Abstract
Content is a key influencing factor in Web Quality of Experience (QoE) estimation. A web user’s satisfaction can be influenced by how long it takes to render and visualize the visible parts of the web page in the browser. This is referred to as the Above-the-fold (ATF) time. SpeedIndex (SI) has been widely used to estimate perceived web page loading speed of ATF content and a proxy metric for Web QoE estimation. Web application developers have been actively introducing innovative interactive features, such as animated and multimedia content, aiming to capture the users’ attention and improve the functionality and utility of the web applications. However, the literature shows that, for the websites with animated content, the estimated ATF time using the state-of-the-art metrics may not accurately match completed ATF time as perceived by users. This study introduces a new metric, Plausibly Complete Time (PCT), that estimates ATF time for a user’s perception of websites with and without animations. PCT can be integrated with SI and web QoE models. The accuracy of the proposed metric is evaluated based on two publicly available datasets. The proposed metric holds a high positive Spearman’s correlation (rs=0.89) with the Perceived ATF reported by the users for websites with and without animated content. This study demonstrates that using PCT as a KPI in QoE estimation models can improve the robustness of QoE estimation in comparison to using the state-of-the-art ATF time metric. Furthermore, experimental result showed that the estimation of SI using PCT improves the robustness of SI for websites with animated content. The PCT estimation allows web application designers to identify where poor design has significantly increased ATF time and refactor their implementation before it impacts end-user experience.
Highlights
As internet plays an increasingly important role in almost every workplace around the globe, web applications have gained a substantial role in streamlining different organizational, business, or personal processes
The analysis shows that the proposed metric, Plausibly Complete Time (PCT), is highly correlated with the perceived ATF time reported by the subjective study
In order to evaluate the robustness of PCT and its relationship with the alternative metrics for estimating ATF time, the data collected in Reference [10] is utilized, and PCT is computed for each test case (21 test cases in total)
Summary
As internet plays an increasingly important role in almost every workplace around the globe, web applications have gained a substantial role in streamlining different organizational, business, or personal processes. The success of web applications significantly depends on an providing a good user experience [1,2]. In web browsing, when a web page is requested, the browser follows a process to fetch and render the web content on the user’s screen. The end-user’s QoE is partly dependant on how fast the visible page content is rendered in the browser [6]. The web application server processes the request and sends a response back to the browser. The browser constructs a Document Object Model (DOM) and starts rendering the web page on the user’s screen. Depending on how the web application is designed, the browser may paint the visual elements all at once, or at different points in time. The browser, may still load more visual and non-visual objects until the page gets fully loaded
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