The Science of Subjective User Experience (Application Performance Management)

Analytics

We all know that it is the human experience of applications that matters. Poor experience means:
  • We are less productive as workers
  • We get frustrated as consumers
And that has economic impact! Up to 9% top line revenue, according to Aberdeen Group.
Quantifying and diagnosing global network and server infrastructure for human experience is important because it is human experience that has economic impact. For businesses that rely so much on IT, the human experience of corporate applications directly affects business process efficiency, and hence top and bottom line. In the consumer internet, human experience directly affects brand perception, customer loyalty.
An Aberdeen Group survey states that application performance impacts top line revenue by up to 9%.
Our customers tell us that they have lots of measurement tools and measurement data that describe the performance of networks and servers, but struggle to translate this into an understanding of experience as perceived by users (we call this Perceptual Quality). This means:
  • Businesses struggle to determine where to invest scarce resources for greatest economic benefit, and how to quantify improvement
  • Users experience problems that engineers don't notice and engineers fix problems that users don't notice
You can begin to manage your user’s Perceptual Quality by deploying light weight, easy to install, centrally controlled software Agents on a sample of computers in offices and homes where your users are located. An Agent ignores what a user does, but instead, makes periodic measurements to determine the performance of networks and servers, and automatically transmits the results to an Analytics Engine.
After ten years of research by Prof Jonathan Pitts at Queen Mary, University of London, Analytics Engines continuously analyse Agent measurement data and automatically quantify and identify sources of impairment to human experience. In essence, the Engine is an automation of Prof Pitts' expertise, allowing Actual Experience to bring leading research to bear on this economic problem. This will mean that you can: The Science of Subjective User Experience (Application Performance Management)
  • Invest in IT where it will have most positive economic impact for your business
  • Fix IT problems that will have most positive economic impact for your business
  • Communicate using performance data that is meaningful to customers and users
  • Benchmark before and after IT change or investment

Posts tagged with "Analytics"
from the Actual Experience Blog

Technical Metrics are Simply Misleading

Friday, January 27th, 2012
Dave Page

Technical metrics such as application response time provide a mechanism for gauging whether application response slows during peak use, or whether it improves as a result of IT investment. But does this beguilingly simple metric tell you whether users notice[...]

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Human Experience is Important to So Many Stakeholders

Thursday, June 2nd, 2011
Dave Page

In conversation with one of our customers today, I was reminded of the value of Perceptual Quality (our language for subjective human-experience) as a non-technical language for IT. It is easily understood by all, and that enables many stakeholders in[...]

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Are we an Analytics Company?

Friday, April 1st, 2011
Dave Page

Are we an analytics company? I have begun to wonder. According to Random House Webster’s Dictionary, analytics is ‘the science of logical analysis’. When you look at what other so-called analytics companies and services provide, it seems to me that[...]

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A Queen Mary, University of London Spin-out