“Performance as User Experience” by Aaron Gustafson—An Event Apart video

Design is problem solving. Each and every day, we are tasked with finding ways to reduce the friction our users experience on the Web. That means streamlining flows, reducing cognitive load, and writing more appropriate copy, but user experience goes far beyond the interface. Our users’ experiences begin with their first request to our servers.

In this intensely practical 60-minute live presentation recorded at An Event Apart Denver 2017, Adaptive Web Design author Aaron Gustafson explores the ins and outs of page load performance by showing how he made the website of the 10K Apart meet its own contest rules—creating a site that was functional and attractive even without JavaScript, and was less than ten kilobytes at initial load. You’ll finish watching the video with a better understanding of the page load process as well as numerous ways you can improve the projects you’re working on right now.

As would be expected from a former manager of the Web Standards Project, Aaron Gustafson is passionate about web standards and accessibility. In his two decades working on the web, Aaron has worked with a number of companies you’ve probably heard of including Box, Happy Cog, Major League Baseball, McAfee, The New York Times, SAS, StubHub, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Vanguard, Walgreens, and Yahoo. Aaron is a longtime member of Rosenfeld Media’s "experts" group and writes about whatever’s on his mind at aaron-gustafson.com. He is currently a web standards and accessibility advocate at Microsoft, working closely with the Edge browser team.

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