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Description:

Anyone can gather data. Data heroes don't just gather data, they use it to make meaningful decisions and help organizations really understand their users.

In this session, Buddy Brewer from SOASTA, along with Mark Zeman and Steve Souders from SpeedCurve, turn the tables on "Big Data" and illustrate how identifying and focusing deeply on a few meaningful metrics facilitates far better decision making.

While it's important to use the latest web performance monitoring tools to gather data about every single user experience on your website, it's what you focus on that really counts. Engaging the wider organization in a conversation about technical performance improvements is hard. You need to earn that conversation by focusing on the experience of your users and the business success that flows on from their happiness.

Data heroes answer difficult questions, such as:

• Every site is different, and people bring different expectations to each site they visit. How do we find out what performance expectations our users have of our unique site?
• How do we balance the need to provide rich content with the need to meet users' performance expectations?
• How do we determine project principles and performance budgets based on all of the above?
• How do we relate performance metrics to meaningful user outcomes?
• What metrics should we care about and share with the wider organization?
• And how do we use all this data to tell us what to fix?

Do you know how much faster your website should be, and how much happier your users should be? Learn how various leading organizations answered those questions — and how you can, too.

About Buddy Brewer, VP Business Development - SOASTA

Buddy Brewer is VP Business Development responsible for SOASTA mPulse. Prior to SOASTA, he co-founded Real User Measurement company, LogNormal which was acquired by SOASTA in 2012. Prior to LogNormal, Buddy spent ten years in the web performance industry building synthetic monitoring tools helping the world's largest web sites solve their performance challenges.

About Steve Souders, SpeedCurve

Steve works at SpeedCurve on the interplay between performance and design. He previously served as Google's Head Performance Engineer, Chief Performance Yahoo!, and Chief Performance Officer at Fastly. Steve has pioneered much of the work in the world of web performance. He is the author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites. He is the creator of many performance tools and services including YSlow, the HTTP Archive, Episodes, ControlJS, and Browserscope. Steve taught CS193H: High Performance Web Sites at Stanford and serves as co-chair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O'Reilly.

Twitter: @Souders

About Mark Zeman, SpeedCurve

Mark has 20 years of digital media experience in a variety of both commercial and academic roles. He founded Morse Media - a new media design studio, in 1997 and spent five years as Director and Lead Developer working to bridge the gap between design agencies and IT firms new to the web. He then moved into academia, completing a Masters of Design and was a Lecturer and Subject Director in Digital Media at Massey University. During his time at Massey he represented the College of Creative Arts on the Massey wide E-learning committee and received several grants to develop an innovative online learning environment that was subsequently adopted by the whole College. As a User Experience Designer and Digital Media Researcher, Mark's interests revolve around the impact new web technology has on the way people communicate, their collaboration in groups and the information they exchange. His interests manifest in a wide variety of projects that cover diverse topics such as search engines, game theory, performance spaces, folksonomies, mapping and models of online consumer trust. He's an active participant in the international web development community and presents his research at conferences.

Twitter: @MarkZeman