Embarrassing Demo Experience with a Positive Outcome

Over the weekend, I finally had a chance to show someone what I've been building live and in person. It was a disaster. But it turned out to be a fixable disaster and a great reminder of how important it is not to work in isolation for too long.

💥 Preparedness

Even though I've been developing and designing a prototype for a couple of months, I was oddly unprepared to show it off to anyone. So when I casually mentioned the URL in conversation, I wasn't actually planning to do a live demo.

⏳ Wait For It...

The production demo took an excruciatingly long time to load. I've been deploying updates using a free Heroku plan. I love Heroku, but the free plan means your application "goes to sleep" after periods of inactivity. So when you try to access it in production it takes several seconds to "wake up" and load the page.

The response was perfect, lol. 😅

"You just lost 90% of your users."

It wasn't mean or tough to hear, it was just accurate and something I hadn't thought about because I had only been building the prototype in a local development environment.

📈 Real, In-person Usage

Watching someone really use the software I've been writing was such a rush. Even after the long load time, I spotted a handful of tiny UX bugs I could easily fix. I was so floored that I rushed home and started pushing little fixes.

I used the Lighthouse Audit Tool that comes with Chrome DevTools to check out the application's performance. Sure enough, it had slowed to a crawl at a 💛 55 performance score. I pulled out some unneeded dependencies, optimized the assets, and ran the audit again. 💚 100.

💡 Takeaway

Instead of having a todo list with a thousand things I think I might need to do at some point in the coming months, I spent 5 minutes with a real person and discovered what I actually needed to do right now.