Tell me about the background of Actual Experience?
Actual Experience is a spin-out from Queen Mary, University of London, and commercialises 10 years of academic research by Professor Jonathan Pitts into IT infrastructure behaviour and how it affects the perceived human experience of application performance. Actual Experience Ltd was founded in March 2009 by Professor Pitts and Dave Page, who, having met in 2000 evolved the idea until the company was formed. Together Jonathan and Dave have forty years of experience in this area.
What is Perceptual Quality (PQ)?
Perceptual Quality relates to the quality of a system in terms of perceived human experience.
Why is Perceptual Quality important?
Perceptual Quality is the most important application performance metric because human perception has direct economic impact, affecting business process efficiency, staff morale, brand and customer loyalty.
What does Actual Experience do?
Actual Experience enables you to manage application and IT infrastructure performance from the perspective of perceived human experience. Our systems automate the expertise required to interpret technical data in order to extract economically useful PQ information. Effectively, we are automating the knowledge of our co-founder, Prof Pitts.
What problem is Actual Experience solving exactly?
Today, companies are well instrumented and have lots of performance data, but find it very difficult to understand what impact IT infrastructure has on human perception. This leads to users being frustrated because helpdesks can’t see the problem, or engineers fixing things that won’t improve human perception, or business leaders not being able to quantify the real benefits of IT investment.
Why is understanding human experience so hard?
There is a complex relationship between human experience and application performance. In turn, applications are affected by network and server infrastructure in quite different application-specific ways.
What are the components of the Actual Experience system?
Software Agents make measurement that are analysed by an Analytics Engine. The results are viewed through a web UI called the Perceptual Quality Dashboard.
What device resources does the Agent consume?
Negligible.
Typically, where are the Agents deployed?
Typically, Agents are deployed at locations where there are people that use the application you wish to analyse.
What about Privacy?
The Agents don’t monitor or record what users do in any way – in fact, they completely ignore the user. Think of an Agent as a measurement instrument hosted by computer devices in offices and homes.
More information can be found in our Privacy Policy