IMPROVE UX through front-end performance, and front-end performance through symbol fonts, in Issue No. 371 of A List Apart:
Improving UX Through Front-End Performance
by LARA SWANSON
Adding half a second to a search results page can decrease traffic and ad revenues by 20 percent, says a Google study. For every additional 100 milliseconds of load time, sales decrease by 1 percent, Amazon finds. Users expect pages to load in two seconds—and after three seconds, up to 40 percent will simply leave. The message is clear: we must make performance optimization a fundamental part of how we design, build, and test every site we create—for every device. Design for performance; measure the results.
The Era of Symbol Fonts
by BRIAN SUDA
Welcome to the third epoch in web performance optimization: symbol fonts. Everything from bullets and arrows to feed and social media icons can now be bundled into a single, tiny font file that can be cached and rendered at various sizes without needing multiple images or colors. This has the same caching and file size benefits as a CSS sprite, plus additional benefits we’re only now realizing with high-resolution displays. Discover the advantages and explore the challenges you’ll encounter when using a symbol font.
More From A List Apart
- Better Navigation Through Proprioception – CENNYDD BOWLES on UX & DESIGN
- W3C is Getting Some Work Done – THE W3C on WEB STANDARDS
- Give a crap. Don’t give a fuck. – KAREN MCGRANE on CONTENT
- Font Hinting and the Future of Responsive Typography – NICK SHERMAN on TYPOGRAPHY
- The Flirty Medium – FERTILE MEDIUM by DEREK POWAZEK
- W3C in the Wild – THE W3C on WEB STANDARDS
- The Future is Unevenly Superdistributed – DAVID SLEIGHT on NEW-SCHOOL PUBLISHING
- Looking Beyond User-Centered Design – CENNYDD BOWLES on UX & DESIGN
- …and of course A BLOG APART
