Summary
Experience is using products that are both intuitive and enjoyable enabling easy and timely completion of tasks.
Experience depends on many factors, a common one is the time it takes waiting to view and interact with an application page in the browser. The longer the wait time less enjoyable it is.
This post is for executives, managers, and architects to understand the importance of experience and prioritize it.
A scenario
A task can be a sales executive(SE) creating a quote for a customer for a set of products and services.
In the process of creating this quote, the SE has to create an opportunity and contact and review the lead and account information.
If each page takes 5 seconds to load or creation of records, that’s 15 seconds of waiting time for the SE.
An average of 5 quotes per hour, and an organization of 10 sales executives creating quotes, would result in 15 mins of waiting time.
As we see experience depends on the performance(page loading time) of each page.
Generally, up to 2.5 seconds to view and interact with a page is considered a good experience. We believe anything above 5 seconds is not a good experience getting into the red zone.
Impact of the red zone
Productivity impact
Sales or service tasks such as completing a quote or updating a customer account take longer to complete. This leads to frustration and adoption problems.
Bugs and complaints
When users notice a degradation in performance impacting their work, it results in complaints creation of bugs. This happens more often after a change management release.
Raising costs
Experience problems are difficult to fix. They tend to add up with each release or change. Util the application usability is severely impacted and it becomes costly in time and money to fix the problems.
Avoiding the red zone
There are steps that can be taken to avoid being in the Red zone.
Consistent
Accurate performance assessment(aka performance testing) which gets all the metrics required to make decisions on what needs to be addressed.
Prioritizing testing
Incorporating performance testing and analysis(assessment) into your change management release cycles. This ensures problems in each release are caught proactively.
Automate it!
Automated testing is consistent and metrics reliable. Automation also makes it effortless to have a testing process in place.
Talk to the users
Getting feedback from users is critical to success. After all, it’s for them to have an experience.
Being in the green zone
The green zone of page performance is definitely great for user experience.
Employee and customer productivity increases.
Reduces the cost of serving and maintaining the application.
Confidence in our applications, reducing risk and ability to seamlessly scale business operations.
Conclusion
Employee and customer experience is closely related to Lightning application performance. Testing provides us visibility into the user’s experience and is much more cost-effective when compared to fixing big problems.
Regular assessments(aka testing) of our applications are easy once implemented, therefore prioritizing testing is an easy decision.