Whenever we speak about measuring web performance and user experience, we typically refer to static events in the browsing experience. Modern websites, however, are far from static, and user interactions with these websites have continuous aspects that cannot be represented by distinct events.
Over the last 10 years, our little OpenSource team has been working to build a JavaScript library, called boomerang, that measures all the performance aspects of real user experience.
In this talk, we’ll look at some of the new user experience metrics that the boomerang team has been collecting. We’ll find out how to measure page responsiveness, smoothness, jank, and usability. We’ll learn about things like Rage Clicks, Missed Clicks, and Dead Clicks. We’ll also look at real user data that we’ve collected showing how these aspects of the page affect user behaviour.
JavaScript provides us with many hooks into measuring performance and user experience. Let’s learn to collect them and understand what to expect when we optimize for them.
Philip Tellis is a geek who likes to make the computer do his work for him. As Principal RUM Distiller at Akamai, he analyses the impact of various design decisions on web application performance, scalability and security. He is the lead developer of boomerang – a JavaScript based web performance testing tool.
In his spare time, Philip enjoys cycling, reading, cooking and learning spoken languages.
Philip has spoken at several conferences around the world, including Velocity, Fluent, JSConf, Paris Web, IPC, Webinale, FOSSDEM, FOSS.IN, FREED.IN, Ubuntulive, Linux Symposium, OpenSource Bridge, PHP Quebec, ConFoo, WebDU, and Midwest.IO. He also writes for Smashing Magazine, blogs and is @bluesmoon on Twitter.
You can watch some of Philip’s past talks on Youtube.
Philip Tellis