Understanding Your Users

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>> Todd Gardner: So let's talk about those users. Let's talk about who your users are. Who are they, and what do they use, and what's interesting? We're gonna look at some general statistics about the web. So this is all according to StatCounter, which has lots of really cool data, but we look at device share in.

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In the world, as of August 2024, 62% use mobile 62%, most of the web is mobile. This is why Google cares about mobile. It's why mobile first indexing. It's why so many stores like Build Mobile First Things. Now, it's not saying everybody uses mobile. Some people use desktop, some industries are overwhelmingly desktop.

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My sites are like 98% desktop users, cuz I typically target developers when they're at work on their workstations. And so desktop is really important to me, but globally, mobile is twice the size of desktop. Let's break down screen sizes, cuz there's a huge diversity here. There's 8% at the absolute like biggest, right, 1920, so we have big screens, 10 ADP or better, 8.3%.

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But then we go the next largest size is all the way on the other end of the spectrum at only 360 pixels wide. 7% only 360 pixels wide that's not I that's like a teeny tiny Android device like an iPhone doesn't even come in that size. 390 by 844, I think that's the small iPhone, and then a 1366 by 768 that's like a small laptop, but it's all over the board.

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And so the screen size, none of those is what I'm rocking here with my MacBook. Like mine's bigger than any of those, right? I bet all yours is probably bigger than any of those, too. And so what you see on your developer laptop or your developer workstation, it's probably nothing like what your real users do.

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Operating system share, let's look at this, check this out. 71% are on Android, 71%. iOS at 27 then on the desktop side, we have overwhelmingly Windows at 71%, some OSX.
>> Todd Gardner: So if we break that down, so mobile is 60% and 60 some percent, and within mobile, Android is 71% of that mobile.

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What's the average cost of an Android phone worldwide, it's $286. So that means even of those Android phones, they're not buying Google Pixels. They're not buying the crazy high-end Android phones. They're buying, the cheap Android phones. The cheap Android phones with the lowest amount of memory and the lowest processing power in them.

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So the average user on the internet is nowhere close to what we typically think of and what we typically have in our pockets as developers. Network speed, this is based on speedtest.net. This is average worldwide mobile and fixed broadband speed, mobile is 60 down, 11 up, 27 milliseconds of latency.

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So if you're trying to base maybe your chrome speed tests on, these would be good numbers to base your throttles based on how you should slow things down. But of course,the future is not evenly distributed yet because those numbers are wildly different depending on where in the world you go.

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Some places, connection speeds is 250 megabits or better. Other places crawl along at less than 10. Now, this is all like global data, which is interesting to think about if you build a site that serves a worldwide audience, but you should understand your users. So using an analytics tool or real user monitoring tool, you should understand who your users are, like what operating system, browsers, what country, what screen sizes are your visitors coming from, so you can be sure to test that.

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These are all reports out of request metrics, which does a little bit of analyticsy stuff, too. So that is all about understanding our users and setting goals for our website.