Why not provide the bottom / top line impact of page optimization? Your business’s profitability is the most important thing to your bosses. They do not care about making the web good, nor should they IMHO. Your job is to show why both parties’ incentives are actually aligned, not opposed.
Death by a thousand cuts. Everyone wants to add just one little resource, until you end up with 8MB pages with 20 seconds time to interactive. They can all make a plausible argument for how their one little resource will improve the bottom line, even considering the performance impact. If you have one person or one team responsible for performance, they're constantly fighting on all fronts just to stand still. You need a business-wide performance-oriented culture, which is very difficult to develop and maintain.
"You can add your just one little resource, but unfortunately the loading time goes over the limit - you need to identify other resource(s) that can be removed first."
Hard performance targets can work, but only if you have full buy-in from management. If you don't, someone is going to persuade a higher-up to make an exception just this one time and the whole thing falls apart.
perhaps I've been unfortunate but everyone I've met who markets themselves as UX are people whose job seems to be to say how will the customer understand this design, how is the customer workflow, and do not give a damn about performance at the level needed to achieve the improvements being discussed here.
I'm a dev and I understand the frustration of multiple resource load and the bandwidth burden it imposes but also as an entrepreneur and business owner, I see the need for metrics when making a sales pitch.
> Your job is to show why both parties’ incentives are actually aligned, not opposed.
This!
It's your job to do just that because of your vantage point i.e. you're able to see everything more broadly than anyone else. Understanding that all the stakeholders in your organization are doing something important that allows everyone to have a place to come to work to tomorrow is critical for you as the engineer.
> It's your job to do just that because of your vantage point i.e. you're able to see everything more broadly than anyone else.
It sounds very good on paper but it doesn't really work in practice because devs are generally not recognized as important decision makers in product design, despite said "broad vantage point".
From there, it's a rather thankless uphill battle of the "no good deed will go unpunished" variety. It's a very misaligned situation.
The need for metrics is another way of saying "I don't trust you", which may be understandable to a degree but stakeholders should also understand that not everything can be measured, and that measuring things in a manner that is both accurate and useful is very hard. I'm skeptical that metrics have more value than the word of a seasoned engineer on a project. We don't have very good results with measuring other vague things, why would software development be any different?
> I'm skeptical that metrics have more value than the word of a seasoned engineer on a project.
That's a rather odd statement to hear from a dev (or developer advocate) because I've always heard fellow engineers talk about how data is more important than opinion. Why is this an exception?
> "Your business’s profitability is the most important thing to your bosses."
I think the UX is the most important thing, without it (i.e., a good one) there is no profit.
In 2018 bosses involved in web - directly or indirectly - should be well aware of this. At this point in time the web dev's job should not be to "fix" those above them. There's plenty else to do and keep up with qithout having to add risking their career to the list.
And few if any freelancers are going to speak up. Which is all the more reason the decision makers should understand the implications of their decisions.
I agree 100%. So instead of saying “The web needs to be good! We need to spend time (money) on this!” Say “I ran an A/B test and the top of our funnel had an X% higher conversion rate when the page loaded in less than Xms. Here are my ideas for what analytics to cut to get us under that number. It’ll take some work but our funnel will improve and there’s an added benefit because all execs will view a unified report, which will ensure that all future business decisions are made with one standard set of metrics. This is win win win!”
Content sites get traffic from google / facebook / etc and then monetize it. Unless the site is so bad that people just close the tab rather than read the article, usability doesn't matter. You're only going to get one page view anyway.
