When we discuss performance, we tend to focus on professional challenges. But in reality, the most difficult and critical component of optimizing social work performance is getting colleagues to engage with performance at all. We cannot continuously maintain a reasonable speed of our website’s user experience on our own, without organizational leaders, peer designers and developers, and without clients who recognize the importance of performance work.
We will need to demonstrate to two groups of people why they should care
about performance:
Very important people (VIPs) — such as managers, executives, and clients — care about engagement metrics. They are also very proud of their business and how well they are doing compared to the competition.
Collaborating designers and developers — your equals — care about your workflow and delivering good work. They want to create a user experience that they can then proudly show off.
The two groups definitely overlap; for example, developers and designers are very concerned with engagement rates. There are a number of great ways to showcase performance data, including Lonely Planet’s public dashboards . At Etsy, we even publish a quarterly report showing how performance has changed over time and what’s causing those changes. But when we convince others to look at performance, we sometimes get bogged down in numbers and graphs. Making a real culture shift is much more difficult.
Moreover, performance is unfortunately a rather invisible part of the user experience. If you’ve done your job really well, users won’t even notice! However, slowness creates truly painful experiences. In his book High Performance Browser Networking, Ilya Grigorik describes how people perceive speed and outlines the corresponding metrics:
a response received within 100 milliseconds is perceived by the user as immediate,
100 to 300 milliseconds creates a small but perceptible delay,
300 milliseconds to 1 second feels like a “computer whine”
1 second establishes a noticeable, noticeable delay for the user. Just one single second of waiting disrupts turkey phone number data the flow of thought, and the user has probably already started mentally context switching.
Try to put yourself in the role of your
Fellow designer or developer. How annoying will it be for them to go through lists of numbers? If a VIP doesn’t already care about performance as an integral part of the overall user experience, how could the affiliate program also has a more familiar method you use numbers (or graphs representing those numbers) to get them to care?
Take your message to the next level. Help people around you feel the impact of performance on the overall user experience. Demonstrating something is much more persuasive than just talking about it; presenting real user experiences is much more by lists impressive than just staring at some numbers or graphs.