Speed Index: Relating the Industrial Standard for User Perceived Web Performance to web QoE

Abstract

In 2012, Google introduced the Speed Index (SI) metric to quantify the speed of the Web page visual completeness for the actually displayed above-the-fold (ATF) portion of a Web page. In Web browsing a page might appear to the user to be already fully rendered, even though further content may still be retrieved, resulting in the Page Load Time (PLT). This happens due to the browser progressively rendering all objects, part of which can also be located below the browser window's current viewport. The SI metric (and variants) thereof have since established themselves as a de facto standard in Web page and browser testing. While SI is a step in the direction of including the user experience into Web metrics, the actual meaning of the metric and especially its relationship between Speed Index and Web QoE is however far from being clear. The contributions of this paper are thus to first develop an understanding of the SI based on a theoretical analysis and second, to analyze the interdependency between SI and MOS values from an existing public dataset. Specifically, our analysis is based on two well established models that map the user waiting time to a user ACR-rating of the QoE. The analysis show that ATF-based metrics are more appropriate than pure PLT as input to Web QoE models.