Will core web vitals impact your UX and design approach

As you’ve probably heard, a Google update called ‘Core Web Vitals’ (CWV) is coming in May. As a designer, an update like this isn’t usually a large concern for me but this one is different. Core Web Vitals is Google’s first major attempt at measuring the user experience of a website and this caught my attention.

The new metrics

Google have announced that Core web vitals will measure a website on three aspects they believe to be core user experience needs when visiting a website — loading, interactivity, and visual stability. These three core areas will then be measured against the following metrics:

• Largest Contentful Paint.
• First Input Delay.
• Cumulative Layout Shift

Now I will leave the specific detail of these metrics to the more technical members of the team, but to summarise they roughly mean.

Largest Contentful Paint
How long it takes for the largest content element on the page to become visible.

First Input Delay
The time between a user interacting with the site and the website responding to the action.

Cumulative Layout Shift
Does the loading or interaction of certain elements…