We recently took a big family road trip out west. We wound through New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado and even a bit of Oklahoma before returning to Texas. We stopped to check out the cemetery plots of our frontiersman ancestors, and got great use out of a National Parks pass that we picked up at White Sands.

Life on the road presents obstacles that we don’t face at home. Among them: Internet speed!

At a historic hotel in New Mexico, I found myself hovering downstairs in the lobby near the router trying to upload a couple of things online to keep colleagues unblocked.

This reminded me of one aspect of the whole “UI/UX” space that often goes unmentioned by us design types - performance!

On both websites and digital product experiences, users expect pages to load fast, react quickly when they interact, and not jump around as they are rendering.

It’s a good idea to keep an eye on Google Core Web Vitals (CWV). A recent article from the online usability testing tool Loop 11 suggests the following actions:

• Monitor both desktop and mobile performance metrics

• Optimize images (decreasing the file sizes of images without sacrificing their quality)

• Use lazy load to load the elements that are visible on the screen and postpone additional loading until the user scrolls.

• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to get your UI’s content physically closer to users, reducing load time

• Reduce the negative impacts of JavaScript, by avoiding it where you can and render-blocking or minifying it where you can’t avoid it.

• Stabilize your site layout by holding appropriate space on the UI before things load

You’ll likely want to work with a designer and developer in order to accomplish much of the above, but the investment can really pay off. If you need help increasing performance for your users, we offer a range of flexible programs. Book a consultation to see if there’s a fit.

Not only do fast-loading experiences satisfy users better, but they also reduce abandonment. There’s a whole cycle of benefits—lower abandonment can mean more conversion ($$$!) and higher rankings in search, leading to more traffic.