CHAPTER 4 Culture of Performance
TaSK CoMPleTion
Each of the principles above are ultimately about reducing the amount of
time it takes for the user to complete a given task. The importance of task
completion can’t be overlooked. There’s the classic study conducted by UIE
back in 2001^34 on the impact of the time taken to complete a task on a vis-
itor’s perception of performance. Researchers sat people down in front of
ten different sites using a 56kpbs modem and gave them tasks to complete.
The surprise came when people rated the slowest site (Amazon.com)
as one of the fastest when asked. The reason was that Amazon.com allowed
people to complete their tasks in fewer steps.
Ultimately, this is what it comes down to: how fast the user feels the
site is. You can get a long way by implementing the performance tech-
niques so frequently cited for developers, but to influence how your users
feel about the performance of your site, performance optimization has to
involve the designer.
If you’re a designer, consider yourself the first line of defense. Yes,
ultimately the developer will have to make many of the specific optimiza-
tions, but you are the person who gets to set the stage. You must make the
decisions early on that will either encourage the site to be as fast as it is
beautiful, or encourage it to be beautiful, yet bloated.Conclusion
Good performance doesn’t happen by chance: it must be planned for and
carefully designed. To avoid contributing to the ever increasing obesity of
the Web, performance must become baked into the process from the very
beginning of the process.
Taking steps like setting a performance budget, simulating poor con-
nection speeds, and getting onto real browsers and devices as early as pos-
sible will help to make everyone involved more aware of the performance
trade-offs.34 http://www.uie.com/articles/download_time/