Digital Customer Experience Blog

We’ve seen a definite step up in the number of clients using video to engage with their visitors.  Some are doing simple stuff, just a couple of videos, and keeping it to a simple download before viewing delivery model.

But the increasing number who are using third party CDN suppliers to provide the video streaming, are finding that once the user journey based monitoring is applied, that some CDN’s are providing quite different value for money: and quite different levels of problems to users.

The bugs in the travel websites test we did this week, produced some nice screenshot examples of how not to treat your users.

As we always do when setting up website monitoring for a an ecommerce travel website, we set up a few User Journeys, some 7 or 8 page long, to reproduce the process of finding a holiday.Various flows including searching, and choosing at random from the packages offered; as well as some that went straight to the special offers with a minimum of searching.

Looking at  the web performance of eCommerce sites, there are some things that make the Holiday sector unique.  We work with a number of holiday companies and they have a unique challenge when it comes to accurate website monitoring.

When a holiday season nears its end, holiday companies are often presented with an increasing number of failed ‘user journeys’ that occur when a holiday is found by the visitor but is actually already sold out.  And these failed journeys need to be identified and quantified, if they are to enable an accurate reflection of lost sales.

I just came out of an interesting load test planning meeting. It was with an organisation we’d worked with on web performance testing for some time, but this is the first time we’ll be doing major web load testing with them, as part of a bigger ITIL Capacity Planning delivery.

Like a number of companies, they have used LoadRunner in house for a few years, some of the guys in their test team are trained up on how to script in LoadRunner, and in LoadRunner best practise, etc.

What’s interesting is that they are moving away from LoadRunner, and calling on us to do the web load testing that they need.

As web performance testers, we regularly see subtle technical issues cause substantial failures in website user journeys -we expect the expected.

Whether in 24/7 monitoring, when our multi-user-journey approach routinely highlights that all areas of a web site may be functioning fine, apart from the one crucial  journey, maybe CheckOut: or Add to Basket.

Or if we’re running a web load test, it can sometimes result in a a whole site stalling: fortunately this normally happens only for brand new sites being load tested well before say a Christmas rush *.

Interesting bit of marketing spin this week from Marie Claire magazine – who reckon that their latest recommended must-have beauty product was so much in demand that it crashed the Boots.com web site!

Confidence in Boots takes a knock from that, doesn’t it? And today (3 days later) , the product is in stock.

Humm, kind of bad manners of them to tell tales on Boot’s website problems.

“We won’t see retailers that don’t have transactional websites in 10 years time”

Internet Retailing Magazine write in The Key To Retail 2010.

10 years? Why so cautious?

Any day now – would be my take on that.

Of course, as other folk have recorded, despite market growth, the credit crunch is impacting retailers online.

So it’s clear that the online commercial environment is set to become far more competitive in the near future, and as a result the web customer is likely to have higher expectations regarding their online experience. Respectively we can expect to see an increase in so called ‘web rage’ as users display even lower tolerance levels with site errors and slow page delivery; when there are so many other websites a mouse-click away vying for their attention, and more than willing to take their business, customers are under no obligation to remain brand loyal.

It sounds like it should be the first metric we all want from our website – what’s the money value of Lost Sales due to problems on the site this month? And how do we fix them, and not lose the same again next month?

I’m talking about problems in the final delivery – the website platform itself – where we’ve brought buyers to the site and then let them down through any number of root causes: sporadic technology glitches, treacly slow experience for maybe 10% of users, code upgrades that killed functionality for a few precious hours and so on.