Designing Real-time Web Applications

Near-real-time web applications have become increasingly common with advancements in event-driven server-side systems, websockets, and Javascript frameworks. Gone are the days of the user having to mash the refresh button to see updates to data that frequently changes. As a product development team, you can now send near-real-time updates to every user on your site about every change that happens... but should you? In this talk, we’ll cover some of the practical design questions we’ve learned to consider when deciding how and when to notify users of changes as well as how to handle things when the connection breaks. When the session ends, you’ll have some ideas from real-world examples to ensure your users get the Goldilocks experience... not so much that it overwhelms them, not so little so that they're making decisions on stale data, but just the right amount of timely information.