Eco-designing a digital service
The eco-design approach, from need to end of life: functional unit, sorting features, compatibility with old devices, the themes of the general framework and measurement with EcoIndex.
- 27 cards
- 4 topics
- Free
The outline, topic by topic
Each topic is weighted the way the exam weighs it.
- Concepts
- Questions
- Sort and link
- Scenarios
A few cards from the deck
Eco-design: what is it?
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An approach that reduces the environmental impacts of a product or service from its design onwards, across its whole life cycle.
The choices that weigh most are made before the first line is written: a badly framed need or a useless feature costs more than poorly optimised code.
A home page goes from 1,200 DOM elements, 90 requests and 4 MB to 400 elements, 30 requests and 1 MB. What happens to its EcoIndex?
- It goes up, because all three measures fall
- It goes down, because the page holds less content
- It stays the same, because it only measures the server
- It only moves if the number of visitors changes
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It goes up, because all three measures fall
The score rises when the DOM, requests and weight fall. It is computed on the loaded page, not on traffic or on the server.
A page's EcoIndex takes into account the size of the …, the number of … and the weight of the data ….
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A page's EcoIndex takes into account the size of the DOM, the number of requests and the weight of the data transferred.
These three measures can be taken from the browser, with no access to the server. The fewer elements, requests and bytes, the better the score.
Functional unit: what is it?
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The service delivered, quantified and bounded, to which impacts are related so that two solutions can be compared: for example "checking a bus timetable once on a phone".
Without it, you compare things that do not deliver the same service: a light app that does only half the job looks better than it is.
The canteen app weighs 90 MB and no longer installs on 2018 phones. Which answer solves the problem at its root?
- Offer a light website and lower the minimum version
- Ask the students concerned to change phones
- Compress the app and keep the same minimum version
- Add an animation to hide the install time
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Offer a light website and lower the minimum version
The need (seeing the menu) requires neither 90 MB nor a recent system. Asking for a new phone shifts the impact to manufacturing; compressing without lowering the version leaves old phones out.