Beyond First Impressions: Estimating Quality of Experience for Interactive Web Applications

Abstract

The number of web applications for both personal and business use will continue to increase. The popularity of web applications has grown, increasing the need to estimate Quality of Experience for web applications (Web QoE). Web QoE helps providers to understand how their end-users perceive quality and point towards areas to improve. Waiting time has been proven to have a significant influence on user satisfaction. Most studies in the field of Web QoE have focused on modelling Web QoE for the user's first interaction with the application, e.g., the waiting time for the first page load to complete. This does not include a user's subsequent interactions with the application. Users keep interacting with the application beyond the first page load resulting in an experience that consists of a series of waiting times. In this study, we have chosen web maps as a use case to investigate how to measure waiting time for a user's interactions across a web browsing session, and to measure the correlation between waiting time and user-reported perceived quality. We provide a short survey of existing Web QoE estimation metrics and models. We then propose two new measures: interactive Load Time (iLT) and Total Completed interactive Load (TCiL) to establish the waiting time associated with a web application user's interactions. A subjective study confirms a logarithmic relationship for interactive web application sessions between iLT and perceived quality. We compare the correlation between QoE for iLT and the state of the art, non-interactive equivalent, Page Load Time (PLT)/Waiting Time. We demonstrate how the iLT/QoE fitting curve deviates from PLT/QoE. The number of clicks in completing tasks and TCiL are explored to explain the connections between user's interactions behaviour and the perceived quality.

Keywords

• Web QoE
• interactive QoE
• quality measurement
• quality metrics
• time metrics
• waiting time