Fronteers Conference 2015 – 8th Edition

Fronteers conference is one of Europe’s largest conferences on front-end web development, organized in Amsterdam yearly. The eighth edition was held in the beautiful Tuschinski theater. And of course we were also present with many other front-enders, designers and interaction designers.

For two days we got away from our keyboards and used our eyes and ears to get some new insights and inspiration from other creative minds such as Scott Jehl, Dominic Szablewski, Alice Bartlett, Jake Archibald, Soledad Penades and many more. They all shared some interesting stuff. Here are a few highlights that we think are worth sharing. 

Scott Jehl wanted to raise awareness for the fact that we shouldn’t forget the impact of all new developments on website load times. A website contains web fonts, high-res visuals, style sheets and many other elements. This content can make a webpage 12 MB and can take 12 seconds to load. But with some simple tricks you can decrease the time to 8 seconds to load a page with the same content.
And not only big files are a problem. You may have heard about the rise of Ad & Track blockers, a relative new application that blocks visuals, scripts and fonts. And if you aren’t able to fully load a page this will of course provide a terrible user experience. Since 30% of all web users are already using such applications and is here to stay, you need to take this into account when testing and designing a website. Something we all should be aware of.

Even when the site isn’t fully loaded yet, you can already do something to get your visitors engaged soon. Jake Archibald showed how with the use of ServiceWorker. By implementing ServiceWorker you’ll be able to set up cached assets first, then load the other elements on the background. A great way to get users engaged at the start. 

Alice Bartlett – Government Services Design

Alice Bartlett pinpointed the importance of accessibility. Take the Government Services Design for instance. By making things technically more accessible on a government site, you’ll be able to reach a wide range of people, regardless of their goals, regardless of their device, regardless of their abilities. As a result of this many call centers could be closed and this have saved a lot of money and user frustration. This is actually not a difficult task to implement. By just following the rules of HTML you’ll be able to make your site up to 80% more accessible. And that’s in most cases already enough. 

Dominic Szablewski made an open source JavaScript Video Decoder. Very impressive to see how the decoder was working in every browser that supports JavaScript. With this script it was even possible to run a VNC protocol. This allows you to play games on your mobile while it’s running on your desktop. Unfortunately we couldn’t test it ourselves during the conference, but it looked very promising.

Now back in front of our computers with some new insights. And already looking forward to the next Fronteers conference. Stay tuned for more to come.