Tags: measurement

Is my host fast yet?

This is an interesting project to try to rank web hosts by performance:

Real-world server response (Time to First Byte) latencies, as experienced by real-world users navigating the web.

Designing for Progressive Disclosure by Steven Hoober

Progressive disclosure interface patterns categorised and evaluated:

• popups,
• drawers,
• mouseover popups (just say no!),
• accordions,
• tabs,
• new pages,
• scrolling,
• scrolling sideways.

I really like the hypertext history invoked in this article.

The piece finishes with a great note on the MacNamara fallacy:

Everyone thinks metrics let us measure results. But, actually, they don’t. They measure only what they are measuring. Engagement, for example, is not something that can be measured, so we use an analogue for it. Time on page. Or clicks.

We often end up measuring what is quick, cheap, and easy to measure. Therefore, few organizations regularly conduct usability testing or customer-satisfaction surveys, but lots use analytics.

Even today, organizations often use clicks as a measure of engagement. So, all too often, they design user interfaces to generate clicks, so the system can measure them.

Web bloat

Pages are often designed so that they’re hard or impossible to read if some dependency fails to load. On a slow connection, it’s quite common for at least one depedency to fail.

Fire up Reader Mode and read this excellent article informed by data from using a typically slow connection in rural USA today. Two findings are:

1. A large fraction of the web is unusable on a bad connection. Even on a good (0% packetloss, no ping spike) dialup connection, some sites won’t load.
2. Some sites will use a lot of data!

CrUX.RUN

This is so useful! Get instant results from Google’s Chrome User Experience Report without having to wait (or pay) for BigQuery.

Here’s an example of my site’s metrics over the last few months, complete with nice charts.

Performance Budgets, Pragmatically – CSS Wizardry

Smart advice from Harry on setting performance budgets:

They shouldn’t be aspirational, they should be preventative … my suggestion for setting a budget for any trackable metric is to take the worst data point in the past two weeks and use that as your limit

How readable—Findings

The results are in for Daniel van Berzon’s most recent experiment into accurately measuring code readability. You can read the results and read about the methodology behind them.

Quitting Analytics

What over a decade of number-crunching analytics has taught me is that spending an hour writing, sharing, or helping someone is infinitely more valuable than spending that hour swimming through numbers. Moreover, trying to juice the numbers almost invariably divorces you from thinking about customers and understanding people. On the surface, it seems like a convenient proxy, but it’s not. They’re just numbers. If you’re searching for business insights, talking to real people beats raw data any day. It’s not as convenient, but when is anything worth doing convenient?

How Google Pagespeed works: Improve Your Score and Search Engine Ranking

Ben shares the secret of SEO. Spoiler: the villain turns out to be Too Much JavaScript. Again.

Time to Interactive (TTI) is the most impactful metric to your performance score.

Therefore, to receive a high PageSpeed score, you will need a speedy TTI measurement.

At a high level, there are two significant factors that hugely influence TTI:

• The amount of JavaScript delivered to the page
• The run time of JavaScript tasks on the main thread

Have we reached Peak Data?

Matt’s publishing a newsletter on the past, present, and future of tracking:

The last 100 years have been a journey to see how to measure ghosts - how to measure the invisible audiences at the end of technological distribution networks. With every decade, these ghosts have come more and more into focus, ending with a the last ten years of social media and digital advertising that has created unimaginable amounts of data about everything we see, read, click and like.

He sees the pendulum swinging the other way now …for those who can afford it:

If there’s one constant in the economics of audience data over the last 100 years, is that we only get free services if we pay for them with our attention. This has been true for commercial radio and television, free newspapers, mobile games and digital content. If we want privacy, we have to pay for it, and not everyone can afford this. Will the right to become a ghost only be for the people with money to buy premium products?

Web Bloat Score Calculator

Page web bloat score (WebBS for short) is calculated as follows:

WebBS = TotalPageSize / PageImageSize

Yes, this is a tongue-in-cheek somewhat arbitrary measurement, but it’s well worth reading through the rationale for it.

How can the image of a page be smaller than the page itself?

Test the impact of ads and third party scripts

This is a very useful new feature in Calibre, the performance monitoring tool. Now you can get data about just how much third-party scripts are affecting your site’s performance:

The best way of circumventing fear and anxiety around third party script performance is to capture metrics that clearly articulate their performance impact.

Performance Budgets That Stick - TimKadlec.com

I like Tim’s definition here:

A performance budget is a clearly defined limit on one or more performance metrics that the team agrees not to exceed, and that is used to guide design and development.

And I agree about the four attributes required for a performance budget to succeed. It must be:

1. Concrete
2. Meaningful
3. Integrated
4. Enforceable

The point is not to let the performance budget try to stand on its own, somewhere hidden in company documentation collecting dust. You need to be proactive about making the budget become a part of your everyday work.

New kilogram standard: how the SI unit of mass is being redefined - Vox

A fascinating look at standards in the real world. In this case, it’s the kilogram, which is shedding its French Revolutionary roots in favour of the Planck constant.

Our messy human measurements have transcended their messy humanness; they have been melded with an eternal truth.

Mention of The Master Of The Kilogram reminded me of The Keeper Of Time.

AddyOsmani.com - Start Performance Budgeting

Great ideas from Addy on where to start with creating a performance budget that can act as a red line you don’t want to cross.

If it’s worth getting fast, it’s worth staying fast.

Breaking the Deadlock Between User Experience and Developer Experience · An A List Apart Article

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Our efforts to measure and improve UX are packed with tragically ironic attempts to love our users: we try to find ways to improve our app experiences by bloating them with analytics, split testing, behavioral analysis, and Net Promoter Score popovers. We stack plugins on top of third-party libraries on top of frameworks in the name of making websites “better”—whether it’s something misguided, like adding a carousel to appease some executive’s burning desire to get everything “above the fold,” or something truly intended to help people, like a support chat overlay. Often the net result is a slower page load, a frustrating experience, and/or (usually “and”) a ton of extra code and assets transferred to the browser.

Even tools that are supposed to help measure performance in order to make improvements—like, say, Real User Monitoring—require you to add a script to your web pages …thereby increasing the file size and degrading performance! It’s ironic, in that Alanis Morissette sense of not understanding what irony is.

Stacking tools upon tools may solve our problems, but it’s creating a Jenga tower of problems for our users.

This is a great article about evaluating technology.

Unit deconverter - make your units less useful!

Take a perfectly useful standardised measurement of length, weight, speed or time, and convert to something far less useful (but much more fun).

Net Promoter Score Considered Harmful (and What UX Professionals Can Do About It)

Jared’s spot-on takedown of Net Promoter Scores.

(Andy feels this is like criticising GDP, but GDP measures something that actually happened, whereas NPS, like horoscopes or tea-leaf readings, rely on clairvoyance.)

Why it’s tricky to measure Server-side Rendering performance

A good analysis, but my takeaway was that the article could equally be called Why it’s tricky to measure Client-side Rendering performance. In a nutshell, just looking at metrics can be misleading.

Pre-classified metrics are a good signal for measuring performance. At the end of the day though, they may not properly reflect your site’s performance story. Profile each possibility and give it the eye test.

And it’s always worth bearing this in mind:

The best way to prioritize content by building a static site. Ask yourself if the content needs JavaScript.

Where Time Comes From on Vimeo

A profile of Demetrios Matsakis, keeper of time at U.S. Naval Observatory, America’s equivalent to Greenwich in its importance for timekeeping in the modern world.