We’re on to the third day of Web 2 Expo, and it’s a been a bit hectic. Good hectic, but busy nevertheless.
I got to the show early on Sunday, before things had opened up. Registration was underway.

Our ad in the program looked decent; nice and simple.

I attended a session on web performance put on by Yahoo that was informative and interesting. Anyone who talks about the impact of cookies on performance is my kind of speaker.

Even on a Sunday morning, for a topic this dry, the room was packed.

I went to check out our booth location; not much going on as it was Sunday and the show floor didn’t open until Monday afternoon.

The location was perfect – right along the main corridor, and you couldn’t miss us from the Google booth.

That evening, a bunch of Coradiant employees and customers attended Ignite. This was a series of 20-slide, 5-minute presentations on all things Geeky. Very entertaining; one of the speakers was Justin from justin.tv — a guy who’s basically broadcasting his life, 24/7, as the ultimate in reality TV. We need to organize an Ignite in Montreal at the next Democamp.

Here’s a shot of Justin (on stage) and James Ward (from Adobe) looking at Justin’s website at the same time. I guess we could use this to measure latency, since on the site it looks like he’s just about to walk up the stairs to the stage when in real life he’s already there.

The next morning, I moderated a session with folks from Crescendo, Microsoft Windows Live, Amazon Web Services, and MySQL. The panelists were:

Hooman Beheshti, VP of Technology, Crescendo Networks
Mike Culver, Amazon Web Services
James Hamilton, Architect, Microsoft Windows Live
Zack Urlocker, Executive Vice President, MySQL AB

Decent conversation to a big audience.

(and if you look closely you can see a bunch of our customers in the room too.)

By then, the booth assembly was well underway. I’d cunningly timed my session to avoid all the real work.

Once the floor opened, we were besieged.

The new Web.I product really blew people away. It’s an amazing blend of reporting, visualization, dashboards, and data mining capabilities. One of the things we were showing was a Gapminder-like animation of site traffic showing sites and pages according to their health. It’s fascinating to see how quickly a human can grasp something once it’s displayed intuitively.

It seems that the entire Web2 world has built sites without much thought to performance and user experience — ironically, one of the main reasons for AJAX and Rich Internet Applications is to improve the user’s experience and yet it makes it harder than ever to manage or guarantee.

It also occurs to me (and maybe this is the topic for another post) that Real User Monitoring is the Long Tail approach. While synthetic testing watches the thin wedge of popular sites, most of a site’s hits aren’t to the pages that are tested. That wasn’t true a few years ago, but it’s certainly the case today. As a result, watching user traffic yields far better coverage for the far larger portion of the site that’s unwatched.

As if right on cue, one of our customers built a mash-up with Yahoo Maps and TrueSight user data to visualize activity to their site. Apparently it’s quickly become a favourite site for guests, prospects, and even interview candidates. Great work!

Thursday and Friday is the West Coast user group, too. Wow. So much stuff going on, and so many people starting to plug our User Performance Management technology into their existing business processes.

We have a lot happening this week. We’re launching an entirely new product line — Web.I — at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. We also have a user group event on Thursday and Friday for our West Coast users. I’m running a session at the show on next-generation data centers as part of the Web Operations tracks.

Dozens of Coradiant folks are swarming the city later today, but I got here early after participating in NetQoS’s user summit in Austin last week. The feedback from this partner’s event was great, and we’re working on even closer integration between TrueSight and their NetQoS Performance Center (NPC.)

But for now, the show floor is quiet and the registration halls are gradually filling up with Sunday’s tracks. It’s a testament to how web-centric this city is that the attendance for Sunday events is already decent. Like a giant “lunch-and-learn” for the development community.

In a Wired magazine interview, Tim O’Reilly claimed that they were expecting between 7,000 and 10,000 attendees. Hopefully lots of them care about running the next-generation sites they’ve built!

User experience has many applications. We’ve seen people adopt it pretty aggressively for incident management and service level management. But we’re also working with customers and third-party partners on a number of other applications.

User performance data joins test-based and device-based monitoring as the three fundamental building blocks of web performance management. And just as testing is used everywhere from capacity planning to reachability monitoring to penetration testing, so real user monitoring is finding a wide range of applications.

One of the reasons for this is its relevance to groups outside of IT. Business information such as the value of a transaction or the name of a subscriber are a part of the data that’s collected, so it’s much more than just performance information. It’s a real-time feed of user activity that gives the business insight into its online interactions.

I put together the circle diagram below to illustrate some of the ways that user experience is being employed.

Starting with the fundamentals — good, accurate, detailed per-hit and aggregate data collected from not only web pages but also Rich Internet Applications — user experience applies to all of these areas:

• User Analytics, in concert with a web analytics tool to look at conversion and search engine sources. For some web applications, user experience is the only way to collect transaction information since the site isn’t publicly deployed.
• QA and testing, both at the start of the test cycle (recording a user session for later use in a load-testing application) and at the end (watching code as it goes into production to see if QA missed any issues.)
• Helpdesk, for problem diagnosis and user assistance.
• Billing, for generating usage reports by subscriber or customer and assessing bills for excessive use.
• Dispute resolution, using facts instead of anecdotes to see what really happened and resolve an issue fairly.
• Incident management, in which problems are detected as soon as a user experiences them — before the phone rings — and resolved using the forensic data that was recorded from the web session.
• Service Level Management, generating performance and availability reports by customer, geography, or branch office.
• Baselining, watching a particular function, server, or site to get an idea of what “normal” is in order to set thresholds or measure long-term growth.
• Capacity planning, in which the relationship between traffic (load) and latency (performance) is calculated over time to see how much a site can handle before becoming unacceptably slow.
• Compliance, keeping a record of transactions for long periods of time in order to comply with industry law or regulations or to protect the company from risk.
• Fraud detection, in which user traffic is analyzed to look for patterns of anomalies or inappropriate use — from hack attempts to site harvesting to sharing of account logins.

Our customers are building many of these themselves, using third-party and open-source tools alongside our equipment. We’re also partnering with a number of companies to test and document proven integrations. Our new VP of Business Development, Ali Hedayati, has his hands full with all of these relationships and others.

Whatever the final result, there’s no doubt that user experience is a ripe field for innovation, and that it’s transforming many parts of an organization far beyond simple incident detection.