We live in an increasingly digital society, especially given the current global pandemic. So what does this mean for software development organizations? For starters, now that digital interactions have become the norm, providing a positive and reliable user experience is paramount.
Below, I will discuss the importance of keeping the user experience in mind during the development process. In addition, I will highlight different technologies and methodologies that can help forward-thinking DevOps teams. In particular, I outline how teams can leverage AIOps solutions so they can refine their applications and provide the best possible experience for the end user.
The Importance of Providing a Top-Notch User Experience
Without question, every development organization wants to provide a stellar user experience for their customers. The fact of the matter is that a great user experience is also essential for remaining relevant in any digital industry. The products that provide a top-notch user experience are the products that remain viable in the marketplace for an extended period of time. Consider the following:
A Positive User Experience Breeds Customer Loyalty
Customers always have options in this day and age, which means that they can shop around for the best possible solution to meet their needs. Therefore, they have little reason to stick with a product or service that is slow, error-prone, or otherwise frustrating to use. Consider online banking, for example. If customers repeatedly experience latency or failures when conducting financial transactions, they may consider switching to a bank that has an application with a reputation for performance and stability.
On the other hand, users who enjoy a seamless and reliable experience have no reason to look elsewhere. This helps businesses retain customers and instill a sense of loyalty to their brand. Organizations that provide resilient applications with reliable functionality are much more likely to retain their customers than those with problematic applications.
Growing the Reach of Your Business Through User Experience
Another way in which user experience affects businesses is by enabling them to grow the reach of their products and services. If a product is reliable and intuitive, current users will be more likely to recommend it to others who are looking to fulfill the same needs.
In addition, if businesses attempt to expand their suite of products or add features to an existing product, their users will be more willing to give these new offerings a chance. This gives businesses an initial audience that can help expand their reach into new markets.
Modern Practices for Ensuring a High-Quality User Experience
While the impact and importance of a great user experience may be somewhat obvious, the tactics for ensuring its greatness may not be as apparent. In modern DevOps shops, there are several key strategies and platforms that can assist organizations in delivering and refining a high-quality experience for the end user.
Let’s take a more in-depth look at a few of them.
Monitoring Your Application to Better Direct Development Efforts
In the digital realm, creating the best possible experience for the customer requires tracking and analyzing user behavior in a manner that provides insight into the performance of the application from a user perspective. This type of end user monitoring, combined with application performance monitoring, enables organizations to identify problematic functionality within their application that may have otherwise gone unnoticed for an extended period of time.
Tracking the user’s journey throughout the application provides development personnel with the data they need to identify opportunities for user experience improvement. For example, certain types of requests may be taking far too long or timing out at a rate that will not (and should not) be tolerated by the customer. By tracking end user interactions and the metrics associated with these interactions (such as resource load times, transaction response times, and error rates), teams can gain much more clarity in understanding how to have the greatest impact on application performance and the user experience. This helps teams to acknowledge issues sooner and remediate them permanently, leading to noticeable improvements in user experience quality.
Collecting data that contains information about the typical user experience with an application can also help teams better understand how users interact with their product. Over the long term, this information can be leveraged to improve user experience design and enable users to interact with the product in a more efficient and satisfying manner.
Increased Visibility and Automated Analysis with AIOps
Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) solutions utilize analytics and machine learning to automate the processes of detecting and reacting to problematic occurrences within an organization's applications and infrastructure. Such an approach can improve user experience by taking monitoring processes a step further and integrating them with machine learning.
The AIOps solution from Broadcom, for instance, strives to solve customer experience problems by monitoring the entire digital supply chain. This includes the network components, infrastructure, application, and database layers.
When these are monitored in a centralized manner, developers and IT personnel can see how all components of the application and infrastructure are performing through a “single pane of glass,” as opposed to the fragmented or siloed views traditionally obtained when monitoring individual components with separate tooling.
Such a platform significantly increases visibility across all components of the digital chain, allowing development organizations to leverage machine learning algorithms that correlate collected data across multiple architectural layers. This enables the production of targeted analytics that help contextualize performance problems for easier and faster remediation. In large part, AIOps removes much of the (normally lengthier) human-based analysis from the processes of problem identification and root cause analysis.
Conclusion
Given the fact that AIOps solutions have demonstrated the potential to improve customer experience, it just makes sense for ITOps teams to embrace the benefits of machine learning and artificial intelligence across all layers of their application architecture. This will streamline issue analysis and problem remediation, helping teams to deliver a better user experience.
To learn more about the benefits of AIOps and boost your skills, visit Broadcom’s Enterprise Software Academy AIOps resource page.