Performance
How fast an app loads and responds, which strongly affects whether people stick around.
Slow
- Full-size images
- Loads all records
- 5 separate requests
Fast
- Images sized to fit
- Loads only what's shown
- One combined request
What it is
Performance is speed: how quickly the first screen appears, how fast actions respond, whether scrolling stays smooth. Slow apps feel broken even when they work.
Common culprits are huge images, loading far more data than needed, and many small requests instead of one. Latency is the delay between asking and getting an answer.
Be specific when reporting: which page, on what device or connection, and roughly how slow. "The dashboard takes 6 seconds on my phone" is fixable.
How to ask for it
“The app is slow.”
“Improve performance on the dashboard, which takes about 6 seconds to load on a phone: load only the last 30 days of data, resize images to the size they're shown, and combine the five separate data requests into one.”
"Slow" is a feeling; naming performance with the page, the measurement, and likely causes gives a concrete target.
You've seen this in
- GGoogle's PageSpeed scores
- LInstant page switches in Linear
- MImages loading blurry-then-sharp on Medium