The Path to Performance Tim Kadlec & Katie Kovalcin

On today’s episode we sit down with Marcy Sutton—a senior front end engineer at Deque Systems, where she works on accessibility. We talk about the intersection and differentiations in performance and accessibility. Marcy explains that there’s a huge audience that’s being missed by not making your website accessible.

Our guests this week are Steve Souders and Mark Zeman, of SpeedCurve. In this episode, we talk about the importance of focusing on the user experience when improving performance, how design and development can work together, what metrics to monitor, and more.

Our guest this week is Tammy Everts. Tammy is a Senior Researcher and Evangelist at SOASTA. In this episode, we discuss getting started with performance budgets, why you should focus on article and product page load times instead of homepage load times, how to build a case for improved web performance to your company or team, the real impact of performance on the bottom line, and more!

Why are Apple's product pages so heavy? When is the right time to choose aesthetic wins over performance wins? We explore these questions in today's preshow. We're also joined this week by web animation expert Val Head. We're taking a deep dive into web animations; the benefits of animations in UI, why you should focus on the problem to be solved and not the tools, how to effectively communicate your animation ideas with your co-workers, and so much more.

This week, we have a brief discussion about how third party ad networks affect performance on news sites before talking with Sophie Shepherd. Sophie is a Senior Designer at Ushahidi, a non-profit software company that develops free and open-source products for information collection, visualization, and interactive mapping.

We discussed the challenges of designing for international users with minimal data speed, how Ushahidi brings data and information to regions with nearly no connection, designing with task completion in mind, and more.

Our guest this week is Brenna Heaps. Brenna currently works at GitHub, but previously was a project manager at Happy Cog. She managed several projects that Katie was a part of, so we asked her to join us on the show today to share her tips and advice on managing projects and teams, selling clients on performance, sticking to performance budgets, and more.