Digital Customer Experience Blog

Let’s be honest and not pretend that websites failing is a shock (the BBC just wrote: Argos faces glitches after website update ) – they always have and they always will.  Even the biggest and best can never be 100% up for 100% of users indefinitely; it’s just the nature of the complexity of the technology and rapid pace it is being extended (it was the Nationwide Bank just last week: ‘online banking glitch‘.

But having said that, it’s also true to say that Argos could have done better – they should be aiming for 100% ( so should we all), and getting closer than they did.

There are lessons to be learnt, in terms of website management:  both management of the technology and management of problems.

When traditional load testing just isn’t enough (updated 19 Nov 2014)

Today’s online car tax web failure left people waiting up to 90 minutes to complete payment for their car tax online. Evidence that you need realistic, thorough load testing and good scalable website architecture, in advance of peak usage.

Book makers know about betting, but they need not gamble on their content delivery.

It doesn’t seem long ago I was watching the World Cup finals and here we at the start of another domestic season. When I say I was “watching the World Cup finals”, I was really looking at how 7 UK-based online football gambling websites were performing!

One of the dilemmas I often discuss with clients is how they can protect their brand and deliver a great customer experience whilst pushing their websites to the limits.

The digital revolution has transformed the way consumers use the web, presenting a whole host of new website performance challenges to eCommerce managers and brand managers alike.

If you want to ensure trouble-free growth in your web traffic next year: there’s a helpful article at eConsultancy: How can you predict next year’s website traffic? I’ve pulled out some key tips, to help turn that into a plan for a realistic website load testing – helping to construct that plan is something every marketer should be involved in.

Hybris is a widely used eCommerce platform – a nice example of a European software company doing well. We’ve seen it in use at a number of our clients, and in the course of Hybris load testing at a few websites,

As long as there has been software, there has been testing. Good testing has always been centred on the business outcomes. It’s not just about finding bugs, it’s about finding Important Bugs: bugs that impact the end user or customer.

There’s a common theme in the world of technology, that mirrors wider life.

Whilst some in the real world will argue about the best football team or the best singer or the best ever romcom – in the tech world, the debate is more, umm,  detailed.

People have reported widespread problems in trying to buy tickets this week, during the running of the London Olympics, and Graham Charlton’s article “Why is the Olympic ticketing website so bad?” at eConsultancy.com nicely highlighted the user experience problems (credit to Nick Donelly at Usability Hell for first detailing them).

There was a time when doing a Website Load Test for a client using a Content Distribution Network was an infrequent activity, but these days it’s a common occurrence.  There are more CDN suppliers of course, the newer ones such as MaxCDN,  the traditional big names like Akamai and LimeLight, and some Datacentres such as UKFast offer CDN services directly to clients themselves.

Some phrases and concepts cause a lot of confusion and take up so much time, when planning website performance management projects.

Website ‘Last Mile’ monitoring is one – there are several limitations in practise, and we are finding fewer clients  getting value from it within their overall end-user experience monitoring.

I get to sit in on a lot of meetings with clients, who are looking to improve the ROI of their websites.

The most interesting ones are with organisations that have evolved far enough along the eCommerce evolutionary path to realise that it’s no good IT and Business teams sitting in separate silos.