It’s been a busy old year. Back in January we were getting ready to launch our new Pocket Guide ebook series. Now, as the end of the year approaches, it’s almost hard to believe we have sixteen Pocket Guides under our belts.

To round off 2013 we’ve launched two great new Pocket Guide ebooks: Web Performance by Andy Davies, and Experiments for Designers by Colin McFarland. Here’s a little more information on each one.

Web Performance by Andy Davies

Web pages are getting larger and slower to load, and we seem to be relying on browser and network improvements to rescue us. Visitors have expectations that pages should be faster. By stretching their patience, there's a danger they will spend less time on our sites, visit fewer pages and buy less.

In this book, Andy will guide you through why performance matters, what we can use to improve it, why these methods work, and some of the trade-offs involved. You'll learn practical techniques to improve website performance and be introduced to approaches that you can experiment with.

Experiments for Designers by Colin McFarland

To discover the value of innovative ideas, designers need to run creative and systematic experiments, be open to failure and iterate quickly. A/B testing, often considered exclusively for small incremental changes, can open the door to experimenting with interaction design alternatives, and even interrogate bigger ideas.

In this Pocket Guide, Colin offers an approach to challenge our intuition, championing validated hypotheses over designers’ hunches. You’ll learn about introducing experiments into your workflow, as well as their implications for and impact on the web design process.

You can pick up each ebook for £2 each, or as part of Collection Four, which also includes Chui Chui Tan’s International User Research and Anna Debenham’s Front-end Style Guides, for just £6.

We’ll be back in 2014 with plenty more exciting titles. Merry Christmas and a happy new year!