Performance is also an irrelevant metric.
Usability is.
Usability is.
If you have a website with excellent UX, but it’s massively bloated and has noticeably slow load times on anything less than a 1 Gbps connection, that’s making for a frustrating experience for a large swath of your users (though maybe you also are targeting a niche crowd and know that they all have adequate internet speed).
It’s also possible to have both. McMaster-Carr [0] had its web dev moment last year when tech influencers rediscovered what basic performance optimizations can do, but hype aside, it’s legitimately good design (to me). It’s simple, intuitive, and fast. It’s nothing it doesn’t need to be.
It’s still about performance.
How fast can I use it, how smooth can I use it, etc.
My point is about how good can I do what I want to do on a website.
For instance a shopping site can as fast and snappy as it likes, if I can’t find the right articles is useless. Amazon and ebay come to my mind who ignore even simple exact search terms just to show things I didn’t search for.
that's not a web design/frontend issue, unless they hide the search bar.
you kinda need the one to get the other in the decent place, even if it is not the only one.
Lack of performance WILL turn every design into mediocre or worse
Looking at performance is making the second step before the first.
Performance is the means to an end, but if you fixate on performance, the means becomes the end
I'm not sure I agree. Bad design can ruin a fast UI, and bad performance can ruin a good UI. I'm not sure one is more important than the other, because they're necessary parts of the UX. They should be designed for together, not independently.