When Design Best Practices Become Performance Worst Practices [SLIDES]
Last week, I had the great privilege of speaking at the annual Shop.org Online Merchandising Workshop. In the performance community, we so often find ourselves preaching to the converted: to each other, to developers, and to others who focus on the under-the-hood aspect of web performance. Attending this Shop.org event was a fantastic chance to talk with a completely different group of professionals — people in marketing and ecommerce — in other words, people who govern much of the high-level strategy and day-to-day decision-making that happens at retail sites.
When attending other speakers’ sessions, it was gratifying to see performance bubble up as a recurring theme. It was obvious to me that there’s an emerging sense of interest and urgency around performance. The tricky part is ensuring that performance gets its share of mental real estate among a group of professionals who are clearly already burdened with a massive set of challenges in the increasingly complex ecommerce space.
The focus of my talk was on what happens when long-held design conventions turn out to be performance liabilities. Using examples from Radware’s quarterly State of the Union ecommerce performance research, I shared four best practices that, when poorly implemented, often end up being worst practices. I invite you to check out my slides (or watch the video of my talk here), and please let me know if you have any questions about our research and findings.