What’s Next for Vercel, DX, and the Customer Experience?

Vercel’s Next.js Conf offered a glimpse into new product features while touching on critical themes for the software development industry.

In October, Vercel held its annual Next.js Conf in San Francisco. Developers, executives, founders, and thought leaders gathered to hear about the brand’s latest developments. The focus of the event was the release of Next.js 14, but the event highlights more than just new features offered by the industry-leading platform. Next.js Conf offers a sightline into the development trends we can expect to see throughout the industry in the months to come.

During his keynote address, Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, announced the release of Next.js 14. This release focuses on performance updates and stability. That’s good news for developers: they won’t need to update or refactor code so they can move to the latest version of Next.js.

Here’s what else is new in Next.js 14:

Turbopack: Next.js’ underlying Rust engine now has 5,000 passing tests for the App & Pages Router. Developers can expect 53% faster local server startup and 94% faster code updates with Fast Refresh.

Server Actions (Stable): with Server Actions, developers don’t need to manually create an API Route. Instead, they can define a function that runs securely on the server, called directly from React components. Server Actions will feel familiar for developers who’ve used server-centric frameworks before; it’s built on web fundamentals such as forms and the FormWeb Data API.

Partial Rendering (Preview): the preview of this feature gives developers what they want most—the speed and reliability of static, with support for fully dynamic, personalized responses. Moreover, Partial Rendering doesn’t require developers to learn new APIs. This feature is under active development, and Vercel will share more details about it in an upcoming minor release.

The updates and enhancements in Next.js, with their focus on performance and stability as well as the overall developer experience, are themes across the industry.

While the software industry prizes itself on its ability to be nimble and innovative, there’s also a healthy tension with the need for stability.

Stability in software means maintaining established programming standards and creating processes (such as documentation, testing, deployment, and maintenance norms) that ensure reliability and consistency. Developers want to do their best work and brands can’t afford unreliable systems with unpredictable periods of downtime. Stability always needs to be in balance with agility to enable that. As the composable commerce space matures and more and more brands adopt a modular tech approach, expect stability to become a bigger focus among vendors and practitioners alike.

Connected directly to the stability focus is software performance. Just as an unstable experience that can crash at a moment’s notice has a profound impact on the customer experience, laggy and low-performing software can drive customers away.

Studies show that frontend performance is a critical factor in customer experience — improving page load speed by just 1 second can reduce bounce rate by 11.7% and lift conversion rate by 5.6%. As the focus shifts to creating a more stable, reliable experience, expect performance to be a part of the discussion. Vercel is already leading the charge here, too, with Vercel Edge smoothing and speeding several parts of the experience to create a more performant end experience, and when research shows that 52% of customers would switch to a competitor if they have a single negative experience with your brand, you can’t afford to neglect the customer experience.

“Developer experience” was a popular term at Next.js Conf, heard in several sessions throughout the event. Next.js 14 reflects a shift toward focusing on the developer experience (DX) and how the tools and processes developers use to do their jobs impact a host of business outcomes.

Why does DX matter? Research shows that when developers have a better on-the-job experience, everyone benefits. A report from Forrester highlighted the following:

36.9% of developers aren’t even slightly satisfied with their work, and that number decreases as the organization’s size increases

It costs between $22,000 and $32,000 to onboard one new developer

Slightly more than 20% of developers shared that their team measures its progress by the quality of its DX, meaning that over three-quarters of developers aren’t at organizations where DX matters

In the past several years, the software development industry has witnessed a significant increase in investing in DX initiatives. As such, it’s not surprising that one of the major themes of the Next.js Conf was the developer experience and how to improve it.

Presenters talked about the need to improve DX by streamlining technologies and processes so developers can do more of what they want— code. They see an opportunity as technology improves to make this happen. However, technology can only do so much. Business leaders and decision makers must continue to take DX seriously if they’re doing so already, or invest in it if they’re not.

Stability, performance, and the developer experience are each critical topics on their own, yet they impact each other heavily. Working on unreliable software that can’t operate at or above industry standard limits your brand’s ability to create exceptional experiences and demotivates developers. Demotivated developers are less likely to produce exceptional experiences, and more likely to look for employment elsewhere leaving potentially critical gaps in knowledge and context to ensure your brand can continue to offer customers what they want.

As composable commerce becomes a bigger and more widely adopted architecture, it’s no surprise that an industry front-runner like Vercel is leading the pack on focusing on these areas heading into 2024. Given their undeniable importance, you can expect to hear more about these themes and their interdependencies in the coming year and well into the future.

Watch the keynote and other Next.js Conf sessions here.

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Rachel Levy Sarfin

Senior Staff Writer, Orium

Rachel Levy Sarfin has been writing and editing B2B SaaS content for over a decade. She’s worked as a journalist and as a content writer for digital marketing agencies and leading tech brands.