Product and Engineering Wisdom - Issue #12
Tips and wisdom on how to build better experiences for users
A free fortnightly email that highlights the relevant tips, advice, and case studies from the world of product and engineering for the SEO community.
Hello 👋,
In this issue, the topic is building better experiences for users.
Although many think users are just your customers, a user can also be internal stakeholders within your business.
For example, if you improve the experience of developers this can help streamline code releases and increase code quality.
The following articles can help you have a better understanding of how to build better experiences for users and internal stakeholders:
Project Aurora - Chrome Team
Building Better User Experiences - DWP Digital UK Gov
Better Responsive Metric in Chrome - Chrome Speed Metrics Team
Stay safe and enjoy.
Adam
The SEO Sprint Retrospective
Please feel free to leave feedback so I can improve this newsletter.
⚡Post of the Sprint
Project Aurora
by Shubhie Panicker, Addy Osmani, Houssein Djirdeh, Chrome Team
A piece of news about the collaboration project between the Chrome team working with the open-source frameworks and tools to make the web faster.
Adam’s Insight: The developer experience isn’t something many businesses think about but it is key to streamline shipping high quality code.
Successful organisations like Yelp, Spotify and Atlassian work with their developers to improve their experience when building features.
The Aurora project by the Chrome team is improving the experience of developers when making web applications faster. Specifically their work is focused on making it easier for developers to implement optimisation best practices for image, JavaScript, Font and CSS resources.
I’ve already seen the benefits of this project as a development team I’m currently working with have quickly implemented the Next.js v11 optimisation improvements.
A must read if your website is using React or Angular.
✨Product
Building Better User Experiences
by DWP Digital team, UK Government
A podcast with Fay Cooper, Product Lead within Shared Channels Experience, and Gavin Elliott a Design Lead. They explain the shared experience channels approach and the challenges they have faced.
Adam’s Insight: This is a great podcast for so many reasons.
The team discusses multiple topics including: siloed internal teams, user experiments and aligning departments in a large organisation.
A lot of the discussions in this podcast were all the things I experienced working at DeepCrawl. Ultimately if your teams in any organisation are siloed then this will impact on the experience of your customers.
There are no easy answers when it comes to improving the communication in any large organisation, but this is a great podcast if you want to learn how it is dealt with in the UK Government.
If you are a SEO Manager or Head of SEO then I recommend listening to this podcast.
How Real User Monitoring will improve GOV.UK
by Matt Hobbs, Head of Frontend Development, UK Government
A blog post written by Matt Hobbs, the Head of Frontend Development at Gov.UK, talks about how Real User Monitoring data will help improve Government Digital Services for the UK public.
Adam’s Insight: Real User Monitoring (RUM) data is crucial for improving the user experience of customers.
This is a great blog post on how the UK Government plans to use RUM data to inform its engineering, product and design roadmap.
I actually had a brief chat with Matt on Twitter and he explained that his team is using SpeedCurve LUX to capture RUM data on government services. They do use the CRuX data source but Matt mentioned that due to methodology of capturing data it is biased and could miss out popular OS / browsers used by the public (iOS Safari).
This is a great post if you’re a digital marketer who wants to understand how a large organisation is using the RUM data to improve its services
⚙️Engineering
Better Responsive Metric in Chrome
by Nicolás Peña Moreno, Annie Sullivan, Hongbo Song, Chrome Speed Metrics team
The Chrome Speed Metrics team provides their ideas and learnings on creating a responsive metric.
Adam’s Insight: I always enjoy blog posts by development teams providing logic behind their ideas.
This post provides great insight into how the Chrome Speed Metrics team wants to evolve the Fist Input Delay (FID) metric.
A must read if you want to better understand the future of the responsive metric and the improvements which are coming to an important Core Web Vitals metric.
Improving Cumulative Layout Shift at the Telegraph
by Chris Boakes, Software Engineer, Telegraph Media Group
A case study from Chris Boakes, a software engineer at the Telegraph, on how his team improved Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) by 250% from 0.25 to 0.1.
Adam’s Insight: Always enjoy a good case study showing how enterprise engineering teams identify and fix Core Web Vital metrics.
This case study provides details on how the engineers improved CLS but also crucially they show the tools used to test and monitor the changes.
What I quite enjoyed about this post was that the team used tools to measure the impact of changes using both lab and Real User Monitoring data. Verifying the fixes did in fact improve the user experience.
A must read for any News SEO interested in how engineers identify, measure and monitor Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) for a publisher.
The SEO Sprint Retrospective
Please feel free to leave feedback so I can improve this newsletter.