User experience and web performance are among the best indicators of online business outcomes. Faster websites have happier users. Those happy users visit longer and spend more. But why is that?
When we think about web performance, it’s easy to fall into an abyss of metrics. Backend time, Start Render, Core Web Vitals, Lighthouse scores… these metrics are useful and necessary, but they’re just a means to an end:
Understanding how to create faster, more joyous user experiences.
We’ll walk through a brief history of UX and web performance research, highlighting key studies that connect the dots between performance and user experience and sharing some educated guesses about new metrics that are just around the corner.
You’ll take away insights into why slow sites enrage you, and why you should prioritize making your own sites and apps as fast as possible for your own users.
We still have so much to learn. Some day we’ll laugh at how much we assumed and how little we actually knew. But if we stay on course, we’ll get there.
Tammy Everts has spent more than two decades studying how people use the web. Over the years, she has worked on groundbreaking UX studies that have involved EEG headsets, facial action coding, and Google’s machine-learning system. As Chief Experience Officer at SpeedCurve – a UX monitoring company with a customer list that ranges from Airbnb to Zillow – Tammy’s focus over the past 10+ years has been the intersection of user experience, site speed, and business metrics. Her book, Time Is Money: The Business Value of Web Performance (O’Reilly), is a distillation of much of this research.
Tammy is a sought-after speaker, having spoken at events like Chrome Dev Summit, Shop.org, Smashing Conference, Beyond Tellerrand, and IRCE. She is co-chair of the annual performance.now() conference in Amsterdam. She also co-curates WPO Stats, a collection of web performance case studies.
Tammy Everts