Proactive monitoring without embedding: a best practice for proactively perceiving user experience

The business world is like a battlefield. Whoever wins the users wins the world. Whoever can successfully retain the users will master the code to rapid wealth growth.

Establish high-quality user experience and win long-term market favor

According to the 48th "Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet" released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), as of June 2021, a total of 4.22 million websites and 3.02 million apps were monitored in the domestic market, covering all aspects of work and life of my country's 1.011 billion netizens, including daily browsing of the web, online shopping, online financial management, watching videos, listening to music, and live streaming.

Web applications and mobile apps are the portals and tools for enterprises to provide business services to users. They are closely integrated with people's needs for office, shopping, financial management, entertainment, etc. On the one hand, this has established a shorter and faster interaction channel between enterprises and users, helping enterprises to serve users faster; on the other hand, it has also put forward more stringent requirements for enterprises - only by continuously optimizing the user experience of Web applications and mobile apps can more users be attracted to stay.

What is a good user experience? How to measure it?

As Kelvin, the famous 19th-century British physicist and father of thermodynamics, said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” If you want to optimize and improve user experience, you first need to accurately measure user experience.

User experience generally refers to “whether this thing is easy to use and convenient to use”. From a narrow perspective, user experience is a subjective feeling of a person, and it focuses on the effect produced when “this thing” is actually used.

However, according to the worldview and methodology of dialectical materialism and historical materialism, the objective determines the subjective, and the subjective depends on the objective. From a more comprehensive and profound perspective, the seemingly subjective user experience is essentially still determined by the objective performance of "this thing".

Therefore, when it comes to the question of "how to accurately measure the user experience of Web applications or mobile apps", whether it is the early PULSE model, the GSM and HEART models proposed by Google, or the PTECH model proposed by Ant Financial, they are all based on objective data such as the performance and screen presentation of the target Web application or mobile app, combined with a certain number of subjective data such as sample questionnaires, for comprehensive analysis and evaluation.

In the practice of establishing high-quality user experience, for enterprises, the lowest cost, fastest and most effective user experience measurement and improvement usually comes from optimizing the performance of their own web applications and mobile apps. Just as a joint study conducted by Google, Deloitte Digital and data company "55" showed that every 0.1 second increase in web page loading speed can stimulate a 9.2 percentage point increase in consumer spending on retail applications.

In the era of booming digital economy, modern IT systems are facing a continuous and massive growth of business data, and their architecture is constantly evolving towards distributed, hybrid cloud, cloud native, etc. The user experience brought by each enterprise's Web application and mobile app is affected by all aspects of the IT full chain, such as terminal equipment, regional operator network, information transmission, service response, data calculation, storage reading and writing. Therefore, it is particularly important for enterprises to quickly discover the experience problems that users are enduring, such as the slow loading speed of web pages of "0.1 seconds", and accurately locate the bottleneck link that causes this "0.1 second" slowness in the entire IT full chain.

No need for embedding, active monitoring, and pre-aware user experience

Through long-term exploration and extensive practice in the pursuit of improving user experience, a best practice has gradually been developed that can predict user experience in advance - Synthetic Monitor (STM) without embedded code.

STM does not require embedding SDK, JS and other code probes in web applications and mobile apps. It is a truly zero-intrusive monitoring method. It mainly uses automated testing technology, RPA technology and other technologies to automatically execute a series of interactive operations when real users use applications, and capture the performance experience data of the target application in this process. It then uses big data technology, statistical methods and other methods to conduct comprehensive user experience measurement analysis.

Therefore, enterprises can take advantage of STM's powerful user scenario simulation capabilities to proactively simulate real users' clicks, slides, inputs, and other interactive actions when browsing the web, managing finances online, and watching videos on personal computers, Android phones, or iPhones at any time in different regions and under different operator network environments. They can deeply collect performance experience data such as web page loading speed, DNS time, HTTP response time and status, and CPU resource consumption during the collection process, turning passive response into active attack, and effectively solving the problem that traditional embedded monitoring can only be triggered and solved after real users encounter problems and produce adverse effects. This allows enterprises to anticipate the enemy's moves, perceive in advance and improve the user experience of Web applications and mobile apps before real users. At the same time, enterprises do not need to worry about the risks of security compliance and privacy leakage brought about by embedded SDK, JS and other probes.

STM has a unique competitive product comparison application scenario due to its characteristics of no need for embedding code and active monitoring. It can be perfectly applied in version verification, active monitoring, and problem location scenarios, providing unparalleled assistance for enterprises in comparing their own application products with those of competitors, selecting Internet services, quickly verifying new versions of applications, actively obtaining user experience of specific groups, and completely reproducing application bugs.

The operation structure of a complete STM system can generally be divided into three levels:

• The first layer: Through recruitment or self-construction, a monitoring equipment cloud covering multiple regions is established, and a monitoring equipment management system is built to accurately evaluate the health status of the monitoring equipment and avoid the impact of problems on the monitoring equipment itself on the test results.
• The second layer: An efficient and orderly monitoring and scheduling mechanism ensures that multiple tasks can be sent to real PCs and mobile devices that meet the task requirements, complete a series of monitoring requirements such as accessing Web applications, running mobile apps, playing videos, receiving text messages, and collecting performance experience data in real time.
• The third layer: Use the big data engine to clean, filter, extract, aggregate and calculate the collected performance experience data, convert it into visual charts and measurable indicators, analyze the monitoring results in different dimensions, and accurately observe the user experience level of Web applications and mobile apps.

What are the good STM products on the market?

In recent years, with the rapid development of the domestic operation and maintenance management market, application performance monitoring has been increasingly favored and valued by enterprises, and there are more and more professional application performance monitoring manufacturers and other IT service providers providing application performance monitoring services. As one of the earliest companies involved in APM in China, Borei Data has obvious market and technical advantages.

Bonree Data is the first listed APM manufacturer in China. It has accumulated many years of experience in IT operation and maintenance management, has built a complete end-to-end ITOM management platform, and is one of the earliest companies in China to carry out STM monitoring. Specific products include Bonree Net, Bonree APP, Bonree Stock, Bonree Box, etc.

Among them, Bonree Net is the star product of Borei Data, which is mainly used for active monitoring scenarios such as Web/Wap applications, streaming media playback, network transmission, and SMS quality. Bonree APP is the first active monitoring product for mobile Android/iOS applications launched by Borei Data in China, which is mainly used for two monitoring scenarios: interactive use of mobile applications and streaming media playback.

Borei Data has its own unique insights and advanced ideas on what data collected by STM can accurately reflect the most realistic user experience. For example, in terms of visual experience measurement, which is generally weak in the industry, Borei Data first introduced the Shannon-Information Entropy Theory to enable visual experience evaluation capabilities, measure the information value brought to end users by each frame of the application, and help companies better optimize visual design and information transmission design.

In addition, in terms of how to use STM data for unified in-depth analysis, unlike the single calculation model of competitors, Borei Data will split the monitoring result data into abnormal data through a health assessment system. Based on a more advanced problem analysis model, it can combine basic dimensions such as time, region, operator, host, domain name, and performance, slow ratio, error type and other data items one-to-one or one-to-many. Analyzing the distribution regularity of problems from multiple data levels of one dimension can help companies formulate a more comprehensive user experience improvement strategy.