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Can you measure and monitor your user experience?

Judith Hurwitz By: Judith Hurwitz, CEO, Hurwitz & Associates
Published: 7th November 2007
Copyright Hurwitz & Associates © 2007
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Since the web has increasingly become the platform for interacting with customers, partners and the like, the notion of managing the online experience has skyrocketed. The term "user experience" is confusing. I have traditionally thought about this in terms of how the user interacts with software. But I am finding that the more interesting definition is around the idea of actually measuring and monitoring the performance of the web environment from the user or customer experience perspective.

I met with an emerging vendor called SYMPHONIQ that was founded in 2003 by Hon Wong, CEO. Wong is a veteran of the management space, having been one of the founders of NetIQ in 1995 and of EcoSystems (purchased by Compuware in 1994). Therefore, although SYMPHONIQ is a relative newcomer, it's management team has lots of experience under its belt.

The company is just introducing its second product—TrueView Express. This product is intended to provide performance measurement and monitoring. The product measures browser response for any HTTP application. Therefore, the company says that it can track performance from the browser through to the database. The product monitors actual user transactions in real time, isolates performance problems, and includes service level reporting of transaction performance.

Because TrueView is instrumented with HTML it does not require the downloading of an agent. In addition, performance data is collected behind the firewall.

In a way, this product is a sort of trojan horse (I love trojan horses since they provide a quick value to customers) for the company's higher end products. For example, its flagship product, called TrueView, provides end-to-end diagnostics.

Clearly, the company has some interesting IP and some traction in the market. It made a smart move by partnering with F5 Networks. F5 Networks provides a platform for Application Delivery Networking. This relationship should help the company gain traction with customers that might otherwise look towards the big players—CA (Wily), EMC (NLayers), Compuware, and HP—and a host of others.

The company seems to be making some progress in the market with two products under its belt and a couple of dozen customers such as Lockheed, Starbucks Coffee, and AMD. The reality, however, is that the company is in a space dominated by big companies so it will have to partner with some big players that will be attracted by its ability to correlate and aggregate actual transaction data. Its reliance on HTML and HTTP means that it provides a lighter footprint than some of its competitors. This is definitely a company to watch.

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12th November 2007: 'Simon Griffiths' said:

There are simpler ways of doing this. We use a combination of programs to the same effect.

To look at the macroscale, Google Analytics is great and free. It gives you a good overall feel and is great to see if you are getting your customers from one place to another.

If you identify a problem area and want to look more closely, try Crazy Egg (www.crazyegg.com). That tracks clicks on your site, and gives some great views that filter on keywords and the like.

Lastly if you are can see a problem, but aren't 100% sure what it is, try Clicktale (www.clicktale.com). This records mouse movement and is great to see confusion in navigation, and is a real user experience tester.

All these utilities have free versions, and paid versions with more features. None are expensive either.

The great thing is that in general these services are all easy to apply to your site with a couple of lines of javascript, and yes they do maintain a level of anonymity for your visitors.

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12th November 2007: 'Tim' said:

Those programs are great and i've used CrazyEgg and google before as well. But they don't give you an insight into whats happening on the server side and if the problem may be there; ie its taking someone 20 seconds to access something which may break the SLA but its not the web server proving trouble its the app server.

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13th November 2007: 'Simon Griffiths' said:

That is very true, but things like CrazyEgg and Clicktale will show you where the problem is, not necessarily what it is. A great example of this is a site we used where we actually saw that a product range name we had was confusing people navigating through the site. When it was pointed out to us via CrazyEgg it was obvious that was where the problem lay, but unless you see the 'confusion' you would have never spotted it.

If you are looking at server side issues, I would suggest you install Firebug (www.getfirebug.com I think). That installs into Firefox and includes a tab called "Net" which shows you file sizes and how long each took to download. I can tell you for example that this page is 269kB, the largest file being a png image which is the banner on the right. I have recently used this to analyse one of the sites my company has, but I don't control, and found all sorts of problems with file sizes and latency.

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