Keynote Rolls Out New UX Performance Metrics

Internet and mobile cloud testing and monitoring firm Keynote Systems has announced the availability of its Keynote Transaction Perspective 11 and MyKeynote 11 solutions.

Transaction Perspective, an on-demand site-monitoring service for Web performance, now provides brand new user-experience (UX) metrics that leverage the capabilities of Internet Explorer 9.

These new UX metrics include the following:

Time to First Paint: This shows the moment when on-screen rendering begins and tells a user that the site is responding to their action.

Time to Full Screen: This shows when a user's browser or screen has completely rendered the page (even if additional rendering takes place below the fold).

Time to Interactive Page: The final metric indicates when users can start clicking or swiping or doing whatever they do with the content on the page.

Version 11 will also feature nine new Browser Event metrics based on specifications laid out by the W3C Navigation Timing standard, allowing Keynote to offer enterprise-level IT operations greater insights into the performance of all key phases in a Web page's lifecycle by observing in more granular detail the small milestones that take place during a browser's construction of the page.

This information will be presented via the MyKeynote monitoring portal for Web and mobile sites, redesigned to help operations teams find and use performance data charts and graphs in their day-to-day management of websites.

Measuring all of these key milestones in a Web page's delivery is growing in importance because recent research from Microsoft claims that 250 milliseconds - the virtual blink of an eye - can make the difference between a repeat visitor and a lost customer.

"Businesses are finding new ways to make Web pages feel faster to customers," says Keynote VP of product management and corporate development Vik Chaudhary. "That perception of performance, or user experience, is critical for businesses to monitor closely and now requires measuring much more than total page speed. They must measure user experience from start to finish."