End-User Experience Monitoring Tool for Web Developers

What is user experience monitoring?

User experience monitoring, also called end-user experience monitoring, is a process that lets you monitor the impact of device and application performance from the point of view of an end user. It’s designed to help locate problems with web content and applications, so you can find and fix performance issues before they impact the end-user experience.

User experience monitoring falls under the broader umbrella of web performance monitoring and, as a result, is often covered by the same software solution as web performance monitoring.

Web performance monitoring involves testing and measuring how a web application, website, or other web-based service responds when end users interact with it by collecting data tied to network hop issues, internet latency, and other metrics to help build a snapshot of server or website performance. You can use this performance data to optimize website speed, reduce bounce rates, and improve end-user experience by monitoring transactions addressing the performance of specific sequences to more easily troubleshoot front-end web application issues.

Using a transaction recorder, you can monitor critical site transactions to make sure you’re the first to know of a performance failure that could be affecting your users’ experience. These insights can help you troubleshoot and prioritize your efforts to provide a seamless end-user experience.

Why is user experience monitoring important?

If your users don’t have a good experience on your website or web application, they’ll likely leave it. End users have short attention spans and expect a fast-loading site and a seamless digital experience. If you’re not monitoring performance and availability, you could be losing customers and revenue.

Poorly performing webpages and apps can seriously cost you. That’s why effective end-user performance monitoring is important. Some other benefits of monitoring user experience are:

• Maintaining speed, endurance, and stability: By monitoring and testing website speed, endurance, and stability, you can find issues before they impact end users. You can even optimize your website and applications to help ensure they can cope with the most extreme stress and meet the highest user expectations.
• Increasing customer satisfaction: First impressions are everything, especially when it comes to potential customers visiting your website. It’s critical to monitor web application performance to ensure a positive end-user experience.
• Improving load capability and optimization: Web applications and websites need to keep up with usage. Through performance testing and monitoring, you can better tailor capacity and optimize performance, so your web apps can keep up with peak usage and spikes in demand.

How to conduct user experience testing

User experience testing is one of the most important steps you can take to optimize your website and web applications. It can let you create different transaction tests to simulate user behavior. Record potential steps taken by end users, such as mouse clicks, text input, file downloads, and matching text strings, so you can monitor performance and get alerted immediately when there’s an issue.

To create a web transaction test to monitor the end user experience, consider the following steps:

Step 1: Figure out your monitoring goals.

Before you start user experience testing, you should outline the goal of your monitoring. Are you monitoring SaaS-based programs to ensure the responsiveness and availability fall within SLAs? Are you measuring the potential impact of specific website and web app changes? Do you want to know if core transactions like shopping and payment processes are performing as users expect? Are you trying to detect if there are any web app bottlenecks occurring in a specific location?

Step 2: Create your task scenarios.

Create task scenarios reflecting real site flows users might try to perform on your site or web app. You want to simulate how real users would achieve their objectives, like checking out, logging in, or using the search field.

Step 3: Use a transaction recorder.

Using a transaction recorder can help you better understand potential performance problems by simulating steps in a web transaction, so you can more easily identify where potential user experience issues may occur.

User monitoring tools can even run transaction tests from remote locations, which means you can troubleshoot performance issues for remote locations and customers no matter where they are.

Step 4: Analyze your results.

The final step is to analyze the results of your testing, adjust accordingly, and then repeat the process to find even more places for improvement. If you have a tool with an integrated application stack management dashboard, this step can be easier. You’ll be able to view detailed load-time metrics, pinpoint slow page elements, and monitor HTML, JavaScript, and HTML elements. You could also run reports on the metrics you need, including web availability, page load speed, or transaction health.

How does end user performance monitoring work with Web Performance Monitor?

SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM) is built to include tools you need to help perform thorough end user performance monitoring.

With WPM, you can:

• Generate reports on key web app performance insights with a user-friendly dashboard
• Easily capture every step in a web transaction, so you can identify performance issues before they affect your users
• Use the transaction recorder to monitor transactions from anywhere
• Quickly identify slow page elements and set alerts for failed transactions
• Use a multi-tenant UI to provide your team visibility and control over website testing

Web Performance Monitor comes with an array of tools to help you track user experience and test transactions from any location. Since WPM is installed behind your firewall, the tool makes it easy to monitor internal web applications.

WPM keeps track of a broad range of metrics, including load-time metrics. The tool offers TCP waterfall charts to help you quickly identify which elements of your pages are taking the most time to load. WPM also lets you monitor website elements including HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and overall performance. You can even get notified for incomplete or slow transactions.

WPM’s transaction recorder tool is a critical part of end user monitoring. The tool lets you quickly and easily capture the ways a user may interact with your web app or site to create a web transaction, with no need to create any scripts. These user experience and test transactions can help you quickly identify slow or failing elements, and WPM’s web-based reports can make it easier to generate insights into page load speeds, transaction help, site availability, and the web page optimization process, so you can ensure a better end user experience.

How to improve end user experience using Web Performance Monitor

SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM) is a SaaS web application monitoring solution designed to monitor web applications from the perspective of end users behind the firewall. WPM helps you proactively identify if slow web services are impacting user experience without needing to rely on third-party apps.

Some of the key features of WPM designed to help you improve end user experience are:

• The easy-to-use transaction recorder, which lets you record and run critical transactions as frequently as every 5 minutes to simulate how users interact with your app or site, including logging in, clicking, completing forms, and downloading files.
• The ability to monitor internal, SaaS-based, and customer-facing web apps, which lets you safely monitor internal resources in addition to monitoring web apps like CRM, supply chain, help desk, and more. With WPM, you can get an accurate sampling of websites and services from end users in multiple, remote locations.
• Gain insight into web-based application performance with website monitoring to help you identify if web services are the reason for a slow end-user experience in your third-party apps.
• Transaction alerting/notifications feature, which can send you automatic notifications when a transaction fails or when custom timing and warnings thresholds are met for entire transactions and individual steps.
• Website and web app performance reporting, which makes it easier to generate reports on everything from transaction health, to page load speeds, to website availability over time.