my name is Raisa and I'm a conversion and user experience specialist at Google, now
based here in Amsterdam as of last April and previously I was a front-end
developer on the Google Brand Studio team so starting my career in the
headquarters in Mountain View and then moving over to London where I was for
the last three years before here and now I've decided to step back from the
hands-on coding work and help our clients to make their websites faster
and more user friendly I started off I guess growing up I was always very
artists artistic and I loved to draw I was drawing comics as a kid and
finally I learned how to digitize them on Adobe Illustrator I think it was
version like cs3 or something at the time and when I finally learned to
digitize my comics I wanted to build a platform to share these lame jokes of
the world at the time and so I built a webcomic site where I posted daily
comics and now that I look back at it I'm a little bit of shamed of the
practices I've used in web development but it's interesting to see how a lot
has evolved since then in the web development practices and in my own
skills so I've gotten better over time but you can say my journey in web
development has always started in art so what I enjoy about this is that I'm able
to bring the technical and design parts together
brenn studio is a really fun team at first it was kind of like when I first
moved to London actually it was a new start to the team so it felt kind of
like a creative agency environment where we were building some marketing
campaigns and micro sites for Google's marketing initiatives and specifically
focused on Omiya when I joined the lending team and this was really
interesting for me as well because we I learned some of the cultural differences
through the websites that we were buildings like some initiatives focus on
privacy and security and also marketing more towards emerging markets like in
the Middle East and Africa regions where I learned a lot about the importance of
mobile website speed and how we need to speed up for everybody
that's been quite a challenge and it's funny that you mentioned that because
this day last year I was speaking at a developer conference about augmented
reality and while the technology is still being developed for the web I was
trying to experiment with it to see what's possible today and although we
are we've progressed squad a lot there are definitely browser and
hardware limitations like as I was developing some fun prototypes my phone
was heating up and it's just not yet ready for those things so that's why I
decided today in my talk to talk about how we need to focus on the basics first
and improve our site speed and our performance budgeting techniques before
we work on these emerging technologies to bring it to the market
yeah it's interesting to see how this is already affecting people's daily lives I
mean we're not quite at the level of using voice UIs over physical displays
but I see that the consumer behavior is changing if you look at the research and
statistics and I think it would be interesting to see the design trends
that change along with these changing consumer behaviors because that's
ultimately we want to design for what the consumer wants instead of solving
with all these technologies but I think we're getting there
well right now since I've taken a step back from hands-on development I've been
doing a lot more research on like market research so I recently published some
articles on think with Google about the consumer behaviors in Northern Europe
because I find it quite fascinating that we have really high internet speeds here
but a lot of big companies kind kind of use that as an excuse to not care about
their website speed so I've been doing a lot more research lately and also
digging into more of progressive web apps and looking for case studies to
really prove the impact of it the coming month see I I have been talking about
wanting to relaunch my portfolio site that's kind of been neglected on my
local machine so if I have time for that I don't know if it'll be in the coming
months but that's kind of something in the backlog that I would hope to at
least launch by the end of the year
so my talk today is about the high the fast mobile internet speeds and also at
the same time evolving user expectations so as I mentioned Northern Europe in
particular has is known to have really high internet speeds but since companies
tend to use this as an excuse not to speed up I want to surface some insights
of why this is still important for your users and what opportunities lie ahead
if you speed up your websites like for example first of all you the user
experience improves but also there's a huge revenue opportunity if you're a big
business