You don't even know what you like

<i>the twitter website is as fast as ever</i><p>Actually, last year Twitter launched a JavaScript-heavy rewrite that was much slower to load and interact with than it was previously. It seems to have improved since then, but at the time it was fairly tiresome to use.

This example is perhaps better than they meant, because reading twitter from a phone is nearly impossible due to their stupid mobile interface rewrite. (Edit: I see the first commenter on their post wrote a similar thing.)<p>I just timed it: after turning off the wifi, clicking my bookmark of a saved twitter search on a Nexus S took <i>10</i> seconds before it showed the centered twitter logo (presumably that ajaxes in the rest of the page?) and another two or three before showing search results.<p>Frequently it's long enough that my phone turns off the screen while I'm waiting for it to load, at which point I usually give up.<p>(Yes, this is the wrong place to complain. I am only a very casual consumer of twitter -- don't even have an account myself -- so I don't know the appropriate tech support channel. Perhaps because of my casual usage they in fact would prefer to discourage users like me.)

I struggle with the notion of friction on our site. It is easy to talk about and very hard to action. For example, I can use optimizely to tell me which approach I'm considering my convert better, and there is no way to know what the baseline outside of my site looks like, nor what the best approach is. The information available is so limited that much of what passes for customer experience design is just a collection of guesses back by a small amount of relative data and reinforced by appealing design. Perhaps this is just obvious and inherent in commerce in general, but I find it very challenging knowing that everything I'm considering might be substandard :)

The performance thing is definitely something I notice from time to time. That I can feel either really positive about my app or really negative depending on the performance of the network I'm using it on. Losing that immediacy in actions and results does make things feel worse to use even if you can't put your finger on it at first.

I thought this post was one of the few on HN main page that was <i>not</i> about Apple, disappointed I am...