Aditya is Conviva‘s Chief Product Officer and Co-founder.
Businesses spend significant time and financial resources ensuring their backend systems don’t unexpectedly go down, preventing hundreds, thousands or even millions of users from accessing their service. Focusing on preventing outages isn’t a bad investment per se, as the backlash from subscribers during an outage can damage a business’s reputation and negatively impact its bottom line. However, brands often focus more on backend systems than preventing poor user experiences. This focus needs reversing.
For example, an Uber user needs a ride to the airport. Uber’s backend systems are green (low latency, high bandwidth), but logging in takes 10 minutes, or worse, they can’t book a ride at all and must find another option. This could be due to user interface changes or a recent app update that invalidated previous authentication tokens. The user leaves frustrated, while Uber might be under the impression everything is working because they only see part of the equation.
System performance is the primary focus of Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring, a useful metric but not nearly as insightful and impactful as what businesses should be measuring: Quality of Experience (QoE). Below, we’ll discuss why it’s crucial to focus on QoE and how businesses can successfully uplevel user experience without losing sight of overall system performance.
Why UX Is An Unsolved Challenge
Traditionally, the tools to evaluate platform performance have been infrastructure-centric and focused on QoS. This approach allows businesses to measure and address the Four Golden Signals:
• Latency: How long it takes to service requests
• Traffic: A high-level, system-specific measurement of demand
• Errors: The rate of failed requests
• Saturation: How “full” the system is relative to maximum capacity
The problem with focusing primarily on QoS is that its reach is limited to backend systems and cannot measure what’s happening at the edge where the user interacts. In today’s digital-first world, with content accessible in numerous ways through myriad devices, legacy monitoring systems can’t offer visibility into user experiences.
Measuring with QoE prioritizes end users and considers their feedback when evaluating performance. While QoS and QoE are interrelated, they aren’t equivalent measures of success. High QoS doesn’t necessarily mean high QoE, and vice versa. DoorDash, for example, could have good QoS because the backend systems are green but have poor QoE because users are experiencing slow checkout times.
The Impact Of Ignoring Experience
QoS and QoE are both necessary metrics, but QoE must be the primary focus because the impact of a bad experience is much more severe than an outage. At Conviva, we recently conducted a comprehensive evaluation of our global streaming customers and found the impact of an outage, while significant, pales in comparison to the effect of poor user experience.
The primary focus of a QoS approach is outages, which is important because if systems are down, users can’t access the service. According to our research, a global media company might experience three outages a year, totaling 22 hours of downtime and impacting nearly 27 million viewers. All told, users lose 306 million viewing hours, companies lose 20 million advertising hours and nearly 240,000 subscribers will leave for another brand. As many companies continue to weather a volatile economic storm, an outage could be catastrophic.
However, QoS says nothing about user experience. QoE recognizes that bad experiences happen every day, not just a few times a year, and the contrast is staggering: Nearly 190 million users are impacted by bad experiences annually, leading to nearly 2 billion lost viewing hours, 129 million lost advertising hours and nearly 2 million lost subscribers.
A bad experience can sour consumers on the entire brand: One report found that 41% of users believe it’s impossible to deliver poor user experiences and produce quality products. For example, if an eyeglasses manufacturer’s website has a poorly designed interface, consumers assume they make a lousy product. In over 15 years of partnering with major media companies, Conviva has found that 82% of users with a failed log-in won’t return for a week, 52% won’t continue if sign-up takes more than two minutes and viewers with a poor watching experience consume 63% fewer video hours.
Shifting The Paradigm
Companies focus most of their time on user engagement and system performance, but user experience is the bridge that connects the two. All three must work together. In a previous piece, I defined what each one entails. In short, engagement (whether the user clicks “buy now”) must connect with experience (a complicated purchase process) and performance (long load times for the payment page).
Shifting the paradigm means embracing experience-centric observability (ECO). Instead of taking a server-centric approach that prioritizes the Four Golden Signals, brands must use experience metrics starting on the client side and drill into performance metrics on the back end and the front end to get a complete picture of user flows.
It’s imperative to monitor metrics in real time at the census scale, rather than taking small samples, to eliminate delays and blind spots. And it’s necessary to go beyond measuring low-level metrics, like error counts, to leverage experience metrics, such as time to purchase or sign in, and understand what’s happening at the edge.
Embracing ECO and focusing on QoE is an impactful way to decrease user churn and increase engagement and revenue without a full-scale business overhaul. Focusing on backend systems leaves brands blind to user experience and unable to proactively address issues before they’re inundated with angry social media posts or emails. Not only does this leave brands scrambling to find and fix the issue, but there’s no way to know whether that backend fix positively impacted the front-end experience.
It’s time to shift from a siloed system-level focus to a transparent, connected focus that places the user at the center and uses their experience as the benchmark for success.
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