Usability - Part 3
Continuing with my series on the topic of usability, I’m going to look at something which, at first glance, you might think has absolutely nothing to do with it: Performance.
What do I mean by performance? There are many possible definitions to choose from, but for the purposes of this article, I’m simply going to use it to refer to the time taken to move between different parts of a web site. With broadband now almost ubiquitous, even on mobile phones, you probably don’t notice the time taken to load a web page. This is good, but it does mean that web sites that do not perform to the standards you expect tend to stick out – for all the wrong reasons.
This comes back to users having a goal in mind when they visit a web site; any site which seems slow will hinder that goal – this means that even with great design and functionality it will be perceived as having bad usability. The solution to this would seem to be simple – just make the site perform better! Unfortunately, this is not a simple goal to achieve, because the root cause is usually the perception of performance (or lack thereof) rather than the actual performance.
At Base Creative, we employ a number of techniques to improve both the actual and perceptual performance. Some of these are profoundly technical, such as optimising the code behind the scenes or doing certain tasks in the background; others are seemingly little things like a progress bar or displaying a “Please wait” message to the user. In combination, all of these tweaks let us achieve the desired result: that the user gets to concentrate on completing their tasks, rather than the web site getting in the way.
Author: Sean Ellingham, Web Developer
Update: Will a web page's Google ranking be affected by loading time?