Interview with Dave Rupert

Paravel’s lead developer discusses hostile discourse, sick metrics, and why we need a revolution in the way we think about websites

“‘Why did I get involved in websites?’ I think that’s a good annual crisis to have,” says Dave Rupert. “Part of the reason is that there are so many bad ones. I’m trying to make the internet OK, rather than this advertising wasteland.”

Rupert’s career in web development began in 2002 when Trent Walton paid him $80 for a schooling in HTML. Since then, they, along with long-time compadre Reagan Ray, have forged ahead as the three-man web-building team that is Paravel.

These days, more and more of Paravel’s work involves integrating with large organisations, which means facing challenges brought about by people as opposed to technology. As best practices have become more widely adopted, the actual process of building a website has become more straightforward. The hardest challenges today come from people and the intricate structures
into which they arrange themselves.

One exercise in particular is sure to uncover tensions: “If you want to discover trouble spots in your organisation, all you have to do is redesign your site’s main navigation,” says Rupert. “Every department wants to be in there, so there’s this full organisational battle happening in a 50px by 800px stretch.”

“Your website is a manifestation of your organisation’s
problems. It shows the world how you work together”

Team talk

One of Paravel’s best-known accomplishments is Microsoft’s 2012 homepage redesign, hailed by many as a milestone in responsive design. According to Rupert, the combination of personalities on the team was key to the redesign’s success. “I didn’t know project managers could be this good!” he enthuses. “They let us exist in a bubble, shielding us from the politics of any big organisation.”

The final state of your website can say a lot about your team, Rupert continues: “Websites are very rarely the product of one engineer or one designer; they’re usually the product of a bunch of personalities clashing. Your website is almost a manifestation of your organisation, and your organisation’s problems. It shows you more of what a group of people does than what a group of technologies can do.”

Hostile discourse

But it isn’t only big organisations that need to work on communication and empathy. According to Rupert, the whole web design industry needs to work to improve the tone of its online discourse. He describes the tendency to attack, and even demonise, people with opposing opinions as “very weird” — yet he confesses that he’s felt the urge to do it himself.

“The phrase ‘Kill your darlings’ comes to mind, ” he says. “If I’ve spent months making something and someone attacks it, my instinct is to protect my baby. So now I’m a mama bear character about my code.”

This kind of behaviour is particularly unhelpful for people hoping to enter the industry, says Rupert. “If you are a young coder and you see people coming at each other with guns and knives, [you’re likely to] say, ‘No, thank you. I’m just going to live at my parents’. If we create a hostile environment, we will not attract talent; talent is probably the first thing to leave in a very weird, crowded and over-excited room. We need to slow our roll, and back away from this religious level of discussion.”

All devices, all people

Rupert’s love for the web began at the age of 14, when he created his first site using AOL Pages. Like most people who were there at the start, he is passionate about the web’s founding principles: that it should work on all devices, for all people.

Intrigued by the tendency of US and UK-based web professionals to use only Apple devices, Rupert recently set himself the task of switching to Windows. This idea was conceived when he discovered half of the listeners of ShopTalk, the industry podcast he co-hosts with Chris Coyier are Windows users, most likely because the audience is global. It occurred to him that Mac usage exists within a particular geographic bubble: in the wider world, even web designers use other devices.

The exercise has proved to be an interesting investigation into the stigma attached to Microsoft products. “I pull out [my tablet] at a meeting and people are like, ‘Woah! A Surface! I’ve never seen one before!” he laughs. “People’s schemas get rocked by someone using a device they don’t expect.”

Although he loves Apple products, Rupert maintains that if we
assume that everyone is using them to build sites, we strip the web of what it’s good at, which is working on everything. By buying into the monoculture of devices, we bottleneck ourselves. Greater diversity would help us build a better web.

In the spirit of making the web work better for all its users, in 2013, Rupert started The Accessibility Project. A collection of short, easy-to-read articles on a notoriously difficult subject, its aim is to make accessibility itself more accessible. One key principle is to be forgiving and avoid implying that people are bad if they don’t know all the techniques. “If we only imagine the web in terms of able-bodied people, we’ve missed out on a whole sector of the population,” says Rupert. “We unintentionally give them the finger.”

Purity vs pragmatism

Paravel founder Trent Walton’s post on device-agnostic development outlines the team’s principles for building websites. Sites should be built with the assumptions that people are on slow connections and that they’re tapping rather than clicking. They should be built so they’ll work on old or obscure browsers; and so they’ll look good on tiny screens.

Rupert is keen on evangelising these ideals, but also realistic about the feasibility of always being able to follow them. “There’s a theoretical purity, [which is] how a site could be, and then there’s the reality of a boss who opens the door and says, ‘We’re using Angular today!’” he jokes.

“How one person views the web might not be how someone who has a job and a boss and responsibility views it. This is kind of a stoner conversation, but maybe every website is the perfect manifestation of what it was ever going to be. Maybe websites are a reflection of our organisations, more than
they are of a theoretical, purified model.”

“Metrics trick us. Getting 10 page views because clicking ‘Next Photo’ loads a new page is not better”

Blinded by tradition

Rupert asserts that the industry is too stuck in its ways when it comes to many aspects of design. As an example, he cites Jen Simmons’ concept of ‘sidebar blindness’, which she discussed in ShopTalk 185. According to Simmons, eye-tracking and heatmap data show that no one looks at sidebars; we have been conditioned to ignore them. Yet we all continue to use them, even though no one is looking.

Another aspect of the web that needs to be shaken up is advertising. Adverts and tracking are becoming so intrusive that the use of adblockers, which Rupert describes as a “very shocking technology”, has become mainstream. “How to do ads well might be the big thing of 2016, ” he says. “I was very
surprised to learn recently that two major web design publications experience a 40 per cent ad block rate. They’re losing out on 40 per cent of their money. That’s sad, especially for these small, independent publishers.”

Rupert suggests that the problem should be approached from a more user-focused perspective, and that the value of adverts and tracking data should be reappraised. Mostly as a learning exercise, he runs a single advert on his website that happens to get a click-through rate that’s 10 times the industry average. But while his data suggests that one advert works better than 10, he doesn’t see a valuation 10 times the industry average. Our current model is based around packing in as many ads as possible. “I would
like to experiment with a model whereby advertisers pay per kilobyte: a metred feed, like when you paid per letter for the classifieds in a newspaper,” he says.

Sick metrics

Rupert believes that much of the web’s brokenness is brought about by aiming for the wrong things: traffic, Likes and hearts. “We have a perverse view of metrics, ” he says. “We measure time on site, but maybe people shouldn’t be spending a lot of time on your site. Maybe you should be communicating your ideas so effectively that they only stay a few seconds. Our metrics trick us. ‘Oh, I got 10 page views because I did the thing where you click ‘Next Photo’ and it loads a whole other page.’ That’s not better. We have these sick metrics, and we’re poisoning our own well with them.”

For Rupert, one area of promise is the work of the Chrome team on progressive web apps and the Service Worker. “The app economy is eroding,” he points out. “If you spend tens of thousands of dollars to build an app and launch to one market, that’s much riskier than launching to everyone.”

Rupert explains that under the progressive web app model, if you visit a website twice for more than five minutes you will be invited to put it on your home screen. If you do that, some assets will be cached, meaning the site will load faster and behave more like a native app. “That’s such a beautiful invitation, and I think it’s the future of building products efficiently, ” he says. “I hope people will really get behind it.”

One of Paravel’s guiding principles is: No one gives a shit about what you do. While this might sound like harsh advice, Rupert has found it’s the best attitude to take when you unveil your latest masterpiece and the blog post gets three Likes. “Realise that everyone’s busy, ” he says. “You invested your heart in something and that’s still valid and good, so don’t let Likes and faves dictate what you’re putting out. Some things will be a smashing success and others will wither on the vine, and that’s OK. Don’t expect success: just enjoy it if it happens.”

Words by Tanya Combrinck. Photography by Jessica Attie

This article originally appeared in issue 277 (march 2016) of net magazine