The Illusion Of Developer “Productivity” Opens The Door To Snake Oil – Codemanship’s Blog

There are a lot of astute observations in here.

In Search of Lost Time, by Tom Vanderbilt

Temporal standards bodies.

Will Serving Real HTML Content Make A Website Faster? Let’s Experiment! - WebPageTest Blog

Spoiler: the answer to the question in the title is a resounding “hell yeah!”

Scott brings receipts.

How normal am I?

A fascinating interactive journey through biometrics using your face.

Can you count on what you measure? | Clearleft

One of my favourite episodes of the Clearleft podcast is on measuring design. This post from Chris is a complements that episode in a sensible and practical style.

What gets measured gets done. You are what you measure. Measurement eliminates argument. If you work in an environment that puts store in these oft-quoted business adages then I urge you to take a moment to challenge your calculations. Let’s review our metrics to ensure they can stand up and be counted.

The impoverished language of business | Clearleft

A good post by Andy on “the language of business,” which is most cases turns out to be numbers, numbers, numbers.

While it seems reasonable and fair to expect a modicum of self-awareness of why you’re employed and what business value you drive in the the context of the work you do, sometimes the incessant self-flagellation required to justify and explain this to those who hired you may be a clue to a much deeper and more troubling question at the heart of the organisation you work for.

This pairs nicely with the Clearleft podcast episode on measuring design.

The Performance Inequality Gap, 2021 - Infrequently Noted

Developers, particularly in Silicon Valley firms, are definitionally wealthy and enfranchised by world-historical standards. Like upper classes of yore, comfort (“DX”) comes with courtiers happy to declare how important comfort must surely be. It’s bunk, or at least most of it is.

As frontenders, our task is to make services that work well for all, not just the wealthy. If improvements in our tools or our comfort actually deliver improvements in that direction, so much the better. But we must never forget that measurable improvement for users is the yardstick.

Cloudflare’s privacy-first Web Analytics is now available for everyone

Cloudfare’s alternative to Google Analytics is now available—for free—regardless of whether your a Cloudflare customer or not:

Being privacy-first means we don’t track individual users for the purposes of serving analytics. We don’t use any client-side state (like cookies or localStorage) for analytics purposes. Cloudflare also doesn’t track users over time via their IP address, User Agent string, or any other immutable attributes for the purposes of displaying analytics — we consider “fingerprinting” even more intrusive than cookies, because users have no way to opt out.

The Core Web Vitals hype train

Goodhart’s Law applied to Google’s core web vitals:

If developers start to focus solely on Core Web Vitals because it is important for SEO, then some folks will undoubtedly try to game the system.

Personally, my beef with core web vitals is that they introduce even more uneccessary initialisms (see, for example, Harry’s recent post where he uses CWV metrics like LCP, FID, and CLS—alongside TTFB and SI—to look at PLPs, PDPs, and SRPs. I mean, WTF?).

Is my host fast yet?

This is an interesting project to try to rank web hosts by performance:

Real-world server response (Time to First Byte) latencies, as experienced by real-world users navigating the web.

Designing for Progressive Disclosure by Steven Hoober

Progressive disclosure interface patterns categorised and evaluated:

• popups,
• drawers,
• mouseover popups (just say no!),
• accordions,
• tabs,
• new pages,
• scrolling,
• scrolling sideways.

I really like the hypertext history invoked in this article.

The piece finishes with a great note on the MacNamara fallacy:

Everyone thinks metrics let us measure results. But, actually, they don’t. They measure only what they are measuring. Engagement, for example, is not something that can be measured, so we use an analogue for it. Time on page. Or clicks.

We often end up measuring what is quick, cheap, and easy to measure. Therefore, few organizations regularly conduct usability testing or customer-satisfaction surveys, but lots use analytics.

Even today, organizations often use clicks as a measure of engagement. So, all too often, they design user interfaces to generate clicks, so the system can measure them.

Web bloat

Pages are often designed so that they’re hard or impossible to read if some dependency fails to load. On a slow connection, it’s quite common for at least one depedency to fail.

Fire up Reader Mode and read this excellent article informed by data from using a typically slow connection in rural USA today. Two findings are:

1. A large fraction of the web is unusable on a bad connection. Even on a good (0% packetloss, no ping spike) dialup connection, some sites won’t load.
2. Some sites will use a lot of data!

CrUX.RUN

This is so useful! Get instant results from Google’s Chrome User Experience Report without having to wait (or pay) for BigQuery.

Here’s an example of my site’s metrics over the last few months, complete with nice charts.

New kilogram standard: how the SI unit of mass is being redefined - Vox

A fascinating look at standards in the real world. In this case, it’s the kilogram, which is shedding its French Revolutionary roots in favour of the Planck constant.

Our messy human measurements have transcended their messy humanness; they have been melded with an eternal truth.

Mention of The Master Of The Kilogram reminded me of The Keeper Of Time.

Unit deconverter - make your units less useful!

Take a perfectly useful standardised measurement of length, weight, speed or time, and convert to something far less useful (but much more fun).

Net Promoter Score Considered Harmful (and What UX Professionals Can Do About It)

Jared’s spot-on takedown of Net Promoter Scores.

(Andy feels this is like criticising GDP, but GDP measures something that actually happened, whereas NPS, like horoscopes or tea-leaf readings, rely on clairvoyance.)

Why it’s tricky to measure Server-side Rendering performance

A good analysis, but my takeaway was that the article could equally be called Why it’s tricky to measure Client-side Rendering performance. In a nutshell, just looking at metrics can be misleading.

Pre-classified metrics are a good signal for measuring performance. At the end of the day though, they may not properly reflect your site’s performance story. Profile each possibility and give it the eye test.

And it’s always worth bearing this in mind:

The best way to prioritize content by building a static site. Ask yourself if the content needs JavaScript.

GOOD 006 - Transparency - Weights and Measures

A really nice visual representation of just how isolated the Imperial system is.