Fast, Fun & Touch-Friendly: The New Rules For Tablet Websites

Fast, Fun & Touch-Friendly: The New Rules For Tablet Websites

A Conversation with Mobile Performance Evangelist Herman Ng

In the post-PC era, tablets are taking on a central role in connecting consumer and business users with their online worlds. But touch-based tablets present an entirely different interface from the point-and-click paradigm of the desk- or laptop-bound Web. And tablet users on the go are frequently stymied by the inherent sluggishness of cellular network connections. It’s not an impossible task, though, to create tablet website experiences that satisfy user expectations and, with a little effort, leverage the tablet interface. Benchmark recently sat down with Keynote Mobile Performance Evangelist Herman Ng to get his insight into the tablet website experience, and get a few pointers on how to make it better.

Benchmark: What is your assessment of the current state of website performance on tablets?

Herman Ng: There’s no one score to give across the board. Everybody’s at a different level, because everybody is doing different things. Some people are doing their regular sites, some are doing a tablet site. Some are just serving the mobile website performance, and there are some companies redirecting the user to use the mobile app. Overall, performance is just all over the place. There are so many tablets coming out — the iPad and some of the Androids are, of course, the mainstream, but there are so many different versions. And then you have 3G and Wi-Fi, and now the iPad’s LTE. So even the same site is going to be performing differently across different connections and devices.

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Measuring Site Speed with Navigation Timing

What makes great user experience? Users’ thirst for speed seems increasingly unquenchable. Even as they (barely) tolerate the sluggish performance of mobile devices, they demand more and more of their PCs. Make them wait one blink of an eye too long, and they are gone, taking the revenue they would generate with them.

In 2010, The World Wide Web Consortium chartered a Web Performance Working Group to give developers client-side tools, in the browsers, to gain greater visibility into the timing of each aspect of page loading and help them see how they can make their pages faster. The first product of the working group is the Navigation Timing API, which Keynote is already leveraging to provide more granular site performance reporting and to provide operations managers and developers a common language to address site improvements.

If you want the complete picture on the user experience, read an interview with Microsoft IE Program Manager Jatinder Mann a Microsoft IE Program Manager Jatinder Mann lives and breathes performance, both on the Internet Explorer team and on the W3C Web Performance Working Group, and is an expert on the Navigation Timing API. Benchmark recently caught up with him to get an overview of the Navigation Timing API and other initiatives and what they offer the Web community.


Source; Keynote System.