Every second support email in the early days of https://www.darwinmail.app was from users who were wondering why the website wasn't faster to load and operate.
I knew that this was going to slowly kill the product if I didn't focus on optimising the speed immediately. I also heard somewhere that even a 0.01 increase in load times for Amazon's website would cost them somewhere in the region of 100's of millions.
1. I gathered feedback from all users that said the website was slow (in any way and in any page/component/workflow).
3. Since that week of initial performance enhancement research and groundwork, I have essentially been completing todo's on that Trello card and adding more tasks as time goes on. I think the more speed improvements I make, the more I learn about what other parts of the application can be sped up. It's like economics, the more you learn, the more you realise you have so much more to learn :D
A few years later and I have not received an email suggesting to increase the speed of the app in several months, although I continue to make speed improvements on a regular basis.
Netflix have been my source of inspiration here. They are leagues ahead of every other streaming service and their custom architecture placed at the ISP level is absolutely incredible and paramount to how the deliver content with such amazing speeds.
I also had a quick look at your privacy policy, and agree with what oarsinsync mentioned. If you could skip asking users for their details, but still allow them access to the tool, you would probably have a lot more users sign up. Before they sign up, you could store their bookmarks locally. Then perhaps later on, you could ask them to sign in to save their bookmarks to the server to be accessed on other devices.
However, this all depends on what way you plan to monetise the app/extensions?
Can I also ask what framework are you using for the mobile app? It isn't React Native by any chance is it? I ask because I'd love to know how you got on with building the app for the App store. I hope to publish iOS & Android apps for DarwinMail[1] in the coming weeks.
Also, it would be absolutely amazing if you built the Chrome extension with React Native and had some tips.
PS: The site is down ATM, probably because of the influx in all the lovely visitors from HN :)
I wonder though, how do you keep the client minimal, while also maintaining a useful level of functionality?
It's something I've tackled with over the years while developing DarwinMail[1]. I've always tried to keep the UI clean and clutter free, while still providing all the functionality the user would like (that I learn about from feedback and also from other tools research).
I'd love to hear your thoughts on how you decide what features make the cut, and how they are designed?
I've done heaps of profiling.. pun intended :D