All that glitters isn't gold: The learner experience

It’s a bit of a cliché, but some developers and businesses can often lose sight of the obvious in their rush to add sparkly gimmicks to their sites.

According to recent research by digital performance measurement firm, Dynatrace, online retailers are seeing massive differences in sales depending on the time taken to load their homepage.  In some cases, a difference of just half a second in the load time can make a difference of 10% in sales.

The physical location of a website can also make a huge difference to performance – Australian websites in particular suffer from delays because they are often linked to Google or Facebook or Twitter, and waiting for responses from servers located thousands of miles away in the US.  This trend towards integration with social networks and third party websites can also have an effect closer to home.  For example, in the US, average homepage response times for ecommerce sites have increased to nearly 4 seconds (a rise of around half a second in the last year alone).  Globally, the rise is closer to 7% as load times have increased from 4.2 to 4.5 seconds on average.

Big brands around the world are now starting to catch on to the principle that we at the DevZone have held at the heart of our development strategy – if it takes too long to load, people will go elsewhere.

As lead developer on the DevZone, my philosophy for its development is simple – the platform should be intuitive and responsive enough that you can focus on what you want to learn, rather than the mechanics of how you can access material or provide evidence of your learning.

To achieve this, the DevZone team are constantly talking to our learners and finding out what they like and don’t like about the platform, and listening to ideas about how things could be improved in the future.  By working in partnership, we believe that our platform is not only one of the most feature-rich on the market today, but is also one of the most intuitive and easy to use platforms to support learning.

In addition to the continuous development of new and existing features, we also spend a lot of time testing our platform to ensure that it is delivering the best possible experience to the user.  This means that we have adopted an HTML5-first approach to learning material, preferring to rely on native support for HTML5 in modern browsers first, and only use third-party plugins like Flash when absolutely necessary.  We also test our platforms on a range of browsers and devices, so that you get the best possible experience whether you use a mobile device, tablet, laptop or desktop computer.

Our development team are committed to ensuring that the platform remains a highly tuned and efficient way to deliver learning content – we don’t just believe that every second counts, but every part of every second too. That’s why we regularly test the page load times of pages across our platform, not just the homepage.

We believe that by paying attention to the small details, and continually developing and optimising the platform, we can enable our learners to focus on the most important question.

What do you want to learn today?