The Real Business of Web Design by John Waters

Author:John Waters
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Allworth
Published: 2003-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

There Is Function and Then There Is Function

The functional specification document mentioned earlier, a requirement of early stage Web development, should always be written from the visitor’s point of view. It outlines the activities that the visitor can accomplish on the site. The visitor should be able to see these actions. If this button is pushed, the visitor goes to this area. If that item is clicked, then greater detail is given. And if “purchase now” is selected, the visitor will be shown the three- to five-step checkout process. These are the responsibility of the interaction designer because they all have to do with the user interaction.

Behind this scene there are many other functions that need to happen within the system that the visitor never needs to know. These are the responsibility of the functional designer. As a very simple example: When the visitor clicks on “purchase now,” a programming function needs to request the buyer’s data and the shopping cart data from the appropriate Web forms. A function may then insert the data into a buyer table and start the order process by creating a row in the order table, assigning an order ID for each item, and checking the inventory table. If inventory is available, the inventory table must be decreased as the item is written to the order table. If inventory is unavailable, a message must be sent to the visitor and the initial process rolled back. On the Web, with the possibility of multiple purchases occurring at the same time, this activity must be simultaneous and protected, so there will never be a point during a transaction when data is partially processed. Otherwise we would not know the real state of inventory.

Each action that a user takes on a transaction-oriented Web site may initiate multiple functions similar to this one, on the back-end or inside any number of computers. These functions require a separate architectural map, a database schema, that shows the content and connection of various tables: the product table, inventory table, order table, buyer table. This may also show the relationship of numerous databases such as customer profiles, business rules, account management, credit checking, monetary conversion, etc. This is the responsibility of the information architect or database designer on the functional design team.

In some cases a programmer who lays out the architecture and writes the code for the system internals and for the user interaction may do all this. In other cases this will be developed by numerous programmers in different cities working on various parts of the system that all need to work together. For this reason, it is important when tossing around terms like information architecture and functionality that everyone understands what specific information and what specific functions are being discussed.

Visitor functionality and systems functionality are totally different animals and require different mind-sets for development. “To be a good programmer,” Alan Cooper says in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, “one must be sympathetic to the nature and needs of the computer.

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