As Client-Server Style Apps Resurface Performance Metrics Must Include API

Published by SYS-CON Media:

I recently received an e-mail from Strangeloop Networks with a subject of: "The quest for the holy grail of Web speed: 2-second page load times." Being focused on optimizing the user-interface, they appropriately quoted usability expert Jakob Nielsen, but also included some interesting statistics:

57% of site visitors will bounce after waiting 3 seconds or less for a page to load.

Aberdeen Group surveyed 160 companies and discovered that, on average, slowing down a site by just one second results in a 7% reduction in conversions.

Shopzilla accelerated its average page load time from 6 seconds to 1.2 seconds and experienced a 12% increase in revenue and a 25% increase in page views.

Read full article here. 

Artbeads.com sees 6% revenue increase after accelerating its website

Artbeads.com, one of the largest bead and jewelry supply ecommerce sites in the United States, has selected the Strangeloop Site Optimizer to improve page load times on its website. Immediately following implementation, the company has reported a dramatic increase in their online sales.

"The Strangeloop Site Optimizer greatly outperformed our hopes," said Michael Hervieux, Chief Operating Officer at Artbeads.com. "Our goal was a baseline revenue increase of 2.5%, but we ran a lengthy A/B test and immediately saw that, for the optimized pages, revenue per visit jumped by 8% and overall revenue grew by 6%."

 Read the full announcement here and the related case study here.

Why we need to be more than just page speed advocates. We need to be user experience advocates.

From the blog, Web Performance Today, of Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby:

The other day I was thinking about the many parallels between the early days of the web and the early days of performance:

We’re at a really interesting juncture. We’re about to enter a time of heavy transition, and while it’s a necessary transition, it’s not going to be easy for everyone. (Warning: There will be crabbiness.)

Read the full post here.

The top ten reasons to work at Strangeloop

Want to work for a great company? We do, too. So we created it.

We're proud to be a three-time winner of the title "Best Company to Work for in BC". How did we earn this honor? Sure, we offer perks from the great (excellent benefits packages and stock options) to the small (a well-stocked kitchen, flexible work hours, and all the ping-pong you can handle).

But more important, we give every person who works here an opportunity to shine and reach their fullest potential in a supportive environment.

Here are our top ten reasons to work at Strangeloop:

1. We're making the internet faster, one website at a time. Everyone hates slow sites. We make it easier for people to do what they need to do online, with less hair-pulling over long wait times. That's something to be proud of.

2. Innovation is our lifeblood. Strangeloop was born out of a crazy idea literally scratched on a napkin. We embrace new ideas and aren't afraid to take chances on new approaches.

3. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Which is why we have a kitchen fully stocked with everything you need to start every day right.

4. Everyone is a manager. We have just enough corporate structure to be healthy, and not an ounce more. We believe smart people are capable of working toward common goals collaboratively, and we're proud to say that our people prove us right every single day.

5. Life is simply awesome. Or L.I.S.A., as we've named our in-house concierge. Whether you need someone to pick up your drycleaning, shortlist caterers for your wedding, or mail your packages, L.I.S.A. will take care of it for you.

6. Only the best people work here. Before coming on board, every potential new Strangeloopian runs an interview gauntlet that includes everyone from the CEO to a committee of their peers. As a result, we get people who aren't just talented -- they're pretty cool, too.

7. It's great to work for the love, but money and perks are good, too. We pay well and offer a pretty competitive benefits package, to boot.

8. When it comes to work/life balance, we walk the walk. We believe that happy, personally fulfilled people make the best employees. This is why we offer telecommuting and flexible work schedules (and no, that's not code for "We're flexible about letting you work all the time").

9. Our president's door is always open. So is our CEO's door. And our CTO's. And our VP Finance's. And... you get the picture.

10. Work hard, play hard. At Strangeloop, we get stuff done. And after the stuff gets done, we celebrate -- whether with a game of ping pong in the boardroom, a night of bowling, or an Iron Chef-style cook-off.

P.S. We're hiring.

Are you focusing on first and repeat views? Then you may be ignoring 96% of your page traffic.

From Strangeloop president, Joshua Bixby's blog:

Question: What do you think these four waterfalls have in common? (Hint: Same browser. Same connection speed. Same location.)

Answer: They’re all the same page (the Lonely Planet home page, to be specific), but from four distinct perspectives: first view, repeat view, and two different flow views.

Why measuring first view and repeat view is not enough

When most of us run simple performance tests, we usually focus on two perspectives: the first view and the repeat view. Unfortunately, life is not this simple.

On non-landing pages (for most of you, that would be all pages but your home page), first view and repeat view only represent about 4% of the total views. There’s another view — the flow view — which represents approximately 96% of the traffic for most of your web pages.

And yet despite its incredible relevance, flow view gets almost zero attention.

Read more here. 

Crazy Theory #9021-D: Can you boost conversions by loading keywords first?

From Strangeloop president, Joshua Bixby's blog:

These days I’ve been reading The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt and I’ve been writing about progressive enhancement. The two came together last night when I read this bit in my book:

After its long infatuation with information processing models and computer metaphors, psychologists began to realize that there are really two processing systems at work in the mind at all times: controlled processes and automatic processes. [...]

…exposure to words related to the elderly makes people walk more slowly; words related to professors make people smarter at the game of Trivial Pursuit; and words related to soccer hooligans make people dumber. And these effects don’t even depend on your consciously reading the words; the same effects can occur when the words are presented subliminally, that is, flashed on a screen for just a few hundredths of a second, too fast for your conscious mind to register them. But some part of the mind does see the words, and it sets in motion behaviors that psychologists can measure.

According to John Bargh, the pioneer in this research, these experiments show that most mental processes happen automatically, without the need for conscious attention or control. Most automatic processes are completely unconscious, although some of them show a part of themselves to consciousness.

What’s interesting to me is that it doesn’t seem to take much to trigger these automatic processes. In a test to see how long we need to be exposed to certain words in order for these words to influence our actions, researchers found that subliminally exposing test subjects to images for just 13-26 milliseconds has a significant effect on behaviour.

Find out more here. 

CIO Insight: Video interview with Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby

From Strangeloop president, Joshua Bixby's blog:

Like any normal self-respecting person, I hate watching myself in videos, but my marketing team is holding a gun* to my head, so here you go. Maggie Rulli interviewed me for the latest edition of CIO Insight. She asked some good questions: is the internet getting faster or slower? What’s the root cause of slow web pages? Why are internet users getting more and more impatient?

(Apologies in advance for my boring office wall. I forgot my blue screen, so they weren’t able to run the helicopter attack scene from Apocalypse Now in the background as I’d requested.)

Find out more here. 

Progressive vs. regressive enhancement: Where and how do you draw the line?

From the blog of Strangeloop president, Joshua Bixby:

As Steve Souders has written in his blog “There are too many pages that are blank while several hundred kB of JavaScript is downloaded, parsed, and executed so that the page can be created using the DOM.” To address this problem, our community has broadly adopted the mantra of progressive enhancement, or delivering the page as HTML so it renders quickly, and then enhancing it with JavaScript.

At one extreme, we know that blank is bad. At the other extreme, we have agreed for the most part that quick rendering, even if this means initially sacrificing a bit of functionality, is good. What has always interested me is the area between these two extremes. 

I wrote a post almost a year ago about how Symantec was showing its visitors the wrong content first on a key landing page. An eyetracking study performed by usability expert Jakob Nielsen found that delaying the load time of a critical page element resulted in that element being virtually ignored by the user when it finally loaded.

Find out more here.