Last month, I gave a talk at DotYork—a digital conference in the North of England—about the way mySociety designs and builds websites for different countries and cultures all around the world.

If you’re into web technologies, or user research, or just generally the sort of work mySociety does, then it’s a fun 15 minute watch!

You can download the slides from my talk here, or watch videos of all the other DotYork 2017 talks here.

At the end of the Q&A session, I said I should write a blog post with links to some of the stuff I couldn’t fit into my talk. So here is that blog post!

• Working with the mySociety design team – a primer we often share with new international partners, before starting on a joint project.
• The Facebook-Loving Farmers of Myanmar – a fascinating exposé into how people outside the Europe and the US have very different relationships with online technologies.
• User Research When You Can’t Talk To Your Users – some great ideas on where to get user feedback on your products, even when you can’t talk to them in person.
• A really excellent post from Karolina Szczur on improving front-end performance for websites, including optimising images, fonts, and scripts, and continuously montoring performance.
• A guide to Analysing Network Performance in Chrome DevTools – a great introduction for anyone trying to track down why their website isn’t loading quickly.
• JavaScript improvements in FixMyStreet 2.0 and a performance sprint for our African PMO sites – two examples of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into optimising the performance of the mySociety products you use every day.

Header photo © Hewitt & Walker