My Highlights from Awwwards Conference LA 2017 — Day 2

Here comes another part of the story: I personally enjoyed the second day even more at the conference! Having all the most talented and experienced designers and developers from Google, Adobe, New York Times…under one roof for a day, isn’t that amazing?

I’m so glad I was there, in LA. The event will be in Berlin next February!

There were many inspirational speakers on that day, but I’d like to highlight my favorite one on that day: 👉

The Illusion of Speed — How You Can Fix The Speed of Your Site Without Making It Faster

Speaker: Paul Bakaus | Developer Advocate, AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) at Google

Paul has been generously sharing his slides (here) and published a blog post “What I learned from going to a design conference” — Please check it out! The slides are great, and his perspectives on attending a design conference as a developer are so interesting.

At Thinknear, I work with developers/engineers very closely. My team consists of about twenty developers and one designer, which is me — so I’m always into knowing and understanding more about how developers’ mind works.

Fun event helps team collaboration

Also, as we’re building a business intelligence software, users are seeking for powerful, efficient, yet intuitive UI to complete their tasks at work on daily basics. Efficiency and speed have come across as a major discussion on the table for many times.

And office dogs contribute, literally

In Paul’s talk, he addresses the pain that all the web performance developers feel today: speed. As today’s human beings are creatures that have shorter attention spans than goldfish, how can developers and designers utilize social science like psychology and web technologies to come up with new solutions?

As a designer, I found his talk fascinating. It’s great (and healthy) for designers to revisit this topic from engineer’s perspective. Again, here are the slides, which I referred a lot during writing. I am not good at taking notes especially I have the same attention span as a goldfish… 😂

Thanks to Paul for sharing it!

My Takeaways:

That’s a great image. Self-explanatory.

Perceived Performance vs. Actual Performance —

• “The perception of performance is just as effective as actual performance in many cases.” — Apple
• “We are all living in the past: Our consciousness lags 80 milliseconds behind actual events. When you think an event occurs it has already happened.” — David Eagleman
• “No-one cares how fast your site is, just how fast it feels.”

Train station = 405 traffic to me (source: Paul’s slides)

Context matters —

• Longer wait times can build up anticipation.
• Sometimes, speed decreases the value of a service

Active vs. Passive Waiting —

• Time is perceived as much longer in passive phase.
• On average, people in passive wait mode overestimate their waiting time by about 36%.
• One way to improve perception: Shorten the passive phase, and lengthen the active phase

I’ve quoted a lot from his original slides. In the second part of his talk, Paul introduced many potential solutions to tackle the speed issue. I love this part in particular— it makes senses to a lot of products I’ve used. I believe you’ve also seen plenty of the below patterns without noticing the technology/design behind the scene.

Just to name a few examples

Potential Solutions to enhance the perceived performance:

• Preemptive Start — Start the work before the user realizes. e.g. multi-page forms, viewport prefetching, resource hints
• Early Completion — Show stuff before all of it is ready. e.g. progressive images, static layout in AMP, Youtube
• Optimistic UI — Show an action as completed that really hasn’t. e.g. Instagram always pretends to work
• Precognition — Visualizing the future before it happens
• Visual Illusion — Sometimes enough to change time perception

Finally, Paul wrapped his talk with some trickier situations, like browsers only unload the current page after the new page has started rendering, here are some potential solutions I’d love to try later at work. I’m excited to practice this knowledge for the product we’re building at Thinknear — and I will keep things posted on Medium!

• Smart skeleton UIs
• Viewport pre-rendering
• Service Worker caching
• Seamless Transitions

Thank you for reading this, again. My original intention on it was just to share my notes with my colleagues, but I started to feel like — This conference was far too good, and it’s a pity if I cannot share it with the broader audience.

I hope you have found my post entertaining and pleasing! I’d like to say thank you to all the speakers, staff, and volunteers from the Awwwards Conference. They earned the credit and made it happen.

Hopefully, Awwwards conference will come back to California the year after next year! 😉