Compuware Gomez UX Index Hits the Net
It’s the busiest online shopping week of the year, and to mark it Gomez has launched a novel way to show how well retail websites are performing from a user’s viewpoint. This is a noteworthy first. Called the Compuware Gomez Retail User Experience Index (UX Index for short), this new report is much easier to interpret than traditional reports that simply rank websites by response time or other raw metrics.
Rather than report raw numbers for response time, availability and consistency, the UX Index uses Apdex scoring methodology to give websites one user experience-based score, which Gomez rolls up into a macro view of how well websites are performing for the top 500 online retailers, the top 15 retailer websites, and the top 15 mobile retailer websites. They also show how well the sites are performing relative to a baseline. Because Apdex factors in response time, consistency as well as availability, it enables Gomez to assign a single score to a measurement sample. This aspect of Apdex also makes it easy to aggregate the results of many websites into a single group score–allowing Gomez to compare multiple benchmarks over time.
Gomez assigns every unique test an outcome of Satisfied, Tolerating or Frustrated. These categories are defined as:
- Satisfied: Page response time of 2 seconds or less;
- Tolerating: Page response time of between 2 and 8 seconds;
- Frustrated: Page response time of greater than 8 seconds or the test failed.
An Apdex score is determined by comparing the ratio of all Satisfied tests and half the Tolerating tests to the total of all tests. A score of 100 means that all tests (or users) in the sample fell into the Satisfied bucket. A score of zero indicates that all tests (or users) fell into the Frustrated bucket. Generally, a score of lower than 70 is considered poor, and 70 or greater is considered fair. A score between 85 and above 94 is considered good. A score above 94 is considered excellent.
If there is one day of the year when retail websites are stressed to the maximum, Cyber Monday is it, so check out the UX Index here and see how things look. Later this week we plan to analyze how well the websites tested fared on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
