Improving UX design could increase a company’s site conversion rates by up to 400 percent, according to Forrester Research.
Good UX is especially important for direct-to-consumer companies since it ensures customers can easily navigate a company’s website, find what they need and — hopefully — buy it. But optimal usability is still a goal for B2B companies, and implementing single-page application strategies help achieve that end.
For Austin dev teams, JavaScript is a key tool they employ when developing feature functionality.
JavaScript has been used to refine user experiences since the earliest days of the internet, lauded by many programmers for its flexibility. Working within the framework, some front-end developers in Austin favor using React because of the extensive toolsets in its library and the ease of working with components.
There are over 477,000 packages available on the primarily npm registry. The abundance of tools offered through this package manager is a key aspect of why Principal Performance Engineer Carlos Moro and his team at Expedia Group prefer the combination of React and Node.
What JavaScript framework is your team currently using?
Currently, we are using React on the client-side and hapi.js on the server-side. This combination of tools is fairly common. It allows our engineers to use a wide variety of modern front-end tools available through npm, which helps them get features to our customers faster and with consistent quality.
JavaScript is flexible and gives significant control to the developer.”
How does page performance play into your development process?
Page performance is significant for most, if not all, customer-facing applications. Since JavaScript is flexible and gives significant control to the developer, there are several areas where it can be extensively tweaked to ensure high performance. We are staying on top of the latest industry best practices and React features, such as implementing Hooks and testing performance regularly using tools like BlazeMeter.
What other tools are you using to monitor and improve website performance?
We use real user monitoring data combined with proprietary models to tune our site performance for the benefit of our customers. Other than that, we use industry-standard tools for monitoring website performance like Google Lighthouse.
Front-end developers rated their satisfaction with React at an average of just over 91 percent over the last four years, according to the 2019 State of JavaScript report. Paul Thomas, VP of engineering at Brightpearl, said his team is pleased with how well React integrates with the company’s legacy infrastructure.
What JavaScript framework is your team currently using?
We use React because it’s a lightweight framework that promotes component-based designs and doesn’t interfere with our legacy code. We compose our app pages from assets served by microservices, so playing nice with older code is vital.
Our SaaS app is instrumented with Zipkin to help us find performance issues.”
How does page performance play into your development process?
Page performance isn’t the make-or-break issue for us like it is for direct-to-consumer products. But the ease with which we can use single-page application techniques in our products enables us to significantly improve their usability.
What other tools are you using to monitor and improve website performance?
Our SaaS app is instrumented with Zipkin to help us find performance issues, while Prometheus monitors all our services for a statistical overview to highlight performance regressions before they become a concern.
