#uxdd

I've been working on a refreshed design for uxdesignday.org over the past couple of weekends. As part of this I've refactored a lot of code and improved both network and rendering performance significantly. 

The main conference page for Dunedin now gets a 96% page speed score measured with YSlow, which is just a little less than Google.com. Unfortunately getting to 100% is going to be tough due to some external resources setting a short cache expiry, and my images will never be scaled correctly because the site is responsive for mobile. Oh well! I can live with 96%.

Over the next few posts, I'll talk about how I improved performance both in the site code and on the server.

But first, the structure of the site.

UX Design Day is a simple responsive site. Straight HTML and JavaScript with jQuery, Stylus for CSS. Everything is compiled and minified locally using Grunt with a few Node.js libraries.

I have an Ubuntu VPS from prgmr.com with Apache configured to show whatever's in the /public directory of the repository.

I've segmented the pre-compiled Stylus into multiple files like buttons.styl, layout.styl, header.styl and so on, which are all concatenated together and minified when converted to CSS.

Grunt also takes jQuery and any extra JS libraries and sticks them into app.min.js along with my JavaScript code for the site.

Improving performance

I used Chrome's Audit tab and GTmetrix to see what I could improve. It wasn't particularly hard and probably took me about 3 hours all up to achieve a high page speed score.

 In the end I did the following, each of which I'll explain in future posts.

Compressed images

Removed unused CSS selectors

Set the content type through HTTP header

Added expires headers to all file types

Added cache validator to resources

Specified width and height for images

Deferred JavaScript

Included jQuery in compiled JS

Replaced PNGs with SVG where possible

Set up a free CDN

The videos from UXDD Wellington 2013 are now up!

Philip Fierlinger (head of design at Xero) talking about their design process

http://vimeo.com/82255433

Wesley Yun, (Creative Director at Samsung) talking about all sorts of shit

http://vimeo.com/82429199

Thank you to everyone for coming. The conference was a huge success. We had almost 400 people in total. You can see photos here and videos will be online soon.

Thank you to the speakers and sponsors and organisers, all of whom did amazing work to make the event happen.

I spoke to numerous people throughout the day and at the drinks afterwards who said they learned a great deal. Lots of people found it good value for money at $150 a ticket, which is awesome to hear.

We heard from a variety of speakers who covered a tonne of wildly different topics.

Ruth's love affair with data at Trade Me. Questioning agile and style guides at Xero with a just do it mentality. User testing with children. Inspirational Polynesian tattoo design. A Facebook game aimed at teens to help reduce speeding. An iPad app built for Peter Jackson to use on the set of The Hobbit.

Wesley Yun from Samsung humbly talked about learning from your failures, while Gillian Hemphill from Kiwibank showed us how to test the new design of a retail store by mocking it up with cardboard at full size in a warehouse.

For me, there was one underlying principle that was drilled in by all the speakers: Listen to your users.

The variety of topics, accessibility of the event at $150 for a ticket, and the mix of practical and inspirational talks really showed that this format works well. I found it a refreshing departure from conventional multi-day, academic conferences which run into the thousands for a ticket.

I had a lot of fun being the Master of Ceremonies, although at times it was difficult to be "part" of the conference since I was always on or near the stage. Because of this, I don't think I got to meet as many people as I would have liked.

I was impressed how smoothly the day went even though we had issues. A few people complained that the volume wasn't loud enough in the corners of the room. We ran out of food at morning tea. The WiFi went down and the room temperature was too low.

While the WiFi never recovered, we did add two more speakers at morning tea to cover the volume issues. We cranked the heat in the room, and we made sure come lunch, there would be plenty of food (and there was)!

The conference was small and agile enough to respond to feedback and change throughout the course of the day, and that's something Silvia Zuur and Philippa Dawe should take all the credit for. Without their expert organisation skills, we would have never been able to adjust that quickly.

So what's next?

I've invited Silvia and Philippa, both of whom were instrumental in running this event, to join the UX Design Day board. With their help, I hope to grow this idea from a guerilla, unofficial beast into an organised, well-oiled foundation with a goal of raising design awareness around the world.

Together, the three of us will begin planning for future conferences and iterating on the structure and template. We'll be looking for keen people to run conferences in cities around the world. San Francisco, Sydney, Melbourne, Wellington, Auckland, and Dunedin were all mentioned at some point last week, so...

We're coming to Wellington! New speakers, new sponsors, new location, same great value and awesomeness. You'd be crazy not to come.