CHAPTER 4 Culture of Performance
eMbRaCe The Pain
They say you can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their
shoes. Until you’ve experienced what they’ve experienced — the highs and
the lows — it can be hard to truly empathize. This is especially the case
with performance.
Recently, a big company launched a re-
designed site. It was beautiful. Lovely im-
agery, slick interactions, excellent typogra-
phy; no doubt about it, this was a beautiful
site. But, like many websites, it was hiding
a secret. Underneath that beautiful, glossy
finish was a horribly bloated site.
Firing up the site over a fast, wired
connection, it seemed fine. It loaded pretty
quickly, certainly not slow enough to
cause any worry. But the same site, loaded
on a 3G network suddenly took over 90
seconds to load. A minute and a half of
staring at a white screen and a loading bar.
There is no way this site would’ve made it live if the people designing and
building it had experienced this during testing.
In addition to getting into real code as soon as possible, we need to
embrace the pain of slow networks during our testing. There are a number
of excellent tools available to help simulate different networks with differ-
ent latency and bandwidth constraints. If you’re on a Mac running OS X
10.7 or later, you can use the Network Conditioner. There is also Slowy^15 , a
dirt cheap app that sits in your task bar, making it easy to switch between
different network simulations.15 http://slowyapp.com/Tools like Charles offer the ability to
throttle your connection to see how
it feels to navigate your site over a
poor network.