Article
Additional Information
uSwitch.com is the UK's leading impartial online service for home and
financial services, offering consumers the comparative information they
need to switch suppliers online. All uSwitch.com products embrace the
core brand values of being comprehensive, impartial, accurate and simple.
The information is provided simply to help customers make the most appropriate
product choice based on their own preferences. Switching is easy and usually
takes just a few minutes.
It's not unusual for the website to have peaks in activity from time to
time, particularly when a key supplier announces a price rise. However,
when the company planned a major increase in Marketing activity for 2005,
including TV advertising, research models forecast a significant increase
in visitors to the website.
It was essential for uSwitch to fully understand the impact of users visiting
the site in greater numbers and ensure that the switching process was
just as effective at peak times. The company needed to protect its marketing
investment by ensuring that every customer received a consistently good
experience regardless of other visitor traffic.
The company called in SciVisum in December 2004, who recommended a programme
of both tests and retests across its entire product range.
Virtual User Journeys
SciVisum has developed a uniquely flexible test engine that creates 'virtual
users' and runs through the multi-page User Journeys they are most likely
to make. A User Journey is the path a typical visitor on a site takes
to perform an intended task - e.g. an Add-to-Basket journey on a fashion
site would perhaps involve going from the homepage, selecting 'women's
wear', then 'shoes', then choosing a style, colour and size, and finally
adding the item to the shopping basket.
For uSwitch, each product has its own well-defined User Journey. The site
takes information from the visitor, searches from suppliers to offer a
choice of cost savings, and then allows the user to complete personal
details to actually switch supplier there and then.
It was clear that the first priority was to find out the maximum number
of User Journeys each uSwitch product could cope with before there was
an excessive slow down or an increase in error rates. SciVisum's SV-Load
service achieved this by producing hundreds or thousands of virtual users
at the same time, and measuring the experience they receive.
The information on error and slow-down rates at high traffic would give
the business team confidence as to how much headroom there was for each
product. In addition, any underlying technical root causes that SciVisum
could identify would help uSwitch to focus their technical team's resources.
The Results
The package of work agreed before Xmas 2004 consisted of initial rounds
of load testing on selected products, followed by a period to identify
and fix any issues highlighted. These products were then retested in Q1
2005 alongside initial rounds of testing on the remaining products.
The results showed numerically for each uSwitch product at what user volumes
the experience became unacceptable.
On a technical note, it's not unusual to find high error rates even though
the web farm by all 'normal' measures (CPU load, database queries/second,
memory swap etc) is a long way from reaching its limits. That's because
there are a number of places in the technology where such limits can inadvertently
be designed in. It explains the situation where a system that is struggling
to cope with demand has bigger hardware thrown at it and yet continues
to perform badly.
The findings at uSwitch highlighted areas of performance that could be
quickly addressed without spending money on hardware. This included reducing
the load on the server for particular steps, fixing out-of-date image
links and identifying bottlenecks in 3rd party software.
Successful Roll-out
2005 started with the increased marketing activity as envisaged - TV adverts
rolled out and online promotion was ramped up. According to Jon Miller,
uSwitch's New Product Director, 'as a result of increased marketing activity,
traffic to the site more than doubled in Q1.The SciVisum service allowed
us to identify and understand potential capacity constraints for our technical
team to remedy, both on existing products and new products prior to launch.’
‘At uSwitch we feel that one of the key ways to protect our future
revenue and to maximise return on our marketing investment, is to understand
the full scalability of our products. It is essential that our website
is able to cope with our expected increases in traffic.'
|
