By Aaron Gustafson CHAPTER 7Most of us jumped on the Web performance bandwagon pretty quickly.
It just made sense. But can we do more?
Mobile networks present an interesting challenge because they typical-
ly suffer from high latency, and roaming users may jump from cell tower
to cell tower, experiencing a wide variety of service stability and availabil-
ity. The more quickly we can deliver our experiences to our customers, the
more likely they will be able to use them before they lose connectivity in a
dead zone or wind up dropping from 4G speeds to Edge.
Then there’s the money issue. Few mobile data customers are lucky
enough to have an unlimited usage plan. Most users are paying by the
bit and the larger our site is, the more it costs them to view our content.
Anything extraneous we send to our customers is tantamount to a tax on
accessing our content or service, and we aren’t even the one reaping the
financial benefits.
This is why it is critical that
we focus on the core purpose of
a Web page or interface when
we build it. Mat Marquis’ now
famous tweet (see on the right)
says it all. I don’t think anyone
has more clearly articulated the
tension between a marketing de-
partment’s vision for a page and
the customer’s. Sure, we want our
pages to be beautiful, but there are trade-offs we need to be aware of. In the
end, we should be empathetic toward the people who visit our websites so
they become (and remain) our customers.
To that end, let’s consider a typical newspaper website. Most newspa-
per sites contain one or more pages that display a number of articles in ag-
gregate. The homepage is a typical location, but newspaper section landing
pages often function similarly.
Mat “Wilto” Marquis on twitter.com