Mobile Performance for a Great User Experience

Today on Radio Johnny Jeff Parks talks with Eric Phetteplace, Emerging Technologies Librarian at Chesapeake College in rural Maryland, who will be presenting at the upcoming edUi conference about the importance of performance when designing for mobile. Eric argues that performance cannot be an afterthought but should be a distinct development concern in every project. He describes the most important improvements to make, shares tools that can automate performance improvements, as well as the specific problems libraries and educational institutions typically encounter.

Quotes

“…we think about the design, we think about the content – what the message is – but really you have to consider how is this going to perform…Writing a performant website is the baseline that needs to be a consideration on everything you work with… reducing the amount of data being sent and the number of HTTP requests…”

“…users expect sites to load faster on their smartphones than they do on their desktop computers which are a lot more high powered, and most are on better Internet connections. Not only that; the trend is getting worse! The first study [by Gomez] was done in 2009 and then again in 2011. The first time around, the number was about 60% of people thought things should be faster on their smartphones… the next time around it was something like 80%”

“As the web becomes a mature development platform, new things are constantly coming out that make our lives easier – that make us not have to deal with the nitty-gritty details. [See Notes below for examples]“

Notes

* Follow Eric on Twitter
* The .htaccess
* Filament Group’s South Street
* Browser Stack
* MobiTest
* Web Page Test
* Yeoman
* jQuery Mobile Download Builder
* Steve Souders
* Stoyan Stefanov
* Jason Grigsby