Complete Web Monitoring

Places and Tasks in User Experience

Recall the places-and-tasks model we outlined in Chapter 5. It’s not just a good way to understand what users did—it’s also useful for thinking about their experiences on your website.

Place Performance: Updating the Container

If the page is a place, we can measure the initial loading as outlined earlier. At some point, the page is loaded, and the user can interact with it. Something triggers a change to the place:

• Minor input, such as dragging an item into a shopping cart or upvoting a story.

• Client-side scripts that periodically refresh a display.

• Client-side prepushing (the opposite of prefetching), in which the browser sends content to the server ahead of time. This is a common pattern in blogging (saving a draft of a post) or webmail (uploading an attachment in the background).

• Server events that push new content out to the client across a nailed-up HTTP connection or a web socket.

These updates take time to load and may have errors, but they’re only a small fraction of a full page retrieval. It’s not correct to measure these updates as a sequence of events the way we do for pages. Instead, it’s more accurate to describe them the way we would describe bandwidth: the delay between the server sending new content and the user seeing it. Place performance should therefore be described in terms of the frequency of updates and the latency with which the page is updated or the display refreshed.

Task Performance: Moving to the Next Step

Traditionally, the ...