📖 The UX lesson that stuck with me for over 10 years
📅 Project year: 2013
🚨 The problem
In 2013, I worked on a digital book project targeting Android and iOS tablets, especially Retina iPads, which were underpowered for their high resolution. The client requested a hybrid app instead of a native one to save development costs.
The goal was to enable smooth horizontal swiping between pages while dynamically loading and unloading content to optimize memory usage. However, the rendering performance was a major challenge.
⚠️ The challenges
- Loading new
<img> elements or background images froze the UI while they loaded.
- Rendering performance was especially sluggish on iPads due to their high-resolution displays and underpowered GPUs.
- Swiping felt laggy and unresponsive due to rendering delays.
💡 The solution
To achieve smooth performance, I implemented a few creative workarounds:
- Used a GPU-accelerated <canvas> instead of
<img> elements to preload and render images seamlessly.
- Implemented a 3D transform hack to take advantage of GPU acceleration for fluid swiping.
- Added and removed pages dynamically in the swiping direction while using margins to maintain layout stability.
📈 The impact
The biggest success of this project was achieving native-like performance and interactivity in a hybrid app, making it feel as smooth as a fully native implementation.
- Enabled seamless, lag-free scrolling on underpowered devices.
- Allowed the project to be built as a hybrid app, reducing development costs compared to native alternatives.
- Proved that performance is critical to UX—users don’t just see speed, they feel it.
🎓 The lesson learned
- Performance is crucial for UX. A laggy experience breaks immersion, and users will always feel it—whether they realize it or not.
- Interestingly, none of the techniques used here are directly supported by modern frameworks. Performance problems often require platform-specific optimizations, and relying purely on frameworks won’t solve them. By going beyond what frameworks and libraries typically address, we can expand our repertoire of techniques that we can use in performance-critical situations.
Even today, ensuring buttery-smooth UI interactions remains one of the most important aspects of UX. The best performance optimizations are often the ones that go beyond standard approaches.