Yottaa, the leading cloud platform for optimizing web and mobile applications, today announced that it has launched the Customer Experience Index (CEXi), a new index designed to help online businesses benchmark web performance and user experience.

Yottaa has previously helped businesses quantify the business impact of their CDN services with its ValidateIT methodology. With the CEXi, Yottaa is providing a framework for businesses to quantify their desktop and mobile user experiences to justify a web acceleration project. Prominent industry thought leadership from eCommerce giants including Amazon and Walmart suggest that web performance leads to increased conversion rates; in the past year mobile usage has increased significantly and in 2015 exceeded that of desktop for holiday shopping for many e-retailers. With claims that the web is getting slower, many businesses struggle to understand the impact that web performance has on the quality of experience they are providing to their users, and the impact that experience is having on business execution.

The CEXi is a compound index that quantifies the desktop and mobile user experience of a web application far more accurately than any single metric. The CEXi combines objective, measurable aspects of performance, such as page load speed from both mobile and desktop simulations, with specific weighting calculations to provide online businesses with an overall performance score that simulates the actual feeling, positive or negative, of using their web applications for a modern, cross-device user.

The Customer Experience Index focuses on three aspects of web performance: speed, parity of experience (across devices), and how well a site is optimized in relation to its complexity.

  • Speed - For the CEXi, key performance metrics, such as Time to Start Render (TTSR) and Time to Display (TTD), are collected and blended, and then weighted 50/50, for both mobile and desktop users. The mobile user simulation uses a 3G connection and an iPhone 5 with Safari browser, while the desktop user simulation uses a standard broadband connection and the latest version of Chrome. Then Yottaa takes the two resulting figures and weights them 60/40 - 60 percent mobile, 40 percent desktop, to match the current trends in web device usage in the U.S.
  • Device Parity - The CEXi compares the complexity of a desktop site for an online business versus its corresponding mobile site. Ideally, a site should be built on mobile-first principles, leading to a design that is equivalent for all users in functionality, and also performs well for all users.
  • Performance Power – While an eCommerce site should not be penalized for choosing to create a simple site, there are some sites that go above and beyond the call of duty by providing a super-rich experience that is also remarkably fast. To reward these companies, Yottaa developed a “bonus” score that bumps up the existing score by 25-50%, depending on how much power it packs from an optimization perspective. This is done by comparing the page weight and Time to Start Render for mobile (the more difficult of the two platforms to optimize). Conversely, Yottaa gives an equivalent penalty to those sites that should be fast, because they’re relatively lightweight, but are not.

“A great web experience has the power to compel users to devote precious time, money, and mental space to a company’s brand,” said Bob Buffone, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Yottaa. “While factors like performance, design, security, and usability each contribute to the result, it’s only when every last aspect comes together to form an experience that you can see the power of the web at work. Yottaa’s CEXi is a powerful tool in that it enables online businesses to gauge how their web applications are performing by approximating the experience of the people that matter most, their end users.”

Click here to learn more about the CEXi.

About Yottaa

Yottaa is the leading cloud platform for optimizing web and mobile applications. Through Yottaa's patented ContextIntelligence™ architecture, enterprises can manage, accelerate, and secure end user experiences on all devices in real-time with zero code change. Top Internet 500 businesses have adopted Yottaa's platform to realize billions in incremental revenue through dramatic improvements across key performance and business metrics. To learn more about how Yottaa can maximize your users’ experience, please visit www.yottaa.com or follow @yottaa on Twitter.