The monitoring of applications has become essential given the importance of user perception, whether on internal, web, or mobile applications. Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM), as defined by Gartner, aims to verify and measure the availability of your services while providing key performance indicators (response time, interactivity time, page stability metrics, etc.).
What are the 10 main reasons to monitor the user experience of your applications or websites?
When an application or website experiences downtime or slowdowns, user experience is negatively affected. As a result, users may stop using your service or, worse, share their negative experience, potentially impacting a large audience. To prevent this, it is crucial for your technical teams to be notified in real-time, enabling them to intervene as quickly as possible.
Many routine tasks are performed every morning by employees, often manually, to verify the availability and proper functioning of applications (morning checks). The repetitive nature of these tasks can lead to human errors and represents a significant operational cost. Automating these processes allows your teams to focus on higher-value projects.
Various tools monitor infrastructure performance and issue alerts when problems arise. However, there are cases where all technical indicators appear normal, yet users experience slowdowns or malfunctions in the interface. These issues can severely degrade user experience, making it essential to monitor performance from the user’s perspective.
Users often exaggerate technical issues, claiming that an application or website “never works,” when in reality, the problem was a brief five-minute disruption. With a user experience monitoring tool, you can provide factual data on actual user experience, fostering better communication between IT teams and end users.
Many companies experience slow page loading, oversized images, and data processing delays. With an application monitoring tool, you can gather data and present it to your hosting provider to demonstrate latency issues. Establishing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) defines which services to monitor, the monitoring conditions, and associated metrics. Similarly, Experience Level Agreements (XLAs) reflect the actual user experience of customers or employees. Monitoring SLAs/XLAs enables organizations to document user perception in service contracts between IT and business teams, between clients and IT providers, and between consumers and service providers.
To accurately assess performance, it is essential to have an unbiased and independent measurement tool. Ekara by IP-Label provides objective insights into application performance, helping businesses maintain an accurate and neutral assessment of their services.
Monitoring tools help prioritize actions based on their importance. Some technical metrics may not distinguish between minor, non-urgent issues and critical problems that significantly impact user experience. Given the importance of user experience, maintenance teams should focus their efforts on resolving issues that degrade it the most.
Businesses rely on multiple tools to operate efficiently. If these tools experience outages, employees may be unable to work, leading to productivity losses. Internal monitoring tools can detect incidents early, allowing IT teams to act promptly and minimize downtime.
User experience monitoring allows you to compare your performance with competitors. Why do they attract more visitors? Why are they more efficient? Does their platform offer a better experience to users and employees? These insights are crucial for staying competitive and optimizing your services.
A well-performing, highly available website or application strengthens brand image and prevents revenue loss. For business applications, downtime directly affects employee productivity. For e-commerce platforms, every additional second in page load time can lead to a 7% drop in revenue and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.
Monitoring the user experience from the end-user’s perspective ensures the performance and availability of your website or application. This monitoring complements infrastructure supervision. It allows you to objectively assess user complaints and feedback, be proactive in incident resolution, obtain business-relevant KPIs, and improve communication between business teams and IT.