Delivering information and services in a fast-paced, multi-device world: How the Government of Canada is meeting the challenge

Thomas Gohard

Usability and accessibility researcher Web Standards Office Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat

+ more devices

+ more browsers

+ more screen sizes and resolutions

+ more types of networks

+ more types of inputs

+ complex problem

How fast do people expect a Web page to load?

2 seconds

How small of an increase in page load time can have an effect on user behaviour?

100 milliseconds

How can we meet these expectations?

m-dot sites

• Requires developing multiple sites
• Limited functionality (usually)
• Poor first-hit performance due to redirection

Mobile applications

• Best performance potential
• Best support for device features

but…

• Highest development and maintenance costs
• Lowest level of portability

Responsive design

• Not as fast as native applications
• Not all device features supported (yet)

but…

• One site that works on all devices

What is the Government of Canada doing?

Responsivebeforeapps

Progressive enhancement

Mobile-first

Interoperability

• UTF-8
• HTML5
• HTML data

Performance

Optimisation

• Touch
• Page weight and load time
• Rendering

Web site consolidation

Content, content, content

How are we getting all this done?

Web Experience Toolkit

User Experience Working Group

Web Experience Toolkit

• Web site: http://wet-boew.github.io
• GitHub repo: https://github.com/wet-boew/wet-boew/

User Experience Working Group

• Style guide: http://wet-boew.github.io/wet-boew-styleguide/new/index-en.html
• Heuristic evaluations: https://github.com/wet-boew/wet-boew-styleguide/issues
• GitHub repo: https://github.com/wet-boew/wet-boew-styleguide

Thank you!

Original This is the Web images by Brad Frost

Statistics on performance expectations sourced from Web performance is user experience by Lara Swanson