Adding half a second to a search results page can decrease traffic and ad revenues by 20 percent, according to a Google study. The same article reports Amazon found that every additional 100 milliseconds of load time decreased sales by 1 percent. Users expect pages to load in two seconds—and after three seconds, up to 40 percent will simply leave.

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These days there’s been a trend of using big heavy images and multiple web fonts which highly affect performance of a website, especially on mobile devices.

Brad Frost emphasizes on performance saying:

The road towards better performance doesn’t start with developers or technology stacks. It begins with a shared interest on everyone’s part in making a product that’s lightning fast.

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Learn to say “NO” from my favorite designer – Jason Santa Maria. He talks about when and why to say NO, and whom to say NO.

Here are 9 rules by Stephen about using colors in charts and graphs:

1. If you want different objects of the same color in a table or graph to look the same, make sure that the background—the color that surrounds them—is consistent.
2. If you want objects in a table or graph to be easily seen, use a background color that contrasts sufficiently with the object.
3. Use color only when needed to serve a particular communication goal.
4. Use different colors only when they correspond to differences of meaning in the data.
5. Use soft, natural colors to display most information and bright and/or dark colors to highlight information that requires greater attention.
6. When using color to encode a sequential range of quantitative values, stick with a single hue (or a small set of closely related hues) and vary intensity from pale colors for low values to increasingly darker and brighter colors for high values.
7. Non-data components of tables and graphs should be displayed just visibly enough to perform their role, but no more so, for excessive salience could cause them to distract attention from the data.
8. To guarantee that most people who are colorblind can distinguish groups of data that are color coded, avoid using a combination of red and green in the same display.
9. Avoid using visual effects in graphs.

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Leisa Reichelt lists 11 points why prototyping beats wireframing. Here are top 3:

1. You’re making, not documenting. You can feel the thing you’re making.
2. You’ve got a thing you can start testing, in all kinds of ways, almost immediately. Prototyping is more like experimenting than describing your grand design.
3. Prototypes create the impression of real progress—of something actually happening—in a way that wire framing never does.

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It’s incredibly difficult to maintain a baseline grid in a medium as inconsistent and fluid as a web page. Images, form elements, rendering differences between browsers and platforms: these can all throw a baseline grid out of phase. This only gets worse when you’re setting up a design for someone else to implement or maintain, as we often do in client work. In other words, if you’re not intimately familiar with the intricacies of a given grid system, it’s incredibly easy to mess it up.

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P.S. I still religiously use vertical grid :)

Prevailing wisdom suggests that simplicity is about less…removal and reductionism. But simplicity is really about comprehension and clarity of purpose…can we design such that people instantly understand what’s going on and make a confident decision about what to do next? To practically achieve simplicity we can stick to a single core idea, improve clarity over time, and use consistency to help users achieve efficiency.

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We’re embracing “responsive” but neglecting the second part: “design.” We’re replacing fixed-width divs with fluid ones. As we undergo a period of reassessment, both of our practice and of our tools, now is the right time to seek out an aesthetic that is truer to the medium.

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