Trends on Tuesday: Speed Matters When Measuring Responsive Web Design Performance Load Times

In the mobile world, every second matters.

Mobile users are a finicky bunch. They want their information anytime, anywhere and quickly. As members of the MobileGov Community of Practice have noted last year, mobile user experience is about emotion. If that emotion is not happy, you will lose the user. For this month’s DigitalGov user experience theme, we decided to talk about how speed can be a key to a user’s happiness.

Private sector organizations know with every second they reduce a website’s load time, their sales increase. For example, see how sophisticated the private sector gets when it comes to delivering your pizza. According to Jeremy Vanderlan, the Technical Deputy for AIDS.gov, the industry benchmark/average load time is 3-4 seconds.

As agencies are building responsive websites, they are taking load time seriously. AIDS.gov has had a responsive site for years now and Vanderlan has become an expert at measuring and testing loadtime.

During last month’s MobileGov Around the Horn Call, Vanderlan laid out why performance testing is important for government, how they approach the testing and some tools agencies use for testing. You can hear the whole conversation I had with him in the video below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td3bxpioQrg&w=600]