"metrics"
Introducing Last Painted Hero
We're excited to announce that we've launched Last Painted Hero as an official metric. Last Painted Hero is a synthetic metric that shows you when the last piece of critical content is painted. Keep reading to learn how Last Painted Hero works, why (and how) we created it, and how it can help you understand how your users perceive the speed of your pages.
The case for smarter heuristics
When choosing the right performance metric, my soapbox for the last few years has been "not every pixel has the same value". In other words, rather than chase dozens of different performance metrics, focus on the metrics that measure what's critical in your page.
Here at SpeedCurve, we think it's good to focus on rendering metrics, because they're a closer approximation to what the user experiences. There are some good rendering metrics out there, like start render and Speed Index, but the downside to these metrics is that they give every pixel the same value. For example, if the background renders and some ads render, that could improve your start render time and Speed Index score, but it might not have a big impact on the user's experience. Instead, it's better to measure the parts of the page that matter the most to users. We call those parts of the page the "hero elements".
New! More RUM metrics in your Favorites dashboards
SpeedCurve comes with a great set of dashboards for synthetic and RUM. But we know that one size does not fit all when it comes to data charts, which is why we've invested so much work into the Favorites dashboards. For customers who use LUX, it provides a place to create custom charts that combine metrics from synthetic and RUM.
We just added some new RUM metrics from LUX in Favorites to allow for even more customized monitoring:
- Page Views – The number of page views, including Single-Page-App page transitions
- Sessions – The number of unique sessions
- Session Length – The number of page views per session
- Bounced Sessions – The number of sessions that only have one page view
- Bounce Rate – The percentage of bounced sessions out of the total number of sessions
Engagement charts: See correlations between performance and user engagement
One of the best – and worst – things about real user monitoring is that it gives you unparalleled access to massive amounts of user data. The problem is when all this data leads to data indigestion. How do you know where to begin? And how do you know what to leave out in order to present a clear case for performance?
At SpeedCurve, we care about more than just showing you all your data. We want to show you the most important data. And we want to make it easy for you to share that data with people throughout your organization. That’s why we’re excited about the newest addition to our family of visualizations: engagement charts.
Waterfall with browser events
We've improved our already fantastic interactive waterfall chart with a new collapsed mode that highlights all the key browser events. This lets you quickly scan all the events that happen as the page loads and if you scrub your mouse across the waterfall you can easily correlate each event to what the user could see at that moment.
Along with all the browser metrics you also get to see our new hero rendering times in context. Click on any event to see a large version of that moment in the filmstrip.
Hero Rendering Times: New metrics for measuring UX
The key to a good user experience is quickly delivering the content your visitors care about the most. This is easy to say, but tricky to do. Every site has unique content and user engagement goals, which is why measuring how fast critical content renders has historically been a challenging task.
That's why we're very excited to introduce Hero Rendering Times, a set of new metrics for measuring the user experience. Hero Times measure when a page's most important content finishes rendering in the browser. These metrics are available right now to SpeedCurve users.
More on how Hero Rendering Times work further down in this post. But first, I want to give a bit of back story that explains how we got to here.
The average web page is 3MB. How much should we care?
A couple of month ago, someone asked if I'd written a page bloat update recently. The answer was no. I've written a lot of posts about page bloat, starting way back in 2012, when the average page hit 1MB. To my mind, the topic had been well covered. We know that the general trend is that pages are getting bigger at a fairly consistent rate of growth. It didn't feel like there was much new territory to cover.
Also: it felt like Ilya Grigorik dropped the mic on the page bloat conversation with this awesome post, where he illustrated why the "average page" is a myth. Among the many things Ilya observed after analyzing HTTP Archive data for desktop sites, when you have outliers that weigh in at 30MB+ and more than 90% of your pages are under 5MB, an "average page size" of 2227KB (back in 2016) doesn't mean much.
The mic dropped. We all stared at it on the floor for a while, then wandered away. And now I want to propose we wander back. Why? Because the average page is now 3MB in size, and this seems like a good time to pause, check our assumptions, and ask ourselves:
Is there any reason to care about page size as a performance metric? And if we don't consider page size a meaningful metric, then what should we care about?
Measuring the User Experience
SpeedCurve’s sweet spot is the intersection of design and performance - where the user experience lives. Other monitoring services focus on network behavior and the mechanics of the browser. Yet users rarely complain that “the DNS lookups are too slow” or “the load event fired late”. Instead, users get frustrated when they have to wait for the content they care about to appear on the screen.
The key to a good user experience is quickly delivering the critical content.
User Timing and Custom Metrics
If you want to improve performance, you must start by measuring performance. But what should you measure?
Across the performance industry, the metric that's used the most is "page load time" (i.e, "window.onload" or "document complete"). Page load time was pretty good at approximating the user experience in the days of Web 1.0 when pages were simpler and each user action loaded a new web page (multi-page websites). In the days of Web 2.0 and single-page apps, page load time no longer correlates well with what the user sees. A great illustration is found by comparing Gmail to Amazon.
In the last few years some better alternatives to page load time have gained popularity, such as start render time and Speed Index. But these metrics suffer from the same major drawback as page load time: they are ignorant of what content the user is most interested in on the page.
Any performance metric that values all the content the same is not a good metric.
Users don't give equal value to everything in the page. Instead, users typically focus on one or more critical design elements in the page, such as a product image or navbar. In searching for a good performance metric, ideally we would find one that measures how long the user waits before seeing this critical content. Since browsers don't know which content is the most important, it's necessary for website owners to put these performance metrics in place. The way to do this is to create custom metrics with User Timing.
Performance budgets in action
Performance budgets are an important tool for ensuring your site is delivering a great user experience. Steve first experienced performance budgets while Head Performance Engineer at Google. The practice of using budgets to track performance took off with Tim Kadlec's blog post Setting a Performance Budget. The idea is to identify your performance goals and track the metrics that help you achieve your goals.
At SpeedCurve, we give performance budgets first-class status by tracking them in the Site dashboard. Here's an example of tracking a budget for image size.
Before setting your performance budgets, you first have to be monitoring your user experience. Only then can you set budgets and thresholds for improving your baseline user experience. This also allows you to quantify the improvements you're making and share success stories across the organization like "We just improved start render by 32% by reducing image requests to half the budgeted amount".
The language and metrics of UX evolve at Velocity 2015
Originally published on the O'Reilly Radar Blog
I’ve attended four O’Reilly Velocity conferences over the last year, and I was struck by a notable shift in the conversations at Velocity in Santa Clara, Calif. Many speakers and attendees have started to change their language and describe the experience of their websites and apps from the user’s perspective.
The balance has shifted from just talking about how fast or reliable a particular system is to the overall experience a user has when they interact with and experience a product. Many people are now looking at themselves from the outside in and developing more empathy for their users. The words “user” and “user experience” were mentioned again and again by speakers.
Here are recent talks from Velocity and other events that highlight this shift to UX concerns.
