One of the nice things in my job, is I get days out of the office spending time with some cool eCommerce guys who have to manage some big and interesting sites, planning some innovative and interesting website testing and monitoring.
Even more interesting is sharing a speaking engagement with people we’ve worked with, and hearing what they are willing to say in public about the web performance projects we’ve shared!
Luke Fairless at Tesco.com is one of those guys. He juggles keeping the world’s biggest grocery site running, with a continual stack of projects to add functionality for customers.
We spoke together at Internet Retail Expo in March, and the videos of the day have just gone live – click on “Luke and Deri: Tesco and SciVisum‘
Luke raises a number of great points in his presentation on how to do website load testing. Taking just four: Continue reading
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. Continue reading
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.
What we spotted within 24 hours of running these user journeys: Continue reading
(This article by Deri Jones was first published in Internet Retailing magazine.)
Online shopping tends to revolve around helping visitors find and put things into the Basket: in order to reach the overall goal of having them Check Out and buy. But there are a number of areas where the overlap between the Business Teams’ specification of Basket features, and the limitations of technical implementations, mean that online shoppers can be left in a state of rage, frustrated that they can’t get the site to do what they want. Continue reading
econsultancy.com put up some interesting research this week , What do customers want from travel websites? This reflected some of the best practise lessons that came out of a website performance assessment this month.
Some of the findings were surprising, and highlighted that it’s often possible to make quick improvements in your conversion ratios with small technical tweaks, once you have the meaningful data to hand – metrics collating together the small blips and burps on your core Travel users Journeys over time. Continue reading
Fame seems to be beckoning this week – firstly, SciVisum was runner up in the eConsultancy.com ‘Innovation in E-commerce‘ awards 2011 announced on Monday.
And, it’s not every day that a web performance tester gets to play lead guitar to an audience of 100. But with rather more suits in the crowd than your usual gig! Continue reading
An interesting mention this week on the BBC Technology website of the fact that users of mobile phones running Windows 7, have found their monthly Internet allowance used up – without them visiting web sites.
The Register in their inimitable way titled it: Windows 7 Phone glitch spews phantom data.
The same kind of root cause, was behind a website performance problem we encountered this month.
The online Christmas plans are pretty much put to bed now, and many websites are entering their CodeFreeze – time to leave the site alone, not change anything, and pray that key routes like the CheckOut pages will handle the traffic peaks OK through to 2011!
Despite CodeFreezes, it’s not too late to make sure right now that you are actually measuring the user experience 24/7 on your core money-making Journeys. This is not web analytics, but 24/7 Mystery Shopper monitoring: if you haven’t got access to graphs of this performance, then move quickly, and focus on having measurements of your core ROI drivers maybe Journeys like CheckOut, or Add to Basket. It’s vital that the website monitoring follows Journeys that you yourself have specified, ones that really ‘do what the customer’ does, including a few of the real world things like choosing a product at random from a screen of choices after a search. If the business teams find the journeys make sense on your web site, confidence in their value as meaningfull metrics will grow. Continue reading
It’s been a very busy time here with a variety of interesting website load testing projects, capacity planning and website performance activity, with some helpful tips coming out of it.
A good percentage of what we do is focused on online Retailers, and maximising their ability to handle the sales peaks in the Christmas online sales rush, means that up to November we saw some interesting load testing projects. Continue reading
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