For the first time ever, a conference has web designers, business line managers and IT professionals rubbing shoulders in the same venue. It’s about time. The venue was the inaugural Web Experience Forum in Boston this week. With 11 sponsors, including performance measurement vendors, CDN vendors, hosting companies and media design companies, the conference premise is to exchange ideas among disparate groups that rarely talk to each other except to trade barbs. Attendees told us they found the exchange of ideas eye opening, and hoped to foster the same kind of disciplined dialog within their organizations that they experienced at the event. The forum was a good initial step to help the disparate groups understand each other’s concerns and goals.
We also learned from rubbing shoulders with web designers and business line managers. Each camp has its own set of tools to measure application performance, and uses its own language to describe application performance. This divergence makes it difficult for both camps to find common ground. Web designers and business managers use performance management tools from companies like Omniture and Tealeaf to see if the user experience is acceptable and site features work, whereas IT uses the tools we are in the midst of profiling to identify and fix technical delivery problems. There is a vast gulf between these two performance management toolsets—and to date, neither side has had the reason or incentive to learn the other’s tools. It’s hard enough for each group to master its tools, much less look over the cubical wall at the other’s tools. But we predict a lot of good will come from trying.
Web Experience Forum topics ranged from describing how the NHL designs its web site experience to make eager fans more eager and “monetize fan engagement”, to documenting how an excellent user experience can increase the lifetime dollar value of each customer, to an “Experience Exchange Session” in which attendees broke into small teams to develop cross-disciplinary problem solving skills.
A great presentation by Lou Carbone, CEO at Experience Engineering, described the importance of emotion in the customer experience. To drive his point home he played a poignent video made by Fedex about the the terrifying airlift rescue and triumphant return of New Orleans' aquarium penguins after hurricane Katrina (click here to view, but make sure to have a Kleenex box handy). We talked to Lou at the conference and he told us he believes that application performance is critical to developing the power of the emotional connection. Creating an emotional connection with customers is delicate business, and if the user experience is impaired by poor performance, the opportunity to bond with customers can be lost for good.
There were plenty of technical deep dives as well, including a breakout session on browser software evolution and browser performance wars (more on that in a future blog). Other topics included leveraging CDNs for Web 2.0, the impact of video, how to scale to millions of users, and lots on performance measurement and reporting.
The Web Experience Forum is expected to be an annual event, and we recommend that you check it out next time around.
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