Test Your Site on IE 9 and Measure User Experience

Few months back, Keynote announced that the Keynote Global Network was being updated with Internet Explorer 9. As a result, our real browser monitoring service, Transaction Perspective™, is now measuring the performance of Web applications and sites using Microsoft’s latest Web browser. This makes Keynote the first on-demand monitoring service built on IE 9, which is pretty cool. But what’s even cooler is the ability that IE 9 gives us to measure a new class of performance metrics we call user experience metrics.
IE is still the big kid on the block when it comes to browser usage. With the demise of IE 6 in the United States, and the rise of Firefox and Chrome, it’s clear that users are quickly leaving “old” browsers for “modern” ones like IE 9. With high performance and broad support for open Web standards, browsers like IE 9 make it easier for companies to create a rich and snappy experience for consumers. In response, 34% of the top Internet sites now use HTML 5, and the use of JavaScript continues to rise. Transaction Perspective built on IE 9 allows customers to get a more precise view of their site performance, especially those leveraging new Web standards.
Our new Live Beta preview of MyKeynote 11 with Transaction Perspective lets you see performance in very important ways Learn More

Speed and Tenacity: the Apple iPad Outage

We’ve heard a lot recently about the importance of speed and performance when it comes to online retail. The New York Times highlighted research from Microsoft claiming that 250 milliseconds—a mere eye blink—could make the difference between a repeat visitor and a lost customer. And a popular infographic touts that Amazon would stand to lose $1.6 billion in sales per year from a 1 second web page delay. Our friends at Walmart.com have also shared some awesome research linking web performance to conversion.

These statistics are welcome news for the web performance community. But sometimes they don’t apply. With Apple, a lot of rules don’t apply.

To Apple’s credit, the Apple store normally runs very quickly—averaging well less than 2 seconds for total User Experience Time and less a second for Time to First Paint. (The Apple Store is a member of the Keynote Retail Performance Index, measured with Keynote Transaction Perspective.)

Your product/service is unique. And your customers are also unique. Keynote web load testing consultants dig into web analytics to model user behavior. They consider familiarity, tenacity, interaction speed and connection speed when developing virtual user profiles. It may be unrealistic for you to understand how different levels of performance impact your various customer types across all these variables. But if you can begin to understand them, you’ll be in a better position for setting ongoing performance goals and SLAs—especially around tolerances for outliers from your averages.

Source: Keynote Systems

Monitoring User Experience of the Cloud

In this blog, we are going to talk about metrics to build into service level agreements and learn how to track the quality of service users of SaaS and cloud applications actually experience.

Q&A With Vik Chaudhary, VP of Product Management and Corporate Development, Keynote Systems

Phil Waineright: I’m glad to have you with us because your — Keynote — is a SaaS provider itself, but you also actually work with SaaS and cloud companies who make use of your services, don’t you?

Vik Chaudhary: That’s right. In fact we do both. We started out as a cloud company and a SaaS company, well before those words were even invented, back 14 years ago. And today, we work with about 2800 different companies all over the world; SaaS companies are among them.

Phil Waineright: Right. So okay. So this part of the business is serving traditional enterprise businesses but part — a growing part I suppose of the business — is serving the cloud vendor community of one type or another.

Vik Chaudhary: As it turns out, the cloud vendor community is — especially in the SaaS world — is growing to include businesses that are using SaaS vendors very effectively. And because businesses typically care about their online performance and customer experience, they happen to look to us to help moderate the conversation between them and the SaaS providers so we can assure that performance and reliability of their applications are really top-notch.

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Fast, Fun & Touch-Friendly: The New Rules For Tablet Websites

Fast, Fun & Touch-Friendly: The New Rules For Tablet Websites

A Conversation with Mobile Performance Evangelist Herman Ng

In the post-PC era, tablets are taking on a central role in connecting consumer and business users with their online worlds. But touch-based tablets present an entirely different interface from the point-and-click paradigm of the desk- or laptop-bound Web. And tablet users on the go are frequently stymied by the inherent sluggishness of cellular network connections. It’s not an impossible task, though, to create tablet website experiences that satisfy user expectations and, with a little effort, leverage the tablet interface. Benchmark recently sat down with Keynote Mobile Performance Evangelist Herman Ng to get his insight into the tablet website experience, and get a few pointers on how to make it better.

Benchmark: What is your assessment of the current state of website performance on tablets?

Herman Ng: There’s no one score to give across the board. Everybody’s at a different level, because everybody is doing different things. Some people are doing their regular sites, some are doing a tablet site. Some are just serving the mobile website performance, and there are some companies redirecting the user to use the mobile app. Overall, performance is just all over the place. There are so many tablets coming out — the iPad and some of the Androids are, of course, the mainstream, but there are so many different versions. And then you have 3G and Wi-Fi, and now the iPad’s LTE. So even the same site is going to be performing differently across different connections and devices.

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Measuring Site Speed with Navigation Timing

What makes great user experience? Users’ thirst for speed seems increasingly unquenchable. Even as they (barely) tolerate the sluggish performance of mobile devices, they demand more and more of their PCs. Make them wait one blink of an eye too long, and they are gone, taking the revenue they would generate with them.

In 2010, The World Wide Web Consortium chartered a Web Performance Working Group to give developers client-side tools, in the browsers, to gain greater visibility into the timing of each aspect of page loading and help them see how they can make their pages faster. The first product of the working group is the Navigation Timing API, which Keynote is already leveraging to provide more granular site performance reporting and to provide operations managers and developers a common language to address site improvements.

If you want the complete picture on the user experience, read an interview with Microsoft IE Program Manager Jatinder Mann a Microsoft IE Program Manager Jatinder Mann lives and breathes performance, both on the Internet Explorer team and on the W3C Web Performance Working Group, and is an expert on the Navigation Timing API. Benchmark recently caught up with him to get an overview of the Navigation Timing API and other initiatives and what they offer the Web community.


Source; Keynote System.

Measuring site performance over an actual cellular network

As fundamental as it may seem, many site owners don’t alter their approach at all when tackling a mobile site project. Call it “desktop thinking,” or terrestrial, landline, wireline thinking — by any name, it ignores the fundamental reality of the cellular network, which as described above, is inherently slower and riddled with opportunities for performance degradation.

One common desktop tactic that causes issues in mobile is the URL redirect, which instructs the browser to follow a different URL than the one originally requested. There are a number of legitimate reasons to employ this technique — to direct users to your third-party site host; to offer nicknames that provide multiple paths to the main site; or to send users to a site designed specifically for the detected browser.

This is generally a fine practice in the desktop browser world, where redirects usually happen in the blink of an eye and are virtually undetectable to the user. Use the same technique on a mobile site, though, where the big “L” — latency — colors the entire experience, and you end up with users staring and staring at a screen where nothing’s happening.

Surprisingly, even some of the biggest retailers have mobile sites bogged down with URL redirects. The problems become apparent when measuring site performance over an actual cellular network (as opposed to a WiFi connection).

At what point does the user come to the conclusion that the site’s not working, or that it’s not worth the wait? If they’ve just navigated from a well-built mobile site that loaded quickly, there’s a good chance they’re not going to wait eight seconds. How likely is it that they’ll come back again? How likely they’ll tell their friends about the experience? Forget what that means in terms of a lost sale. What does it mean for retailer X’s brand image?

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App, Website, Or Both?

There’s no silver bullet for getting content successfully onto three screens, no switch that can be thrown to make content fast and usable. On smartphones and now tablets, site owners are juggling some combination of Mobile site optimization, Web app and native app; except for those who are doing nothing at all, and effectively writing off what is soon to be online’s biggest audience.

Whatever the approach, any serious mobile strategy requires effort and investment. Native apps need to be developed separately for multiple platforms, at minimum iOS and Android, for both smartphone and tablet — that’s virtually four apps, for starters.

HTML5 Web apps theoretically simplify the development task, in as much as one app should function acceptably on multiple phones. But a big tweak is required for tablets, to take advantage of the format and deliver a native-like experience.

Still another approach is to build separate, mobile-optimized sites for smartphones and tablets, streamlined for fast loading and usability, but not offering the capability of offline viewing.

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