Performant Architecture for a Fast Gen AI User Experience

More and more developers are being asked to build Generative AI experiences into their web applications everywhere. However, the user's experience with Generative AI can sometimes be slow and frustrating. It’s been years since we would gladly wait over 10 seconds for a response to anything online. As AI processing gets faster, there are new limiting factors that could be negatively affecting your AI user experience.

In this talk, we will cover different ways to minimise laggy experiences in web applications when interacting with third-party Generative AI tools. We’ll be using a practical demonstration to show how you can reduce latency as we build one of my favourite sci fi gadgets, the babel fish.

Building applications for the web has evolved over the years. With new technologies and frameworks promising different things, browsers have also gotten smarter. Across board, we still prioritize creating a fast, seamless and accessible experience for users. This talk will be focused on simplifying some of the steps we can start practicing, to optimize for performance in web applications.

Performance advice tells us to reduce bundle size, minimize re-renders, and optimize everything to the extreme. But do we really need to? Is there anything else we can explore to make our apps look and feel faster—and if we’re lucky, actually be faster?

In this talk, we will review some conventional wisdom and explore techniques beyond it, like different UX strategies, overfetching, and modern Web APIs. We’ll even ask an unexpected question: Can SEO and LSO (LLM Search Optimisation) help with performance?

Deliver a practical and insightful session on optimizing web app performance, focusing on real-world techniques to enhance speed, availability, and user satisfaction. Explore topics such as caching, lazy loading, client-side rendering, and leveraging modern tools like Dynatrace and Chrome Lighthouse. Learn how to scale architectures, prevent thread blockers, and align with Core Web Vitals to deliver faster, more efficient web experiences.