#btconf Berlin, Germany 02 - 04 Nov 2015

Steve Souders & Mark Zeman

SpeedCurve is a small, smart, international team of industry leaders in visualization and performance. They love nothing more than playing with mountains of data and finding simple, meaningful ways to communicate the vital role of fast front-end performance in delivering great user experiences.

Steve Souders

Steve is a pioneer in the world of web performance. Before SpeedCurve, he held positions as Chief Performance Yahoo!, Google's Head Performance Engineer, and Chief Performance Officer at Fastly. Steve "wrote the book" on web performance with High Performance Web Sites, and its follow-up Even Faster Web Sites. He is the creator of many performance tools and services including YSlow, the HTTP Archive, Episodes, ControlJS, and Browserscope. He taught CS193H: High Performance Web Sites at Stanford University and serves as co-chair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O'Reilly.

Steve on Twitter

Mark Zeman

Mark comes from a design background but has always been just as passionate about the code. He founded SpeedCurve in 2013. He is based by the ocean in beautiful New Zealand and has spent 20 years crafting websites and mobile apps.

He is a prominent thought leader in the performance community and popular on the conference circuit where he evangelises the role of design in improving engagement with performance issues. Here is Mark's latest Velocity Conference talk on better performance through better design.

Mark on Twitter

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Design + Performance

Which would you rather have: A rich design or a fast user experience? Users want both, but sometimes the interplay between design and performance feels like a fixed sum game: One side’s gain is the other side’s loss. Design and performance are indeed connected, but it’s more like the yin and yang. They aren’t opposing forces, but instead complement each other. Users want an experience that is rich and fast. The trick for us as designers and developers is figuring out how to do that.

The answer is to adopt an approach that considers both design and performance from the outset. With this approach, designs are conceived by teams of designers and developers working together. Developers benefit by participating in the product definition process. Designers benefit from understanding more about how designs are implemented. There’s an emphasis on early prototyping and tracking performance from the get-go.

With new metrics that focus on what a user actually sees as the page loads, we can now bridge the technical and language gaps that have hindered the seamless creation of great user experiences. In this presentation, Steve Souders, former Chief Performance Yahoo! and Google head performance engineer, explains how promoting a process that brings design and performance together at the beginning of a project helps deliver a web experience that is both fast and rich.

Speakers