TY - GEN
T1 - Scaling up your web experience, everywhere
AU - Newman, James
AU - Belson, Robert
AU - Bustamante, Fabian E
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank our shepherd Ben Greenstein and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback. This research was partially supported by NSF grant CNS-1619317 and a Google Faculty Research Award.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 ACM.
PY - 2019/2/22
Y1 - 2019/2/22
N2 - We present an approach to improve users' web experience by dynamically reducing the complexity of websites rendered based on network conditions. Our approach is based on a simple insight - adjusting a browser window's scale (i.e., zooming in/out), changes the number of objects placed above-the-fold and thus hides the loading of objects pushed below the fold in the user scroll time. We design ScaleUp, a browser extension that tracks network conditions and adjusts browser scale appropriately to improve user web Quality of Experience (QoE) while preserving the design integrity of websites. Through control experiments, we demonstrate the impact of ScaleUp on a number of key QoE metrics over a random sample of 50 from the top 500 Alexa websites. We show that a simple adjustment in scale can result in an over 19% improvement on Above-The-Fold (ATF) time in the median case. While adjusting a scale factor can improve metrics of QoE, it is unclear if that translates into an improved web experience for users. We summarize findings from a large, crowdsourced experiment with 1,000 users showing that, indeed, improvement to QoE metrics correlate with an enhanced user experience.We have released ScaleUp as a Chrome Extension that now counts with over 1,000 users worldwide, and report on some of the lessons learned from this deployment.
AB - We present an approach to improve users' web experience by dynamically reducing the complexity of websites rendered based on network conditions. Our approach is based on a simple insight - adjusting a browser window's scale (i.e., zooming in/out), changes the number of objects placed above-the-fold and thus hides the loading of objects pushed below the fold in the user scroll time. We design ScaleUp, a browser extension that tracks network conditions and adjusts browser scale appropriately to improve user web Quality of Experience (QoE) while preserving the design integrity of websites. Through control experiments, we demonstrate the impact of ScaleUp on a number of key QoE metrics over a random sample of 50 from the top 500 Alexa websites. We show that a simple adjustment in scale can result in an over 19% improvement on Above-The-Fold (ATF) time in the median case. While adjusting a scale factor can improve metrics of QoE, it is unclear if that translates into an improved web experience for users. We summarize findings from a large, crowdsourced experiment with 1,000 users showing that, indeed, improvement to QoE metrics correlate with an enhanced user experience.We have released ScaleUp as a Chrome Extension that now counts with over 1,000 users worldwide, and report on some of the lessons learned from this deployment.
KW - Quality of experience
KW - Web browsing
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85062846035&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85062846035&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3301293.3302368
DO - 10.1145/3301293.3302368
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85062846035
T3 - HotMobile 2019 - Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications
SP - 87
EP - 92
BT - HotMobile 2019 - Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 20th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, HotMobile 2019
Y2 - 27 February 2019 through 28 February 2019
ER -