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.