Gomez UX performance index results for early holiday shopping
The Compuware Gomez Retail User Experience (UX) Index has been using Apdex methodology to report online retail site performance for a week now–long enough for us to draw conclusions about user experience trends so far this holiday shopping season. Gomez tracked performance for its Top 15 Websites accessed from PCs as well as mobile devices, and its Internet Retailer 500 websites accessed from PCs. Several key observations stand out. For starters, in aggregate the Internet Retailer 500 websites fared poorly in the holiday crush. Second, Cyber Monday is a two-day, not a one-day event–and finally, the Gomez Top 15 Websites are crowd proof when accessed from a PC but not a mobile phone.
Gomez applied the same two-second user satisfaction threshold to all three of its indices. Using this threshold, Gomez gathered baseline Apdex scores over the course of the month of October. This baseline appears as a light blue line in the Internet Retailer 500 UX Index snapshot shown below. Each day has a pattern. The gray vertical lines on the chart mark midnight Eastern Time. The baseline shows higher Apdex scores in the middle of the night, with performance peaking around 3AM ET when the east coast residents are asleep and the west coast finally retires for the night. The lowest Apdex scores occur around 10PM ET.
As you can see from the chart, on the day before Thanksgiving and Friday, Saturday and most of the following Sunday, Apdex results track the baseline quite closely. But on Thanksgiving day Apdex scores are higher than the baseline, indicating that most would-be shoppers were socializing in the flesh and eating Thanksgiving dinner, they were not at their computers buying stuff. Online shopping began in earnest late Sunday and continued its intensity until late Tuesday evening–a total of about 48 hours during which the Internet Retailer 500 Apdex scores were consistently below the baseline. These results lead us to conclude that Cyber Monday is, in fact, a two-day, not a one-day event.
Overall Cyber Monday delivered poorer performance than Cyber Tuesday. But at 10 PM Tuesday evening, there was an intriguing dip that was the largest decline from the baseline for the week with a seven point Apdex performance drop. We imagine American shoppers must have been eagerly lapping up cyber deals before heading for bed. The overall Apdex score for Monday was three points below the baseline while the overall score for Tuesday was only one point below the baseline, so the 10PM dip wasn’t enough to move the daily score dramatically.
Check out the UX Index here to see more details of the Compuware Gomez UX Index results.
