Capturing the User Experience as a separate response time

Hello

So, one of the things that comes up frequently with our customers is the disconnect between what a real user actually perceives to experience and the 'truth' of the absolute response time.

For example; a site has a page that pulls data from several databases hosted on different servers and displays selective information on the screen according to the call's rules (stored procedures and the like)

1. I report that the response time is 10 seconds

2. The business argue that they are doing it right there and then manually and can see the page in 3 seconds

3. Big loud conversation is had

We want to get away from the big loud conversation and, while education is good to a certain degree, the BU still like to gauge things based on 'User Experience'. This of course is a bit of a dumb term, it should really be called 'User Perception', as just because they can 'see' the page it doesn't mean everything on that page is fully functional. All the user input fields and so on. But by the time they actually start work on the page chances are everything has loaded up hunky dory.

I can write custom code to capture individual components on the page, but I think this will add weight to the script and distort the results.

Custom code example:

var blahTimer = lr.startTimer();
    
    web.submitData(
        {
            name : 'ajaxServices.htm', 
            action : 'https://blah=getDBBlah', 
            method : 'POST', 
            recContentType : 'text/html', 
            referer : 'https://blah/homeView.htm', 
            snapshot : 't4.inf', 
            mode : 'HTML', 
            itemData : 
                [
                ]
        }
    );
    
    var time_elapsed = lr.endTimer(blahTimer);
    
    lr.outputMessage("Blah Section = " + time_elapsed);
    
    lr.wastedTime(1000 * time_elapsed);

But can this method actually capture what I want, or is there some other way?

...sorry for a long post, should have recommended getting coffee before reading!

Thanks

Jes