What if we translated Core Web Vitals to the restaurant world? What would those metrics look like?
Here’s my first stab at it:
Here’s my first stab at it:
- Time To Menu: From the moment a customer walks in to the time they can read the menu.
- First Waiter Delay: The delay between a customer trying to and actually getting a waiter’s attention.
- Cumulative Table Wobbles: How much a customer’s table wobbles during their visit.
Looking at these metrics in a different context, like a restaurant, adds a fresh perspective (at least for me) for web vitals. I feel like I have a lot more intuitive sense of the value of each metric, how they interact with each other, and what I’m missing when I focus on just them.
For example, I immediately ask, “What kind of restaurant is this? Is it a sit down restaurant or a fast food joint?” And the questions go from there: How important is the menu? How fast can I cook and serve the food? Is it any good? Would a different process help? What do my customers really care about? Etc.
Web vitals are similar: they’re a great gut check on the health of my website, but they’re specifically designed to be simple—they don’t tell me how valuable my content is or how happy people really are with my product. I need to dig deeper for those answers.
Vitals don’t prove you’re alive, they just say you’re not dead.
But back to restaurants, it’s interesting: if I focus on, say, Time To Menu, I can come up with clever ways to improve that metric, like posting a “critical menu” on the front door of my restaurant. But if it still takes people forever to actually place their order and get their food, what good does it do them?
And so with First Waiter Delay: if my waiters are hyper-attentive and responding immediately to every customer response, but my kitchen is consistently slow, churning out poor quality food that needs to be taken back, how much am I really improving my customer’s experience?
(Everybody should fix their wobbly tables, by the way, because they’re just the worst. Please and thank you!)
Vitals are important, but let’s be careful not to miss the forest for the trees. Translating metrics to other contexts can help regain that sense of perspective.
What are some other analogies you use for web performance?
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P.S. Here’s a first stab at “Core Car Vitals”: Time To Ignition, First Acceleration Delay, Cumulative Bounces and Vibration. What else?
P.S. Here’s a first stab at “Core Car Vitals”: Time To Ignition, First Acceleration Delay, Cumulative Bounces and Vibration. What else?