By the time a developer is asked to “make it faster”, most of the choices that made it slow have already been approved.
Where the weight comes from
- A full-screen video nobody asked the visitor about
- Four typefaces where two would do
- A third-party script for each team that asked for one
None of these are engineering problems. They are design decisions with an engineering bill.
What we do instead
We set a budget before we design: how many seconds, on which phone, on what connection. Every idea is weighed against it in the open. Some of the best work we have done came from an idea that didn’t fit and had to become simpler.