Do you Agree? Contrasting Google’s Core Web Vitals and the Impact of Cookie Consent Banners with Actual Web QoE

Providing sophisticated web Quality of Experience (QoE) has become paramount for web service providers and network operators alike. Due to advances in web technologies (HTML5, responsive design, etc.), traditional web QoE models focusing mainly on loading times have to be refined and improved. In this work, we relate Google’s Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics for improving user experience, to the loading time aspects of web QoE. To this end, we first perform objective measurements in the web using Google’s Lighthouse. To close the gap between metrics and experience, we complement these objective measurements with subjective assessment by performing multiple crowdsourcing QoE studies. For this purpose, we developed CWeQS, a customized framework to emulate the entire web page loading process, and ask users for their experience while controlling the Core Web Vitals, which is available to the public. To properly configure CWeQS for the planned QoE study and the crowdsourcing setup, we conduct pre-studies, in which we evaluate the importance of the loading strategy of a web page and the importance of the user task. The obtained insights allow us to conduct the desired QoE studies for
each of the Core Web Vitals. Since – due to legislation in Europe and other parts of the world – cookie consent banners have become ubiquitous, we investigate their impact on the Core Web Vitals as well as their influence on web QoE. Our results suggest that the Core Web Vitals are much less predictive for web QoE than expected and that page loading times remain the main metric and influence factor in this context.We further observe that unobtrusive and acentric cookie consent banners, are preferred by end-users and that additional delays caused by accepting or rejecting consent banners should be accounted along with the actual page load time to reduce waiting times and thus to improve web QoE.