The language and metrics of UX evolve at Velocity 2015
Originally published on the O'Reilly Radar Blog
I’ve attended four O’Reilly Velocity conferences over the last year, and I was struck by a notable shift in the conversations at Velocity in Santa Clara, Calif. Many speakers and attendees have started to change their language and describe the experience of their websites and apps from the user’s perspective.
The balance has shifted from just talking about how fast or reliable a particular system is to the overall experience a user has when they interact with and experience a product. Many people are now looking at themselves from the outside in and developing more empathy for their users. The words “user” and “user experience” were mentioned again and again by speakers.
Here are recent talks from Velocity and other events that highlight this shift to UX concerns.
Velocity: Better performance through better design
Improve web performance by improving your design process… it needs to be iterative, mindful, principled and visual.
At my third Velocity conference for the year (this time in beautiful Barcelona) my keynote presentation explored the ways in which a thoughtfully developed design process can lead to higher functioning teams and better web performance.
Velocity: A better waterfall chart
The way we visualize performance data can have an impact on how we interpret and communicate performance issues within our teams.
In this talk from Velocity New York I explored the importance of data visualization and presented some of my own explorations into re-imagining the classic waterfall chart which is the mainstay of front-end performance analysis.
Skip to 15:30 if you just want to see the data visualization experiments.
One of these experiments was also turned into a performance heatmap bookmarklet.
Velocity: Responsive in the wild
I was lucky enough to give a Lighting Demo at Velocity Conference in Santa Clara. The focus was on research I conducted into 250 responsive websites and how well optimized for performance they were.
