Progressive Web Applications and Offline Quantifying Web App Success

[00:00:00]
>> Mike North: Let's dive into measuring apps. Because I want us, as we iteratively work on this example, right, there are 14 different steps we're gonna go through. We wanna be sure that we're watching something quantitative that helps us understand that we are moving our position closer and closer to where we want to be.

[00:00:22] And there are a couple metrics that I want us to pay attention to. These two metrics you'll see all over the place. So there's time to first meaningful paint, and this is just sort of starting when the request is sent out. You click on a URL, how long until the user feels like the loading experience has finished, or they can at least start going about what they intend to do, right?

[00:00:48] If it's a news article, maybe they can start reading already. There is time to interactive, and so this is where you can start touching on navigation elements and tapping buttons. And they actually work, right, they're not just visually on the screen, but not yet wired up. And I like to threw a third metric in here that you're not going to see widely if you go and read about PWAs.

[00:01:13] But I think it's an important milestone that we need to pay attention to. And that is the time to dynamic data showing up on the screen. We put this here because it helps us understand that if we move the first paint so that it's really, really fast, but dynamic data comes much, much later, we haven't really done our job completely yet.

[00:01:39] Right, so we need to be able to show something on the screen, not just have a spinner. I mean that's good, that is certainly like a massive step up from a blank screen to at least show that we have this booted. You might buy yourself a second and a half or two seconds of additional patience by showing that the link you tapped is not broken.

[00:02:01] We are working on it. We're going to get stuff for you. But then data has to come shortly thereafter.