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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

It is astonishing how hard it can be to internally sell any kind of web quality features to management in both for profit and non-profit organizations.

There is also a real herd effect. Many people will do whatever Matt Cutts tells them because they think it will be good for their SEO. Yeah right. Some of the people who are good at SEO either went to work for huge brands or quasi-competitors of Google (like about.com) that might have some ability to bring Google to anti-trust court; most of the others switched to paid advertising once they figured out that Google won't let you win at SEO.

Certainly people who write for Spamium (aka Tedium) are the ones who try herd-following methods of getting traffic and they tend to be impressed when they get 100 hits on their blog.

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One technique I've seen work well for getting bosses to care is showing them how much slower their sites are than their competitors - nobody wants to be worse than their competition.

In SpeedCurve, for just around $8/mo per page/site you can set up daily synthetic checks for the business and its competitors, covering multiple profiles: mobile/3g, tablet/4g, desktop/fibre.

You can use both the metrics (Start Render, SpeedIndex, Hero Paint) [1] and the filmstrip videos to literally show them how they compare side-by-side [2] – this is super-powerful as it's so visual.

Disclaimer: I don't work for SpeedCurve, just a fan of the tool.

[1]: https://speedcurve.com/features/synthetic/#benchmark [2]: https://speedcurve.com/demo/video/?tests=180102_1T_d12fa882f...

> One technique I've seen work well for getting bosses to care is showing them how much slower their sites are than their competitors - nobody wants to be worse than their competition.

were the filmstrips enough to convince them, or did your bosses want to see numbers/stats like how many were dropping off your site for each x-seconds of delay?

> schwinn: were the filmstrips enough to convince them, or did your bosses want to see numbers/stats like how many were dropping off your site for each x-seconds of delay?

There are some great stats on bounce rate / abandonment on WPOStats: https://wpostats.com/

This is my favourite:

> 53% of visits to mobile sites are abandoned after 3 seconds according to research from Google's DoubleClick.

One thing to note, to those stakeholders who are aware of web traffic stats, is that if a site uses client-side analytics (e.g. Google Analytics) and it hasn't loaded the analytics script by the time the user abandons the site, they won't be tracked, so the bounces won't be affected – it'll be like they were never there.

So ultimately, bounce rates in analytics tools can typically be significantly worse than reported when web performance is poor.

I sometimes feel like I should sell a consultancy selling EVaaS - External Validation as a Service. :)

I've been fortunate to spend my career working at sane companies, but I've talked to so many people who were in situations where management wouldn't listen to their own staff, but then turned around and listened to (and implemented) the exact same recommendations when they were made by a consultant.

I know there are often valid reasons for this, and external validation can be important. But it sure must be frustrating as hell to see your company pay $25+k to receive a list of recommendations you already made.

Management consultant here; this is literally what I do probably 50% of the time. Our buyer has a strategy they want to implement, so they hire us to help them sell it to their boss. Usually we improve them of course; but our buyers can generally handle this stuff on their own -- their bosses don't trust them, and want someone else on the hook.

Trusting subordinates who are incentivized to fudge the numbers is very difficult. Most people won't outright lie to their boss to get ahead, but they will make a bad business proposition look good to the point they genuinely believe it themselves. Leadership is hard.

I'm sure some of it can be contributed to the management itself. If you hire and trust people, and then fail, you failed when hiring and trusting them. If you use a consultant, it's very easy to shift the blame without taking any yourself.

That is mostly a problem if the people above the management are the same. For a sane company with good leadership, failures are a learning experience that makes you better.

>It is astonishing how hard it can be to internally sell any kind of web quality features to management in both for profit and non-profit organizations.

In my experience it's next to impossible. We have a bunch of inefficient bloated legacy shit that barely works and we spend most of our time bug fixing. Yet we keep adding to it while hiring more and more people to fix the increasing amount of bugs.

Why not provide the bottom / top line impact of page optimization? Your business’s profitability is the most important thing to your bosses. They do not care about making the web good, nor should they IMHO. Your job is to show why both parties’ incentives are actually aligned, not opposed.

Death by a thousand cuts. Everyone wants to add just one little resource, until you end up with 8MB pages with 20 seconds time to interactive. They can all make a plausible argument for how their one little resource will improve the bottom line, even considering the performance impact. If you have one person or one team responsible for performance, they're constantly fighting on all fronts just to stand still. You need a business-wide performance-oriented culture, which is very difficult to develop and maintain.

You" need a business-wide performance-oriented culture, which is very difficult to develop and maintain."

How about customer-centric culture? One where UX is #1, and not out of sight?

perhaps I've been unfortunate but everyone I've met who markets themselves as UX are people whose job seems to be to say how will the customer understand this design, how is the customer workflow, and do not give a damn about performance at the level needed to achieve the improvements being discussed here.

"You can add your just one little resource, but unfortunately the loading time goes over the limit - you need to identify other resource(s) that can be removed first."

Hard performance targets can work, but only if you have full buy-in from management. If you don't, someone is going to persuade a higher-up to make an exception just this one time and the whole thing falls apart.

I'm a dev and I understand the frustration of multiple resource load and the bandwidth burden it imposes but also as an entrepreneur and business owner, I see the need for metrics when making a sales pitch.

> Your job is to show why both parties’ incentives are actually aligned, not opposed.

This!

It's your job to do just that because of your vantage point i.e. you're able to see everything more broadly than anyone else. Understanding that all the stakeholders in your organization are doing something important that allows everyone to have a place to come to work to tomorrow is critical for you as the engineer.

> It's your job to do just that because of your vantage point i.e. you're able to see everything more broadly than anyone else.

It sounds very good on paper but it doesn't really work in practice because devs are generally not recognized as important decision makers in product design, despite said "broad vantage point".

From there, it's a rather thankless uphill battle of the "no good deed will go unpunished" variety. It's a very misaligned situation.

The need for metrics is another way of saying "I don't trust you", which may be understandable to a degree but stakeholders should also understand that not everything can be measured, and that measuring things in a manner that is both accurate and useful is very hard. I'm skeptical that metrics have more value than the word of a seasoned engineer on a project. We don't have very good results with measuring other vague things, why would software development be any different?

> I'm skeptical that metrics have more value than the word of a seasoned engineer on a project.

That's a rather odd statement to hear from a dev (or developer advocate) because I've always heard fellow engineers talk about how data is more important than opinion. Why is this an exception?

> "Your business’s profitability is the most important thing to your bosses."

I think the UX is the most important thing, without it (i.e., a good one) there is no profit.

In 2018 bosses involved in web - directly or indirectly - should be well aware of this. At this point in time the web dev's job should not be to "fix" those above them. There's plenty else to do and keep up with qithout having to add risking their career to the list.

And few if any freelancers are going to speak up. Which is all the more reason the decision makers should understand the implications of their decisions.

I agree 100%. So instead of saying “The web needs to be good! We need to spend time (money) on this!” Say “I ran an A/B test and the top of our funnel had an X% higher conversion rate when the page loaded in less than Xms. Here are my ideas for what analytics to cut to get us under that number. It’ll take some work but our funnel will improve and there’s an added benefit because all execs will view a unified report, which will ensure that all future business decisions are made with one standard set of metrics. This is win win win!”

Content sites get traffic from google / facebook / etc and then monetize it. Unless the site is so bad that people just close the tab rather than read the article, usability doesn't matter. You're only going to get one page view anyway.

Is Tedium worse than Medium?

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