real user – Performance Zen

~~The latest trend~~ A key tool in web performance measurement is ~~the drive to implement~~ the use of Real User Measurement (RUM) in a web performance measurement strategy. As someone who cut their teeth on synthetic measurements using distributed robots and repeatable scripts, it took me a long time to see the light of RUM, but I am now a complete convert – I understand that the richness and completeness of RUM provides data that I was blocked from seeing with synthetic data.

[UPDATE: I work for Akamai focusing on the mPulse RUM tool.]

The key for organizations is realizing that RUM is complementary to Synthetic Measurements. The two work together when identifying and solving tricky external web performance issues that can be missed by using a single measurement perspective.

The best way to adopt RUM is to use the dimensions already in place to segment and analyze visitors in traditional web analytics tools. The time and effort used in this effort can inform RUM configuration by determining:

Unique customer populations – registered users, loyalty program levels, etc
Geography
Browser and Device
Pages and site categories visited
Etc.

This information needs to bleed through so that it can be linked directly to the components of the infrastructure and codebase that were used when the customer made their visit. Limiting this data pool to the identification and solving of infrastructure, application, and operations issues isolates the information from a potentially huge population of hungry RUM consumers – the business side of any organization.

The Business users who fed their web analytics data into the setup of RUM need to see the benefit of their efforts. Sharing RUM with the teams that use web analytics and aligning the two strategies, companies can directly tie detailed performance data to existing customer analytics. With this combination, they can begin to truly understand the effects of A/B testing, marketing campaigns, and performance changes on business success and health. But business users need a different language to understand the data that web performance professionals consume so naturally.

I don’t know what the language is, but developing it means taking the data into business teams and seeing how it works for them. What companies will find is that the data used by one group won’t be the same as for the other, but there will be enough shared characteristics to allow the group to share a dialect of performance when speaking to each other.

This new audience presents the challenge of clearly presenting the data in a form that is easily consumed by business teams alongside existing analytics data. Providing yet another tool or interface will not drive adoption. Adoption will be driven be attaching RUM to the multi-billion dollar analytics industry so that the value of these critical metrics is easily understood by and made actionable to the business side of any organization.

So, as the proponents of RUM in web performance, the question we need to ask is not “Should we do this?”, but rather “Why aren’t we doing this already?”.

In February 2010, Fred Wilson spoke to the Future of Web Apps Conference. He delivered a speech emphasizing 10 things that make a Web application successful.

The one that seems to have stuck in everyone’s mind is the first of these. People have focused, quoted, and written almost exclusively about number one:

First and foremost, we believe that speed is more than a feature. Speed is the most important feature.
Fred Wilson

Strong words.

Fred has worked with Web and mobile companies for many years, so he comes at this with a modicum of experience. And for years, I would have agreed with this. But Fred goes on to describe 9 other items that don’t get the same Google-juice that this one quote does. There are probably 10 more that companies could come up with.

But a maniacal focus on speed means that in some companies, all else is tossed in order for that goal of achieving some insane, straight-line, one-dimensional goal. Some companies are likely investigating faster than light technologies to make the delivery of online applications even faster.

Can you base your entire business on having the fastest online application? What do you have to do to be fast?

Strip it down. Lose the weight, the bloat, the features. And what’s left is a powerful beast designed to do one party trick, likely at the expense of some other aspect of the business that supports the application.

If a company focuses on a few metrics, a few key indicators, they might evolve up to NASCAR, where it is not just speed, but cornering, that matters. Only left-hand corners, mind you, but corners nonetheless. Here speed is important, but is balanced against availability and consistency to ensure that a complete view of the value of the site is understood.

But is that enough? Do your customers always want to go left in your application? What happens if you are asked to allow some customers to go right? Do all of the other performance factors that you have worked on suddenly collapse?

As you can tell, growing up means that my taste in fast cars and racing forms has evolved, become more complex. Straight-line speed, followed by multi-dimensional perspectives have led me to realize that speed is only one feature.

So, if top-fuel and stock-car racing aren’t my gig, what is?

2011 F1 Singapore Grand Prix - Seb Vettel - Red Bull Racing - Infiniti Global

For a number of years in the 1980s and again since 2008, I have had a love of Formula One. The complexity of what these machines are trying to achieve boggles the mind.
Formula One is speed, of that there is no doubt. But there is cornering (left and right), weight distribution, brake temperature, fuel mix, traffic, uphill (and downhill, sometimes with corners!), street courses and track courses. And there are 24 answers to the same question in every race.

And then, there is a driver. In Formula One, a driver with an “inferior” car can win the day, if that inferiority is what is particularly suited to that course, in the hands of a skilled manager.

There is no doubt that like Formula One, speed is key to coming out on top. But if the organization is focused solely on speed, then your view of performance will never evolve. The key to ensuring a complete Web performance experience is a maniacal focus on a matrix of items: speed, complexity, third-parties, availability, server uptime, network reliability, design, product, supply-chain, inventory management integration, authentication, security, and on and on.

The Web application is a just that: a web. Multi-dependent factor and performance indicators that must be weighed, balanced, and prioritized to succeed. No web application, no online application, fixed or mobile, will survive without speed.

However, if speed is all you have, is that enough to keep someone coming back?
Is your organization saying that speed is all there is to performance?

Tag: real user

Real User Measurement – A tool for the whole business

Web Performance: The Myopia of Speed