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How to visualize user journeys with Site24x7 to spot opportunities to improve the UX



Before judging anyone, walk a mile in their shoes. This is a great idiom that emphasizes the importance of experiencing what your customers experience when you offer a service. With empathy, IT product owners can ensure that their operations take into account user journeys to be responsive and responsible. 

The first step in understanding user journeys is establishing comprehensive IT observability of every stage of the user journeys. Seeing is indeed believing, and what you see is often what you get. Visualizing customer journeys is essential to finding and eliminating bottlenecks across the stack and continuously enhancing the user experience (UX) by understanding the pain points. This blog will focus on how IT managers can achieve all this with a comprehensive IT observability platform such as Site24x7. 

Do you see what the customers see?

The UX refers to the quality of users' interactions with your software. The spectrum of the UX ranges from "never coming back" to "feels like home." As user demand for continuous availability, flawless performance, and robust security grows, the success of your website or application increasingly depends on delivering an exceptional UX. The quality of your website or app directly influences your product's success, and observability plays a key role in ensuring it. 

Seeing is believing

Product owners need to see every step of the application's user journeys, both from within the stack and from the users' perspective. An IT observability platform provides the tools to monitor every aspect of the UX, helping product owners identify performance issues. 

What is UX observability?

UX observability involves real-time monitoring of metrics, traces, and logs to assess how well a website or application performs in real-world scenarios. It combines actual user data from diverse devices and networks with synthetic monitoring to ensure accuracy and reliability. While real user monitoring (RUM) captures the users' perspective under varying conditions, synthetic monitoring provides controlled insights from within the system.

Typical user journeys and expectations

  • Websites: Users anticipate seamless navigation; rapid load times; and secure, uninterrupted transactions.
  • Mobile apps: Expectations include quick app launches, fast server responses, minimal errors and latency, stable sessions, and secure interactions.
  • API calls: Users expect timely, accurate responses; high throughput; low latency; error-free transactions; and efficient resource use.

Tracking the impact of the UX on businesses with Site24x7

UX monitoring

  • Availability: Monitor uptime worldwide with monitors from multiple geographical locations and calculate the financial impact of downtime.
  • Performance: Track metrics like the page load time, time to interactive, API response times, and throughput and analyze the mean time to resolve (MTTR).
  • Synthetic monitoring: Use scripted tests to mimic user actions, detecting performance issues before they affect real users.
  • RUM: Collect live data on user interactions to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks immediately.
  • Security: Monitor for vulnerabilities and SSL/TLS certificate statuses and ensure compliance to maintain user trust.
  • Visualization with dashboards: Integrate all the data onto dashboards for a comprehensive view that supports quick, informed decisions.
  • Platform capabilities: Leverage alerting, reporting, and communication tools for effective management and response.

Application performance monitoring

Component performance tracking: Use monitoring agents to observe performance across your application's components.
Log management: Centralize logs for in-depth analysis, root cause diagnosis, anomaly detection, and trend comparison.

By integrating these monitoring practices with ManageEngine Site24x7, you can directly link the UX to business outcomes. Metrics can drive actionable insights for improving performance, security, and satisfaction, in turn positively impacting customer retention rates, conversion rates, and revenue.

Obstacles to effective UX optimization and solutions

  • A lack of a holistic view: If you focus on individual metrics, you can miss systemic interactions; Site24x7 dashboards provide a unified view.
  • Siloed data and tool sprawl: Without integrations, data correlation suffers; Site24x7 unifies data for clearer insights.
  • Not enough context: Performance data needs user context; Site24x7 provides this to optimize for real use cases.
  • A reactive approach: Addressing issues after their impact is too common; Site24x7's synthetic monitoring allows for proactive fixes.
  • Ineffective usage of AI: You can't fully optimize if you're under-utilizing AI; Site24x7's AIOps can predict and automate.
  • Ignoring user feedback: If you don't act on user feedback, UX issues will persist; Site24x7 can correlate feedback with performance.
  • Overlooking the mobile experience: Mobile optimization is key; Site24x7's RUM tracks mobile metrics and helps you optimize them.
  • Failure to benchmark: Performance standards are crucial; Site24x7 offers benchmarking tools for goal setting.
  • Neglecting security as an integral part of the UX: Security impacts trust; monitoring tools like Site24x7 include security metrics.
Addressing these areas transforms monitoring into a tool for continuous UX enhancement.

Do you also see what your customers do not see?

The UX goes deeper than the gloss of the UI. That is why, in addition to seeing what your customers see through RUM and synthetics, you need comprehensive observability that pervades every layer of the stack, connected applications, and data flows. Observability helps you converge exhaustive telemetry (metrics, traces, and logs) to visualize the application or website in its entirety. Because these aspects contribute to the UX's impact, it is pertinent to include comprehensive observability in the context of UX improvement.

How to identify pain points in the UX

  • Monitor user interactions: Track actions like clicks, scrolls, and submissions to find where users struggle.
  • Benchmark performance metrics: Measure against industry standards or past data using tools like Apache JMeter or Lighthouse.
  • Quantify the UX's impact: Link UX issues to business metrics for prioritization.
  • Correlate system metrics with the UX: Use Site24x7 to connect back-end performance with user interactions.
  • Perform user sentiment analysis: Collect and act on user feedback for immediate UX adjustments.

Leveraging AIOps for incident response and visualization

  • End-to-end user journey visualization: AIOps provides end-to-end visibility into user journeys by correlating data from multiple sources (logs, metrics, and traces) and mapping dependencies across systems.
  • Proactive issue detection: Use AI and ML to detect anomalies and predict potential disruptions in user journeys before they impact performance or uptime.
  • Root cause analysis: Automatically identify the root cause of issues by analyzing patterns and correlations across user journeys, reducing the MTTR.
  • Automated remediation: Automate responses to common issues, such as scaling resources during traffic spikes or rerouting traffic during outages, to maintain high uptime and performance.

How to measure, improve, and benchmark UX journeys with Site24x7

RUM

  • Track user behavior, including click-throughs, session lengths, and drop-offs, to identify roadblocks and optimize user paths.
  • Monitor the Core Web Vitals (the Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and Interaction to Next Paint) for actionable UX insights and pinpoint problematic pages or components.
  • Use PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals to optimize website performance and ensure SEO compliance.

Synthetic monitoring

  • Script and test user journeys to ensure consistent performance and proactively identify bottlenecks.
  • Use synthetic data to systematically eliminate performance issues before they impact users, avoiding potential PR or social media backlash.

Benchmarking and quantifying performance

  • Use metrics like Apdex scores and Core Web Vitals scores to set targets, measure progress, and continuously improve.
  • Link UX metrics to financial outcomes to validate the impact of your efforts on revenue.

Real-time alerts and notifications

  • Set up customized alerts for immediate issue awareness and route them through preferred channels based on the urgency or responsibility.
  • Ensure your team is prepared to address pressing issues promptly.

AIOps for incident response

  • Automate responses to repetitive incidents using AIOps for faster resolution and an improved UX.

Security

  • Regularly check for security vulnerabilities, ensure certifications are up to date, and prevent your site from being blocklisted.

Status communication

Best practices for monitoring the UX

  • Know your customers: Personalization is key. Deeply understand your userbase and tailor your content and user flows to suit the user groups that use your application the most. 
  • Prioritize continuous performance improvement: Regularly refine performance aspects and set dynamic targets. 
  • Improve your tool set: Keep your tech stack modern and efficient. Reduce tool sprawl to minimize, integrate, and unify your tools to improve observability. 
  • Combine lab and field data: Merge insights from both real (RUM) and synthetic data for a complete picture of the UX. 
  • Develop a unified view of the UX: Look at user journeys comprehensively and not as broken portions that may work together. Imagine the overall picture. 
  • Embrace AIOps strategically: Use AI for predictive insights and capacity planning. AI is especially handy at predictively alerting you through forecasts and at automating tasks wherever possible to help you achieve more.
  • Break down organizational silos: Promote collaboration for a unified UX strategy across your teams and have stand-up meetings to discuss the UX. Listen intently to users through social media and other channels of engagement and flow these insights back to the boardroom.

Leverage Site24x7 

With these strategies, your IT teams can significantly enhance the UX, reduce the business impacts of outages and a poorly functioning website or application, and maximize your potential revenue and brand reputation. The potential of comprehensive IT observability in ensuring high uptime, performance, and security cannot be overstated. With Site24x7, your IT teams can continuously visualize and improve the UX, forecast needs, leverage AIOps, and engage the workforce effectively to maintain a competitive edge. Try Site24x7 today. 

Here are some statistics to ponder

In Q3 2024, over 77% of global retail website traffic came from mobile phones, which generated 68% of online orders. (Source: Statista)
79% of dissatisfied website customers do not come back, and 57% of shoppers leave a slow site to buy from a competitor. (Source: Shopify)
A study that analyzed 12 million pages found that only 52% of desktop websites and 48% of mobile websites pass the Core Web Vitals test. (Source: Wattspeed)
A website loading speed study of 100 million page views revealed that a site that loads in one second has a three times higher conversion rate than a site that loads in five seconds and a five times higher rate than a site that loads in 10 seconds. (Source: Portent)