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Real User Experience through Speed Index - Do Not Miss out on this!
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Real User Experience through Speed Index - Do Not Miss out on this!

Customer Engagement Concept. Modern Illustration. Multicolor Customer Engagement Drawn on Dark Brick Wall. Doodle Icons. Doodle Style of Customer Engagement Concept. Customer Engagement on Wall.

Real User Experience! So, this article is about Real User Experience computed through the measurement of Speed Index and Qentelli's take on it. My statistics say, about 80% of people reading this article will only pay attention to the words and phrases in red. 10% will scroll through the page after this line trying to get as much information from this article with as little reading as possible. Only about 5% will completely read the article while 5% will search for images and because they don’t find it, will leave. Interestingly, any highlighted information is read in full and this paragraph almost succeeds in getting 90% completion while about 5% fall off starting at the second line.

We are a generation that suffers from chronic ADD. We want faster build cycles. We need faster machines. A 5 second delay will make us think why this universe was created in first place. This Need for Speed is taking over everything in our lives. It dictates how we do business and how we retain customers. A lot has been written about xx% of users will abandon a site if it doesn’t respond in y seconds. I am not going there again. It has already been beaten to death!

Thanks to the performance awareness brought in by a myriad of vendors, bloggers and researchers, almost every organization is becoming increasingly aware and conscious about their applications' and websites' performance. From measuring server response times in 90’s to including browser response times in 2000’s to implementing network impairment nowadays, the craft of measuring performance has come a really long way. Interesting point to note here is that, barring a few organizations that really care and have deployed RUM solutions, a vast majority of them are blind to their customer or end user perception/experience of their apps/website’s performance. Tools that tell you the response times on a network layer do not necessarily tell you how long it took on a device/browser. Modern websites and apps have become so complex and distributed that an average webpage today gets served from 20 domains. And fair part of those domains are either social plugins, ad feeds, analytics beacons, payment gateways or personalized content feed from a partner. What it tells us is that, though you choose to ignore, though you hate the fact, the performance of your application in production is dictated most times by the third-party APIs you have in play.

If you have gotten this far, kudos! Look at the previous paragraphs in this article, the visual highlights helped the author drive his point to 90% of footfall on this article.

Page Speed Index is a measure of that visual completeness. Real user experience is a composite score that considers, web page speed index and usability to show what your end users perceive / experience when they access your application. If this article were written in a mono spaced black font as opposed to the way it is, more than 80% of footfall on this article bounces off even though the word count is the same. Page Speed Index addresses this very issue on your web pages. How quickly can a user engage with your web application?

Even if your web page loads in 3 seconds, exactly like that of your competitor’s, you can still lose customers if your competitor’s web page engages within the first second. One of the most useful features of PSI is that it helps you fine-tune your page to start engaging your customers within the first half second even on a 3G wireless signal.

One of the biggest concerns when it comes to looking at performance metrics is, what does it mean to my user?

Want to know see your customer’s perception of your web page’s performance?

Check out Qentelli’s customized implementation of Real user Experience and Page Speed Index here. Don’t worry. It is free.

If you’re one of those who is going back to the top of this article to read it again in full, that’s the power of visual engagement. Bring it to your websites today.

Real User Experience measurement by Qentelli can be one of the steps in your performance engineering journey. It helps you understand things on the production side, the side where a majority of those that judge, reside. Granted you cannot talk to each of your customer to understand what they think, but a tool such as our Real User Experience through Page Speed Index can simplify and enhance that critical feedback cycle.