Performance · Customer experience · Business outcomes
The wrong questions we ask
We had a problem. Our online shop sometimes felt slow, but we couldn’t reliably tell when or why. We had our own experiences, and we’d heard from customers about errors during checkout or when using the wishlist or shopping cart. But we had no reliable way of understanding what was actually happening.
We did the next best thing we could think of: creating a list of tools that could help us better understand the trouble that we were experiencing.
| Criteria | DebugBear | SpeedCurve |
|---|---|---|
| Dashboards | — | — |
| Pricing | — | — |
| Alerts | — | — |
We took a look at all the features. Compared them. Compared prices. Tried them out. And we eventually settled on a winner. Still, something felt odd. I couldn't pinpoint it exactly, something just felt odd when I looked at the solution we were going for: DebugBear. So I went back through the list of tools, browsed a bit, and eventually stumbled upon a correlation chart by SpeedCurve.
“This is what we need,” I thought to myself. I couldn’t quite explain why, but something about that correlation chart excited me. It showed performance metrics, such as page load speed, alongside business metrics, such as conversion rate.
And suddenly, I started wondering whether we’d been looking at the problem from the wrong perspective. Maybe it wasn’t just about measuring performance. Maybe we needed something that connected technical performance with business outcomes. Something that would help us make better decisions together with management.
A week later, I thought about it again. What we had tried to do from the beginning was very different from what we thought we needed when we started the project:
- Establish a culture in which performance becomes an integral piece in achieving a great customer experience.
- Make the business value of performance visible.
- Create a baseline to measure the online shop's performance. A standard that we could all agree upon. That allowed the agency, the developers, and us to agree on a standard that we'd use objectively to evaluate our impact.
We needed something, a common ground, that closed the gap between the technical, daily implementation part and the higher level up business part. SpeedCurve could be just that.
Update
The interesting part is that implementing SpeedCurve was the easy part. Creating a culture in which performance becomes part of everyday decisions? That’s something we’re still working on.
We found a tool that could help us connect performance with business outcomes. But getting people to actually use that information when making decisions turned out to be a different challenge altogether.