APMdigest invited industry experts — from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors — to predict how APM and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2019. Part 3 covers website performance and the end user experience.
Start with 2019 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1
Start with 2019 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2
USER EXPERIENCE RESUMES PRIORITY POSITION
As more workloads run in enterprise clouds, user experience will re-emerge as a critical success factor for both IT and digital business executives. Today, user experience plays second fiddle to standing up the enterprise cloud and delivering workloads to it. However, as this platform and pipeline are smoothed out, user experience will once again be the primary lingua franca between IT and the digital business owners.
John Van Siclen
CEO, Dynatrace
In 2019, merchants — even those with a purely online play — will strive to convey their uniqueness through the customer experience. Since the customer experience permeates every part of the purchasing experience, merchants will leverage technologies to offer customers personalized and consistent interactions with their brands. With strategies like omnichannel growing in significance, merchants will ensure experiences link across digital platforms throughout a customer's journey. Taking the time and effort to recognize a consumer's preferences and behaviors will ultimately benefit the business.
Jeff Dahlby
VP, MarketForce Digital Agency, Digital River
UNIFIED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE ACROSS ALL PLATFORMS
Digital transformation has created a world in which customers expect a virtually identical brand and buying experience across all platforms. Whether they're in-store, online, or on their mobile devices, customers expect an experience that looks and feels the same, all the time. That means remodeling your store today, refreshing your website tomorrow and updating your mobile app the day after that is no longer a reasonable approach to handling change. That's why we'll see businesses in 2019 focusing less on eCommerce as a siloed concept, and more on taking the steps necessary to deliver a unified customer experience across all platforms. The downstream operational impacts of this shift will be far reaching, most notably as it pertains to the software application lifecycle for development and testing. The need for continuous synchronization of your customer experience will leave development teams that haven't already shifted to agile development with no choice but to do so. This, in turn, will drive increased need for continuous testing across the entire development process.
Joanna Schloss
VP of Product Marketing, Sauce Labs
WEBSITE PERFORMANCE CONTINUES KEY ROLE
Website performance will continue to play an important role in business success in 2019. It is essential that businesses are leveraging synthetic monitoring as well as new techniques for capturing real user data to proactively monitor website performance, load, user experience, revenue impact and availability on a global scale. Tools should be capable of providing machine learning and analysis from the web all the way to back-end systems to eliminate blind spots and help IT teams better align with the needs of the business.
Ashley George
Product Marketing Manager, Broadcom
PERFORMANCE DRIVES CONVERSIONS
Performance will continue to be the #1 driver of conversions. Companies will start hiring more performance experts than graphic designers.
Antony Edwards
COO, Eggplant
MARKETING AND WEB TEAMS WORK TOGETHER ON USER EXPERIENCE
Web content is only getting denser as we head into 2019, adding to the weight of the average web page. Innovations like AR/VR and 360-video content are driving next-generation web features that end users are increasingly demanding to enhance their experience. The ironic reality is that these heavy assets, if not managed and optimized properly, can literally weigh down the page and negatively impact that experience. In 2019, it will be paramount that marketing and web teams work together to leverage real users to evaluate the impact of these new assets and whether integration is truly worth it. For example, will adding a 15-second runway walk video for every gown on a retailer's site drive a better experience (and ultimately conversion), or will the 4-millisecond delay actually hurt it? Data-driven conversations like this between marketing and web team will become critical to keeping website weight down and experience up.
Anthony Larkin
Director of Product Marketing, Akamai
DYNAMIC OPTIMIZATION OF JAVASCRIPT
Dynamic optimization of Javascript will become mainstream. Google and other big players will again try and replace Javascript with something more structured that allows them to do this kind of optimization more easily. This will increase web and mobile fragmentation. The first genuinely accessible load testing platforms will become available; enabling non-experts to do high-scale performance testing in the cloud easily.
Antony Edwards
COO, Eggplant
PAGE LOAD TIME LOSES RELEVANCE
Gone are the days in which simply the fastest app or website wins. Yes, page load time is an important — but in 2019, performance as a practice will emphasize removing barriers to a good experience versus simply pushing for speed. Business will instead look to real user insights that look at metrics like “perceived performance” and “time to interactive” — meaning the time between when a feature loads that allows a user to interact with the page as the rest of the page catches up in the background. These insights paint a better picture of end user interaction and the experience that user is actually having, allowing web teams to uncover potential performance issues that they were previously blind to.
Anthony Larkin
Director of Product Marketing, Akamai
PROGESSIVE WEB APPS
In 2019, progressive web app (PWA) technologies will evolve beyond mobile and will become mainstream for desktop web apps — with support for Mac OS. Similar to mobile, desktop PWAs will get “installed” on the user's Mac/Windows much like native apps. Safari will add more support for service workers — the technology behind PWA making web push notifications with PWA apps a reality. On mobile, compared to native apps, web apps will continue to be perceived as safer and more respectful of privacy. This will lead to more companies and enterprises building “single code base” PWAs utilizing strengths of the web while providing native like performance and engaging experiences.
Sandeep Adwankar
Sr. Product Manager, Sencha
SINGLE PAGE APPS
As providing a streamlined user experience continues to emerge as the name of the performance game, single page apps (SPAs) will explode in 2019. From ease of deployment and maintenance, to no reload requirements and a simple, easy-to-use interface for the end user, the SPA will eclipse the convoluted multi-page application.
Anthony Larkin
Director of Product Marketing, Akamai
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS
Sentiment analysis of users will become standard for apps. Google will release an SDK (integrated with Google Analytics) to help you track the sentiment of your users. As long as you share that data with Google of course.
Antony Edwards
COO, Eggplant
Read 2019 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4, covering IT Operations Analytics including Machine Learning and AI.
