From Chaos to Concept

CH 4MAKE IT FUNCTIONAL

“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”

—The Agile Manifesto

This chapter won't teach you to be a developer. It will teach you how to evaluate code from a user experience point of view and provide you with further reading if you want to learn more about how to be a UX-focused developer.

If you are a designer or a person in the product organization at your company, your relationship with the performance of the services that you design might be as simple as “it works” or “it doesn't work.” When I say performance in this context, I'm not talking about how well the system is delivering on your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). In this case, I'm talking about how well your service is running. How well your service is running will often have a large impact on your KPIs. In other words, if your checkout process is offline (poor performance), your conversation rate (KPI) will drop to 0% during that outage.

If you take anything away from reading this chapter, let it be that it doesn't matter if you have the most amazing content designed by the very best designer if your users can't see it because the page doesn't load or takes too long to load—that's a terrible user experience.

This type of performance is usually measured at the highest level by monitoring the following:

• AvailabilityThe percent of the time the system is up and running so users can interact successfully with it.
• Response ...