10 Tips to Improve User Experience of your site

Hi. My name is Ben, and I plan to visit your website a lot! I’m a casual user that likes to browse the Internet, and like everyone else I know, I hate to wait. Although your website is really cool, and I love your products and services, the Internet is full of interesting places and I’m easily distracted. Oh, and did I mention that I love using my Android smartphone and iPad to play, connect, shop, bank and book travel when I’m not at work? All I want for the holidays is a speedy web and mobile site.
Here are top 10 wishes of a user for you and your site in 2012:

1. Please test your code/site on IE and not just Firefox before you launch it. I am one of the 50% that will continue using IE, even after they start auto-upgrades!
2. Understand the difference between browser execution and network/back-end performance. Most pages have both and you need to know which is which to optimize the page/site. One way is to monitor using a real browser.
3. Understand how your page renders. Focus on reducing upfront (pre-render) delay. It’s the one me and your other users feel the most!
4. Please make sure your third party tags (analytics and others) are below your visual content. (Did I mention rendering delays and blocks are aggravating?)
5. Please combine your external JS and CSS files. I’ve been saying this for years, but very few sites seem to follow this recommendation. Do it, and I’ll see a major improvement in the speed of your site.
6. Understand the quality your Content Delivery Network is providing. Every website is unique, and not all CDN providers are created equal.
7. Don’t worry so much about overall page size but instead focus on individual file/resource sizes. Keep them under 100K and you will limit the impact of slower connections. (Did I mention I love my smartphone?)
8. Don’t just push your desktop website to mobile. You will fail.
9. Test your mobile web site… please!
10. Read Keynote’s Page Construction Guidelines. They’re chocked full of goodies to help you optimize the performance your Web pages and keep visitors like me happily clicking through them, instead of away to your competitor’s site.

What’s on your wish list for better web and mobile performance in 2012? Let us know in comments!


Relate Articles:

• Test Your Site on IE 9 and Measure User Experience
• fast fun touch friendly new rules
• A need for speed on mobile websites

Web Application Performance Measurement and Tuning

To combat the growing problem of poor web application performance and safeguard the rising amount of business revenue gained via online channels, load testing strategies, tools and services have experienced a transformation in terms of both awareness and adoption.

Business requirements for web application load testing and application performance testing as a means for ongoing performance measurement and tuning have become more rigorous over the past several years.

Measurements derived with load testing tools should provide a clear understanding of where performance bottlenecks reside and aid in infrastructure and capacity planning of computing resources. When derived from meaningful load tests, results serve as a guide to helping IT staff make informed decisions about the performance of their applications and infrastructures.

A solid load testing strategy must complement performance monitoring and analysis in a production environment and, in turn, production monitoring and analysis should be leveraged to improve the accuracy of load tests.

Read More on Enterprise Load Testing for Web Applications.

To Understand And Measure An Application’s Performance

With RIAs, much of the execution of code in Web applications happens on the browser client, and not just the Web or application server, and therefore understanding what is actually happening inside a real browser has become imperative. To understand and measure an application’s performance, most Web monitoring tools try to emulate a user transaction using measurement technologies that use imitation, or emulated browsers.

These imitation browsers mimic, or emulate browsers like IE and Firefox to simulate a site or application visitor’s behavior. While emulated browser measurements have their place when simply monitoring for availability, a complete Web performance monitoring discipline must include both operational monitoring, primarily conducted using emulated browsers, and true end-user experience monitoring, conducted using real browsers.

Read More

Prerequisites For Transaction Monitoring

There are some essential components that need to be taken care of while selecting your website monitoring service. You will need to adopt the user’s perspective. The User’s experience depends on a number of elements, namely third party advertising, content distribution networks, content providers, ISPs, etc. which are part of the complex system.

The entire transaction needs to be monitored. This could include just submitting a request or including a much larger transaction of buying some merchandise. The user might go to many pages where he might perform a number of transactions. With just the knowledge of a failed transaction will not help, a root cause analysis will only bail you out.

By reducing the complexity and instilling credibility, the transaction monitoring solution should simplify IT tasks. Being user friendly is another necessity in crunch pressure situations. Monitoring solutions should not be too difficult to use. The solution needs to be accurate identifying problems quickly by providing detailed, end-to-end transaction information.