Chapter 17
Delivering the Promise
Not the maker of plans and promises, but rather the one who offers faithful service in small matters. This person is most likely to achieve what is good and lasting.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I magine walking into a store and having everything off by just a few seconds. Associates standing still, like statues, responding to inquiries a few seconds after they are asked. It’s kind of like the television commercial aired by Cox Business (the B2B telecom product division of Cox Communications) about “business buffering.”1 (See Figure 17.1.)
Figure 17.1 Cox Communication: Business Buffering
Well, that’s exactly what it feels like to visitors when a website is slow or unresponsive. Way back in Chapter 1, we explained that the website is the heart of our digital presence, the amalgamation of all our digital activities through which we form our relationships. Some of them, like Facebook or Yelp, we cannot control. However, given that the point of all of them is to drive people back to the website, to the digital pot-belly stove in our general store, it’s critical that the website perform at the highest level possible.
The mechanics of delivering a high-performing website are just as important as providing the right content for the right relationship need. It’s all wrapped up together in a “pleasing experience,” in giving our audience what they want (access to content without having to wait), and this is the foundation for engagement. It’s the foundation of what we promise when we ask a consumer to spend some of their precious attention.
Why Does Delivery Matter?
As B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore explain in their book, The Experience Economy, “. . . companies stage an experience whenever they engage customers, connecting with them in a personal, memorable way.”2 That means that everyone is “selling an experience.” How many times have you gone to a restaurant and swore never to return because the service, atmosphere, or environment was so terrible . . . even if the food was phenomenal? Or, in the case of Amy’s Baking Company in Scottsdale, Arizona (featured on the show Kitchen Nightmares3 after a much publicized social networking fiasco), coming to a restaurant for the experience despite the quality of the food?
The path is simple to understand:
- Spend attention. Consumers spend their attention with you and kick off the relationship cycle.
- Generate engagement. Once attention has been given, engagement can happen.
- The experience kicks into full gear. Maybe it meets the consumer’s expectations, maybe it’s a surprise, maybe it falls flat on its face.
- A relationship is formed. This is good, bad, or indifferent, or maybe a little bit of each, but it determines the habit that follows after (i.e., “I’m going to come back here once a week” or “I’m going to avoid this place like the plague”).
This certainly applies to all types of organizations. Companies like GoPro4 provide an experience in their advertising, marketing, messaging, and packaging. Rackspace differentiates a commoditized offering (colocation and related services) with “fanatical” customer service.
A digital presence offers an opportunity to differentiate through an exceptional online experience. Digital presence begins with the website. Not only it is the easiest destination to control, it is also the most interactive. Ten years ago, websites were nothing more than static “newspaper-like” displays. Today? They are interactive, often combining technologies from other websites (like Facebook integration), and software that helps create a personalized, memorable experience. Take a look at how the NFL website has evolved over the past 10 years.a (See Figure 17.2.)
Figure 17.2a NFL.com circa early 2000s
Figure 17.2b NFL.com circa 2013
There’s a clear distinction between the two. By 2013, the website is tremendously more interactive. It is delivering an immersive experience with scores, live video, fantasy football, social integration, and a host of other engagement tools. The website is now bigger . . . and if we are not careful, slower. Of course, that’s not just indicative of the NFL. It’s a trend across the web. (See Figures 17.3 and 17.4.)
Figure 17.4 Websites Are Getting Slower
Source: Radware, “State of the Union: Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance,” Fall 2013.
We have come to expect that everything related to technology follows Moore’s Law—getting continuously better, smaller, faster, and cheaper, but websites are on a different path. They are getting better, yes, but along the way, they are getting bigger, slower, and much more expensive. Unfortunately, consumer expectations haven’t followed suit. In fact, consumers are even more unrealistic in their demands than ever before. Remember when you were willing to wait a few seconds for a computer to respond? These days, even 400 milliseconds—literally the blink of an eye—is too long, as Google engineers have discovered.5 That barely perceptible delay causes people to search less.6 (See Figure 17.5.)
That’s because consumers have virtually unlimited choice. The competition is one click away, literally; it is that simple and easy to visit a competitor’s site or use a competitor’s mobile app. There is no barrier to change and the cost is almost zero to look elsewhere (just the cost of a bit more attention). There are obvious and tangible business impacts to having a slow website. It’s obvious that if people are leaving the website, we will lose business. What’s not so obvious is the long-term impact of poor user experience on relationships. (See Figure 17.6.)7
Providing consumers an awesome experience acknowledges that they have a choice. We must be more helpful, more quickly, than other options. We must focus on pleasing visitors by offering them a great experience every time they visit. When we give them what they want—a fast-loading website through which to experience our relevant and helpful content—we earn their attention, and the potential to engage further, and move through the relationship cycle and up the relationship pyramid.
Delivery from the Cloud (and Not Underneath Someone’s Desk)
So, the first step in providing that great experience with our digital presence is recognizing that we probably should not do it alone. There are simply too many variables. This is why so many organizations are migrating the delivery of digital experiences to the cloud. It enables them to offload some of the components (like bandwidth and infrastructure) and yet still remain in control. They aren’t handing off their website to someone; they are just offloading some of their worries to a capable service provider.
Instead of having to worry about whether the website can withstand a sudden spike in traffic (the elastic nature of the cloud can handle this), you can worry more about how you are engaging with your audience.
Reach, Scale, and Availability
Let no one argue that digital is not bringing us closer together economically. Much like the telegraph and the railroad, the Internet breaks through geographic boundaries to provide equal access for the dissemination and delivery of information or electronic goods (notwithstanding individual governmental policies on providing such access). In fact, according to John Sviokla, the business leader for PwC’s strategy and innovation advisory group: “The Internet . . . is triggering a third wave of capitalism that will transform business and government, and lead to extraordinary wealth creation around the world.”8 It would seem that Mr. Sviokla’s predictions in 2011 are carrying true as we have seen massive wealth creation through technology in a variety of countries. But whether or not it ultimately holds true, the Internet is truly a globalizing medium as best described by David Reed, one of its early framers:
The Internet consists of three conceptual “clouds”: the connectivity cloud, for the transfer of information; the resource cloud, for the storage of data; and the social cloud, for networking and collaboration. These clouds, which can be public, private or semi-private, provide the infrastructure for the digital economy. They enable the creation of new markets, and provide the conduit for the fluid movement of resources and demand. As a result, firms and individuals worldwide can participate in innovation, wealth creation and social interaction in ways never before possible.9
Our audience is no longer in our backyard, around the corner, or just in the town nearby. Our audience is everywhere in the world, wherever they want to be, using every device imaginable to interact with us. Understanding that simple fact gives us perspective. We see it is difficult to provide the kind of experience visitors expect online. Imagine what our audience would think of the experience if they have had to walk 100 miles to get to our store? That’s what it can feel like when the website is not properly distributed, when it cannot be reached around the globe, and when it slows down because it is taxed by too many requests.
Devices Are Context, Too
It’s clear that mobile usage is on the rise. As we’ve discussed in various chapters through this book, users are employing their mobile devices not only more frequently, not only as part of multidevice activities, but also with the same expectations they have for the website when sitting at their desks. That’s bad considering that mobile connectivity is inherently unpredictable. We have to deliver an excellent experience in a “variable bandwidth environment”—that’s when a mobile device can switch from Wi-Fi to 3G to 4G to LTE and everywhere in between with varying signal strengths.
Who do users blame when the website isn’t performing? Their phone? Their carrier? More likely, the negative experience reflects on our brand alone. (See Figure 17.8.)
Unfortunately, mobile delivery performance is not even the first challenge we face. Before visitors enjoy the experience, we need to get our content and sites to show up on those devices in the first place! Although there are proven solutions to help (like responsive design),b there’s no silver bullet, and not having a mobile version of the website is the kiss of death in today’s digital world.
On the positive side, mobile technology provides us a great deal of detailed information that can help personalize and contextualize the experience for our audience. If we know they are engaging with content through a mobile device, we can tailor the experience for someone who is “on the go” (even if that means they are standing in line at the grocery store).
Improving the Delivery Experience
If ensuring that content is presented appropriately is challenging, delivering an effective digital experience at scale, available around the world, to any device, is even more daunting. The site has to load fast. No wait. No latency. That’s why it’s critical that the website is optimized.
Optimization reduces the latency (the difference between the time when a request is received by a web server and the time it takes for that system to respond) while also improving perception. As we know, perception is reality.
Just when you thought you could lick this whole “deliver a pleasing experience” problem by improving the webserver and network, we slap this dead fish down on the table. (See Figure 17.9.)
Figure 17.9 Internet Users Have Faulty Perceptions of Time
Source: Sloyan Stefanov, “Psychology of Performance.”
Tackling optimization actually requires that you address three different aspects of delivery. (See Figure 17.10.)
- First mile: This is the network connection between the content origin and the point of delivery. So, that may be a server with content located in one datacenter and the webserver located in another. Or, it may be content stored in AWS and a CDN ingest.
- Middle mile: This is historically the “longest” mile and deals with the point of delivery and the user’s “point of Internet connection” (i.e., their Internet service provider, or ISP).
- Last mile: This is the connection between the user’s physical computer and their ISP.
The ultimate optimization involves getting the digital assets, whether they be website pages, images, or video files, as close to the end user as possible. That’s called the “edge” and usually represents that barrier between the middle and last mile. With that in mind, there are three methods to improving the performance of a digital experience:
- Caching objects
- Accelerating dynamic content
- Optimizing the browser experience
Caching Objects
A cache represents a specific storage component in a network whose sole purpose is to store frequently requested content. This is like having displays of popular products in special stands, right where customers come through the front doors. In the digital world, this might be a video or images or even assets for an online game. Regardless, objects stay in a cache for as long as they are popular (or based on a specified time), so each time those assets are requested, the method of delivery doesn’t have to go all the way back to the origin of the files (which may be tens or hundreds of miles away from any given user).
Accelerating Dynamic Content
As we saw in the NFL example, websites are no longer static. They are dynamic, interactive, almost living things. And because of that, much of the content (or interactivity) is generated on the fly. Using a combination of server-side programming (like PHP), client-side scripting (like JavaScript), and databases, websites can shift and change to meet a particular user’s needs or interests. Although this ultimately makes for a more pleasing experience (because it’s personalized and contextual), it also complicates the prospect of providing it quickly. There are many organizations that have created dynamic and exciting websites only to have users abandon them, resulting in little to no engagement and a lot of negative relationships because they failed to accelerate them adequately.
Optimizing the Browser Experience
With static digital content in the cache and dynamic content being accelerated, there’s only one place left for optimization—the browser. Despite what most people know, all the browsers are actually quite different. Sure, they all accomplish the same basic thing (rendering HTML), but they do so in very different ways. That means that a webpage “optimized” for one browser may end up performing terribly on another browser. Front-end acceleration is the process by which web content is optimized for a specific browser at the time of request. So, a system within the network (or a service provider’s network) looks at the incoming request, determines what browser it is, and then returns the data optimized for that requesting browser. This technology also allows an organization to specify what gets loaded first. Like that perception problem, when our audience sees nonessential or noninteractive elements loading first (while they have to wait to click on what they want), their perception of the speed of the experience we deliver is jaded. This optimization method, on the other hand, ensures that the important elements (like calls to action, menus, and videos) are loaded quickly even if the rest of the page is still rendering.
Keeping a Watchful Eye (like Kevin)
Okay, so you understand what needs to happen—you need to stop trying to deliver your digital presence yourself; you need to implement specific strategies to help optimize the delivery of your digital presence through the first, middle, and last mile.
But once that’s done, then what? Is it all unicorns and rainbows?
Not quite.
Ensuring that you are providing the fastest possible delivery of your digital presence is an ongoing activity. There’s no way that you’ll be able to foresee all the possible things that could cause your website to perform less than adequately. That’s why you need to continually monitor delivery from two different perspectives—the systems and the end user.
System Monitoring
There are a lot of systems involved in getting website content to the end user. There are web servers, application servers, databases, third-party technology integrations, routers, switches, disk drives, and the list goes on. All of these systems produce data that can help us understand performance. By analyzing the data, we can get a sense of the system-level impact on website performance. Is a network problem causing users to wait? Is a slow database resulting in users abandoning their shopping carts? Is a third-party integration (i.e., with Facebook) causing the website to slow down? Understanding all of these can help in optimizing the delivery.
End-User Monitoring
End-user monitoring helps us understand how the website is performing from the client perspective (i.e., from the browser). The most common method to test this is using synthetic user monitoring. This kind of monitoring employs software to mimic thousands or tens of thousands of users accessing the website from different browsers. The other method is called real user monitoring, or RUM. This method utilizes agents installed in the user’s browser that measure actual response times. So, for example, a synthetic user test is programmed to know exactly what to click on when it’s loaded. But in real life, the user may have difficulty finding the interactive element that needs to be clicked on next. This is both an important indicator of the user experience as a whole, as well as how long the perceived wait time is. (See Figure 17.11.)
Figure 17.11 RUM vs. Synthetic Page Load Times
Source: “Comparing RUM & Synthetic Page Load Times,” stevesouders.com.
The graph below supports what we uncovered earlier in this chapter—that perception of wait time is generally higher than what the wait time actually is. But when it really comes down to it, what’s more valuable? Some number that says the website is fast or the number that users are actually reporting?
The Takeaway
Doing this by yourself, facing what might seem like unreasonable user expectations from a global audience, probably isn’t going to help ensure that the website experience is as pleasing as it can be. And once we start sliding down the slope, failing to provide what the audience wants (the content according to their relationship type) when they want it (on their device, as quickly as possible), we undermine every opportunity to engage and form relationships.
In order to ensure the highest level of performance, we recommend that you utilize either a combination of cloud resources (such as those available with Amazon Web Services or Rackspace) or a Content Delivery Network (CDN). In both cases, you will get access to globally distributed infrastructure and acceleration services that will deliver the website and other digital assets around the world, quickly. In the case of the latter, the CDN is usually coupled with hands-on expertise providing architectural as well as operational support.
Notes
1. www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLxNRrtInd8.
2. B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy, updated edition (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011).
3. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uPOGxUtZvk.
5. Steve Lohr, “For Impatient Web Users, an Eye Blink Is Just Too Long to Wait,” New York Times, February 29, 2012, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/29/business/The-Blink-of-an-Eye-Oh-Please.html.
6. www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/technology/impatient-web-users-flee-slow-loading-sites.html.
8. Oxford Economics, “The New Digital Economy: How It Will Transform Business,” PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, www.pwc.com/gx/en/technology/publications/assets/the-new-digital-economy.pdf.
9. Ibid.
aIf you ever want to see a website as it might have appeared a decade ago, check out the Wayback Machine at http://archive.org/web/web.php.
bResponsive web design (RWD) is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices, from mobile phones to desktop computer monitors (Wikipedia).