Website Performance: More Than Just Speed

In addition to evaluating customer experience on a subjective level, the Keynote research assessed seven factors related to the site’s service levels:

1. High-Speed Response
2. Dial-up Response
3. Response Time Consistency
4. Geographic Uniformity
5. Load Handling
6. Availability
7. Outage Hours

Car rental sites and the travel sector in general lag in technical quality, page performance, and in the delivery of an error-free user experience. Geographic consistency and load handling as key advantages, users know that wherever they are in the country or what time of day they visit, they can count on consistent website performance.

Three bottlenecks that block traffic that car rental sites, and Web sites in general, need to focus on in order to improve technical performance:

• Too many technical elements on a page: From small non-visual images to java scripts to unnecessary encryption, too many individual elements on a page can stifle site performance

• Java overload: The ubiquitous coding language is an important tool for developers, but every Java script can act like a tiny speed bump for browsers. “Sites may have five, six, seven or 10 JavaScript files in a page, and every time the browser hits that, it slows by almost a factor of two.

• Proliferation of third-party tags: The rising number of third-party tags – DoubleClick ads and calls to third-party analytics services – can also hinder web page performance, minimizing them whenever possible is a good idea. Another option would be to move the tags to the bottom of the page where they are less likely to impact user performance.

Monitoring Web Pages & 3rd Party Content

If you are the owner of the Web site, there are at least two ways to improve overall site performance. One is to optimize the Web site itself for each widget so that those widgets running on the page will be more efficient, a method that is not cost-efficient. The other, more cost-effective option is to use continuous and focused performance monitoring of your Web site. Breaking down performance by time and by component category allows you to pinpoint the components that adversely impact Web site performance.

The benefits of web page monitoing and third-party components are significant indeed. First, operations can target these issues quickly and efficiently, which can reduce potential downtime and loss of revenue. This metric, known as Mean Time to Identification, can be tracked. Second, business unit managers can track the performance of all content, both internal and external, which can establish SLA accountability with the third-party vendors, saving money on lost downtime or the cost of rebates. Another benefit is the accountability that can also be established internally on components and content that has been developed on your site. Third, development and QA teams can save money by tracking these issues in real time. Modifications to code on the Web site or to the widget have been known to adversely affect a previously well-performing Web site, and monitoring can nip these issues in the bud, saving time and therefore money. Finally, the user experience can suffer due to bad website performance. This can cause a loss of viewers, both because of direct experience and by word of mouth. This impact can be potentially devastating to the bottom line.

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Web Performance Varies by Geography and Network

Unlike Web content downloads to desktops, mobile downloads can vary dramatically based on time of day, network operator used, and geographic location. For example, a mobile Website can take twice as long to download in San Francisco as compared to another operator in New York, London, or Tokyo. If a content-monitoring strategy does not include monitoring web content from various geographic locations, it is impossible to know what the end users are experiencing.

In the Web world, both the user interface and the delivery mechanism have been standardized for years, keeping mobile browser compatibility in mind. However, mobile content must be routed to the user through an operator network, and additional operator specific content may be added during the download. Also, different devices render content differently, so when the Web server detects a specific device type it may choose to send a variant of the generic content to the requesting device.

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Testing Mobile Devices Cost Effectively

Although manual testing is a need with real devices and real networks, avoiding it whenever possible is always a good idea. Manual testing is expensive and slow, it also lacks the necessary instrumentation to isolate application problems of your product to ensure a quick delivery. Instead, how about considering a solution that combines some manual testing, some remote-manual testing, and a lot of testing using emulated devices.

Mobile testing with an emulator is cost effective as it can be done very quickly and efficiently. Diagnostics on the tool is a must have, this lets you isolate problems and ensures flexibility in network stacks you will need to test different network options. Ensure that your emulated device solution contains a high – level scripting solution to allow you to repay your test cases over and over. Also look for an emulated device that lets you change device profiles quickly.

Emulation Technologies and Mobile Device Monitoring

Many Websites and services require only a browser to render the page and do not depend on the operating system of the device (for example, SMS). To accurately monitor such services on a broad range of possible combinations in the mobile ecosystem, the mobile monitoring solution needs to be able to emulate the vast array of devices available. A diagnostic capability helps to quickly pinpoint the root causes of failures when something goes wrong. Emulation technologies must contain, along with a wide range of device profiles, an awareness of the multiple factors comprising the end-user experience.

Emulated mobile device monitoring can be performed by content owners in two separate modes:

● Over the air mobile monitoring for true end-user experience

This requires a measurement solution that truly emulates the entire technology behind mobile downloads—including the actions of the operator network that sits between the Web server and the end user’s device.

● Direct over the Internet monitoring to measure only the availability of content without the impact of operator networks

By using this method, you can quickly identify the root cause of failures experienced by end users.

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Mobile Web Optimization

Testing mobile web applications lets you in on several challenges in the mobile web. Decision making is crucial when it comes to your testing options. It is necessary to explore all the challenges first, to understand them. This helps is explore our technology options and to manage each challenge in an effective way. We will need to measure positives and negatives of each challenge before we choose the combination of testing options that suits best. Mobile testing challenges include devices, network and scripting.

One of the biggest and the most obvious mobile testing challenges is when it comes to mobile devices as its used by customers. There are thousands of client devices that could be used on your mobile site, therefore all are to be considered while testing your mobile applications. If we try and reduce this number, we will be taking a chance that out application might not work on a few devices and that will lock out a number of potential customers.  To handle this challenge, we will need to test using real devices or use emulated devices.

The next challenge is a regional challenge, the Network. Considering about 400 mobile operators in the world some being GSM, some being CDMA and the remaining use local or less common networking standards. Since each network has a unique combination of network, it wouldn’t be possible to discuss a challenge without discussion location. Also travelling to each network would be expensive. There are several ways of dealing with network challenges. (More about Network challenges in separate post)

Call scripting being the last challenge is actually used to execute the test script. Script execution can be manual or automated where real devices require manual scripting while emulated devices can use automated scripting.  

We need to understand a lot more about these challenges on mobile web testing. To lay down a path, once we understand the above challenges, we would need to focus on how to utilize the information and what would be the testing strategy for mobile application testing.

Root Cause Analysis with Mobile Monitoring Solutions

The quality of the subscribers’ mobile experience can be ensured by monitoring, benchmarking performance and availability of services. Now, this needs to get down to every step of a transaction.

Mobile monitoring solutions provide real-time information for transactions involving root cause analysis, competitor benchmarking and alerts in case of service downtimes.

Let’s get into a few details regarding ‘Root cause analysis’.  In case you there is a service downtime or a degrading performance issue how do you determine the cause for the problem?   It could be the handset, the carrier network or your content portal.

Mobile monitoring solutions can quickly take you through an intuitive portal if the problem is resulting from a specific transaction; or if your service in every location is down; if the problem is local to one city. You can also drill down further into the components that make up that transaction to find out what exactly caused the issue.