In a world where pretending is everything — where the illusion of expertise passes for mastery, and the appearance of speed passes for performance — Google’s Web Vitals are right at home.
They measure how quickly a spinner appears. Not whether the system understood what you asked for. They track paint, delay, shift — everything except the one thing that matters. Did the user get what they came for.
The Illusion of Measurement
Web Vitals sound scientific. Largest Contentful Paint. First Input Delay. Cumulative Layout Shift. They come with numbers, thresholds, and badges — green if you’re fast enough, red if you’re not.
But beneath the precision lies an assumption so hollow it’s almost tragic.
That a fast-loading image means your product is working. That a quick tap response means your interface is usable. That layout stability means the user is satisfied.
These metrics don’t measure user success. They measure whether the browser rendered something in time. Whether the user found it useful, understood it, trusted it — that’s none of Web Vitals’ concern.
Your app can pass every Web Vital check and still leave the user confused, stuck, or misled. Your app can fail them and still deliver something useful, clear, and satisfying.
What Web Vitals give us isn’t performance — it’s a performance.
What the User Actually Wants
The user didn’t come to your site for “contentful paint.” They didn’t come to admire layout stability or see how quickly a button responds to a tap.
They came to do something.
They came to sign up. To reset a password. To submit a claim, book a flight, check a balance. They came with a goal — and left if that goal wasn’t met.
That’s the part we’ve lost. In our obsession with loading times and interaction delays, we’ve forgotten the only metric that matters: was the user’s intention fulfilled?
That’s what performance should mean.
Not how fast we pretend to be. Not how quickly we show a spinner. But how long it takes to deliver something real — a confirmation, a result, a response that says: “I heard you.”
What We Should Be Measuring
If we really cared about user experience, we wouldn’t just measure what painted, or when the interface looked “ready.”
We’d measure something simpler. Something human.
We’d measure the time between intention and fulfillment. Between the moment the user asks, and the moment the system answers.
You click “Register.” The spinner appears. The system processes your request. And eventually, you see a confirmation — or the next step.
That gap — from intent to response — is the only part that matters. Because that’s the part the user feels.
We can call it Time to Fulfillment. Not as a metric to obsess over, but as a reminder of what performance actually means.
Because a fast-loading placeholder isn’t performance. An immediate tap response that leads to nowhere isn’t performance. Fulfillment is.