My work career helps customers optimize their web sites and I have written articles on how organizations can use optimal metrics to focus their technology on the key things that customers care about. Customer Experience management is the industry term and it’s about empowering the employees to better serve their customers.
For my career in helping customers optimize their web sites, I have written a number of articles on how organizations can use optimal metrics to focus their technology on the key things that the customers care about. Customer Experience management is the industry term and it's about empowering the organization's employees to better serve their customers. Have a visit ... Optimal Metrics!
There are a number of more thoughts about Heatmaps and Clickmap technology. I was reading Avinash's latest blog post and stumbled across the new Google Analytics "In Page Analytics". Wow, click maps right there! Very cool. This shows the clicks on my other web site and can give me some insight into where people are clicking. The good part is the "below the fold" orange bar that shows only 10% of people are scrolling down and clicking. This is very useful and more helpful than the pretty heat maps out there.…
After the Dot Com boom and bust took out my company Genuity, I was on the search again for a new job. My friend Scott worked in Sales at Gomez and introduced me to the manager there. It look a few months (okay half a year) to get the job running the Benchmark practice. This was a position we both constructed and were excited to bring to the customers. I was part product manager, part consultant, and part company spokesman. Customers bought the benchmark product to size up their Internet Performance against their peers.
Tealeaf is a small company based out of San Francisco and I had heard about them a number of times over my career. In the meantime, we were bought by IBM but have still kept the core of the small company together. What attracted me was a mission to provide technology that would really help business people. I really liked focusing on the value of helping an organization better understand their customer's digital experience. Reading the Tea Leaves By capturing every single page, click, and form field entry, the software allows…
More and more of my customers have the request for heatmaps and usability metrics. While my snide comments of "eye candy" were my own personal thoughts originally, I decided to think and study the use of heatmaps to help improve the customer experience. What Do People Do with Heatmaps? My first real thought was "what do you really do with a heatmap"? A lot of folks in the Search Engine Optimization space use them to check their ad effectiveness. As seen below, the hotter part of the screen (red) indicates where…
In my role as a customer experience consultant (with Tealeaf), I get to research many types of web sites built by a variety of organizations. Focusing on usability issues, I get to analyze web site implementations where the use of AJAX is a big factor today. Alas, too many sites have gone wild and crazy and deliver too much AJAX.
Back in the old Web 1.0 world of ten years ago, developers broke business processes into nice, consumable chunks called pages. It was easy to break down a business form into nice logical pieces that were easy to implement and easy for customers to understand. For example:
There are a number of performance challenges that many websites find themselves, but nothing worse than the Misconfiguration. Last week, a customer noted that "my site seems very slow." So I fired up Gomez and started testing. The page was very heavy at over 1.5 Mbytes, but still, 70 seconds on average was terrible! I drilled into the data on behalf of the customer and saw swings of excessively long Content Download times, which usually indicates something is misconfigured with the web server. Note the graph showing the oscillation up and…
Back the early Internet age, I was a consultant helping build marketing data warehouses. There were a number of great spokes-persons of our niche industry, notably Ralph Kimball and Bill Inmon. Both published a lot of books and both educated many of us on critical data management issues. A rising star from those days was Wayne Eckerson, who became the Business Intelligence guru. Wayne published a great book, Peformance Dashboards, which really leverage the 1990's wave in data warehousing with the web analytics of this decade, blending the metrics to deploy…
Benchmarking has been in business for dozens of years. It is known well in the retail industry, where phantom shoppers visit the competition and try to get intelligence on their pricing for certain products. And for years now, this discipline has been available to organizations with web sites, using a newer discipline of Performance Benchmarking. So what is Benchmarking? Benchmarking is an ongoing, systematic process for measuring and comparing the work processes of one institution to those of another, by bringing an external focus to internal activities, functions, or operations. Benchmarking…
In understanding Service Levels for Web Sites, moving quickly to how to measure for SLAs, we quickly turn to Performance Monitoring to see how a web site is doing. In Avinash's book, "Web Analytics An Hour A Day", he describes the Web Analytics trinity, a framework for understanding "Why customers visit", "Who actually visits", and "What Happens when they visit". I propose to expand the trinity to "How is the Web Site Doing?" and that is why we use performance monitoring. The critical issue not found with Web Analytics is the…
From my background in rock climbing, the hardest part of the climb is called the ‘crux’. It’s the pivotal point in the whole application performance business. Why you ask? Because business people think this way, and so do the web site customers. People don’t think servers and disk drives. When discussing Business Processes, IT can get the business engaged. Now you provide a Business Process, SLM-driven metric dashboard, and you’ve got everyone up the mountain, past the hard parts and on the path to optimal metrics and business nirvana!
The following graphic shows this exactly:
Service Level Management (SLM) is the ability to help organizations monitor application performance against a defined set of objectives agreed to by either internal or external service providers. By proactively managing SLM performance, organizations can: