, you know, this person prefers higher contrast than I can provide a higher contrast mode.
James Royal-Lawson
What I didn’t realise, Per, was that the CSS media feature for, contrast, has less.
Per Axbom
Oh, yeah, that was really interesting, less more in custom.
James Royal-Lawson
Because when we’ve been working on this before, from an accessibility point of view, we’ve gone for high-contrast mode, because high contrast, we know, helps particular groups of people looking at the content. But I hadn’t really considered the less contrast option. Do you know anything about, I shouldn’t question of why it’s useful, but is there any example of in particular of whether that’s a useful situation?
Per Axbom
Again, it comes down to all these 7.8 billion people on our planet. And I think that some people will actually have trouble with too much contrast. And I have experienced this because sometimes I’ve wanted to design things with more contrast. And people just protest and object to that, because it makes them feel uncomfortable, because it’s too sharp, it’s too much of something. And it’s not always easy to articulate. But if you can say, I want less of that, in a way in one of these CSS media features, that’s fascinating. Because then you can actually accommodate people wanting it less, because then you could have a default, that is higher contrast, which accommodates a lot of people and make the less one, the one that is the secondary option.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I guess in some ways, I mean, I don’t like having my screens really, really bright with brightness levels really high. So I can imagine that in said switch situations, that I wouldn’t mind toning down the contrast a bit. I mean, to be honest, we do a bit with text, and we don’t generally use black text on white.
Per Axbom
Exactly, yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
We would generally have a dark grey, because it is slightly easier to read, instead of a…
Per Axbom
Or an off-white background.
James Royal-Lawson
Exactly, yeah, so you just reduce the contrast slightly to make it more readable for many people.
Per Axbom
Or for the people who want it. I’m gonna jump over to the motion one, because I find that this one is interesting. It relates a lot to our previous article because motion itself can be quite intensive in terms of graphics and processors, which means that it can actually affect carbon emissions. Depending on of course, how many users you have, and how popular your website is. But this is, a choice, when you add motion to your website, whether it involves videos, GIFs or SVGs. And you often do that, because you think: “Well, this makes the experience so much better”. But it can also be a problem for a lot of people. So people with seizure disorders, and migraine disorders, it can trigger all these things within humans, which means that you should always have the option to turn that off. If, and this is a big if, you actually do have something that involves a lot of motion on your website.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, because I mean, some transitions and animations are necessary to convey interaction. It can feel you know, brutally harsh if you don’t have any transitions or motions on your web designs or digital designs generally. But there’s sometimes stuff that could definitely be reduced or eliminated. And I think actually, the examples in the article for these ones are pretty good. There are two videos with default motion, and then one where you have reduced motion, and at first I kind of thought: “Well, is it just slower?”. I didn’t really pick up on the difference between the two. And then I kind of thought, “Am I missing something?”. And then I played it back again. And I realised that one of the biggest differences is that there’s no background motion in the second video. So it’s basically a couple of words that are animated. And then behind it there’s two colours, green and blue. And this kind of wave across in the background. And in the in the second one, the background stays stationary. And I think the animation of the words is a different speed. I’m not completely sure. But the result is that I couldn’t, I didn’t feel the difference between the two, consciously. Which is interesting in itself. But yeah, clearly, the one without the background did use slightly less resources.
Per Axbom
Exactly. And I have to say, I personally have a huge problem with the parallax effects, where the background moves at a different speed and or it stays static, I don’t know how to explain it. But parallax effects websites, I avoid them. And if they actually used the prefers-reduced-motion, CSS media feature, they could actually turn that feature off for people who requested.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I had a problem, when they have the full page videos going and playing behind text I really can’t cope with. It’s very difficult for me.
Per Axbom
So having said that, exactly as well. Perhaps you should consider not doing it at all.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, you might have a very strong push within your organisation to actually do these things. So again, this is down to you know, starting conversations, coming with maybe even doing some guerrilla tactics here. And just, you know, designing both versions, you know, one with reduced motion, and one with full motion from the off. Because it’s gonna be your most, most efficient time to do it is when you’re doing it, rather than going back and doing it. And, you know, if you’re implementing something now, then the chances of getting it tweaked in a few months down the line, or whatever, for something which was already considered a fringe activity, edge-case or what you want to call it, then you’re going to struggle. So I think just do it.
Per Axbom
That’s the one I would actually recommend everyone to get going with. And it also has this 94% support across all the latest versions of the most popular desktop and mobile browser. So extensive support for that one, actually.
James Royal-Lawson
Yep. And I think that is the closest one you can probably say to my request for “prefers-low-emissions”, this is the next thing that you’ve got I reccon.
Per Axbom
And let’s just end on the last one, the prefers-reduced-data. I was not aware that this existed. So I thought that this was fascinating. So people can actually say they prefer reduced data. And I know there are lots of countries where this would actually make sense, because you pay a lot for data usage. So it’s not just about the environment, it’s actually also about the financial health of the person using your website. And this is an interesting one, because then what would you do? It’s still an experimental one. So Carie actually says that it’s not perhaps not one that you would want to use straight away. But you want to try and experiment with it. And actually would be part of the conversations that we encouraged with the first article as well. If a person selects prefers-reduced-data, what would we do? Would we hide the header image, the featured image at the top of the website. That would be a very common way, I think to actually approach this.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, show some… an alternate version that was more efficient, or not do the video. So some of these options do overlap and do kind of interlink with each other. Which is fine, because that is when you will get the set of choices that this human has made and communicated to you so you can deliver something better to them.
Per Axbom
Yeah, all this is truly fascinating for me, there are so many options available to you now, to impact the user experience, which means that you should keep track of these, some you can implement now some you just need to be aware of. Some need to be just part of conversations around how are we designing our websites based on our knowledge that people need these things sometimes and we can actually design that from the get-go instead.
James Royal-Lawson
Recommended listening. I think what you could do given that we talked a bit about images now, and we’re talking about efficiency when it comes to carbon emissions and the preferences and so on. I recommend going back listening to Episode 283, which was “Core web vitals” with Katie Hempenius.
Per Axbom
Oh, yeah, good one.
James Royal-Lawson
That might be the one to listen to because I know that we definitely talk about image formats there and how they are supported.
Per Axbom
Well remembered James.
James Royal-Lawson
Thank you.
Per Axbom
And if you want James and myself as part of your next conference, event, or in-house-training, we are offering workshops, talks and courses to inspire and help you grow as individuals teams, and organisations. Get in touch by emailing hej(at)uxpodcast.com. Remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.
[Music]
Per Axbom
So James, do you know why I don’t use beef stew as my computer password?
James Royal-Lawson
No Per, I have no idea why you don’t use beef stew as your computer password.
Per Axbom
It’s not Stroganoff.
James Royal-Lawson
Oh.
Per Axbom
I just thought that was amazing. It’s not Stroganoff.
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom recorded in August 2023 and published as S02E03 (episode 313) of UX Podcast.