ONLINE GAMING Getting it right
Is it possible to get a website so wrong that it kills your brand? Compuware Gomez VP EMEA, David Flower, considers all things possible…
S
ixteen thousand, three hundred and seventy-seven dollars per minute. That’s the revenue
Amazon.com generates online. For Dell, it’s $7,289. For Wal-Mart it’s $2,025.
This revenue, of course, flows only when these web sites are up, which is the vast majority of the time. However, when they’re down, this money goes out the window. Furthermore, what many fail to realise is that
much more than just revenue hinges on web site performance. Downtime, inconsistency, slowdowns and bad design don’t just cause annoying niggles like a player being ejected from a poker game or having to start back at the home page to re-select a carefully considered purchase, they can ruin customer experiences and create lasting harm. A new study has revealed that an incredible
10% of all of our Internet activity is dedicated to online gaming. The Online Casino Gaming Global Outlook study has found that there’s more online gambling than anyone had previously suspected. The research has looked into people’s Internet habits and determined that we spend 10% of our time online engaged in some form of gambling activity.
“Just because your customer’s experience is satisfactory today, doesn’t mean it will be tomorrow.”
This research is support by Global Betting and Gaming Consultants (GBGC) whose figures show that the world’s online gambling market grew by 12 per cent in 2010 to just under $30bn – or 9.4 per cent of all gaming revenue. And that growth is set to continue; GBGC predicts the market will be worth nearly $42bn within three years. A company’s website is an investment and should serve to generate revenue. Abundant imagery and interactive applications have become increasingly important as websites try to engage with their users and strive to
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differentiate themselves. But with that comes challenges. Running a gaming web site that can respond
quickly and withstand spikes in traffic is getting tougher because these websites are getting more complicated. As a result testing the functionality and performance of these sites becomes ever more critical. Most e-gambling sites are continually adding more rich media content such as photos and videos, along with interactive capabilities. Adding to the complexity is a new generation of browsers and mobile devices that will require changes to the websites. On the web, your site is your business. Every
slowdown or frustration felt by your customers will not be dismissed as an Internet problem, but will be experienced as a customer service issue that directly affects your brand. Ignorance and apathy are the two biggest challenges when it comes to delivering first- class web performance. No-one sets out do to a bad job, most are just very busy people. Gaining an understanding of web performance requires a careful examination of performance from the entire spectrum of customer connectivity. Here are some recommended steps to help with the process:
• Know your users, their profiles and their usage patterns. What kind of browsers do they use? What kind of machines? How do they connect to the Internet? Where in the world are they located? What are their usage patterns, (e.g. days, nights, weekends or certain paths through the application)? What are the key processes that they use on the site?
• Continually check on your users’ experience. Continually gauge the customer experience from various locations around the world. Remember that many of your users don’t always have stunning Internet connections. The home page needs to be fast and easy to navigate, so the user can get where they want to: login, search, or play. With the Internet changing so rapidly, just because your customers experience is satisfactory today, doesn’t mean it will be tomorrow.
• Know what contributes to your users’ experience. Many organisations understand the
concept of third-party web services, but still only monitor the content they provide. Just because your third parties perform well in one country, doesn’t mean they will in all of them. You can’t assume your third parties are as consistent as you are.
• Benchmark. Identify your chief competitors and find out exactly how the web experiences you deliver match up to theirs. For starters, look at response time, availability and consistency. Then look at user’s ability to find or do what they came to do.
“On the world wide web, the brand is the experience and the experience is the brand.”
• Connect the web experience to business results. Web performance testing reveals connections between web experience quality and business success. Track important processes such as online conversion rates, click counts, or even the frequency with which users hit the stop button to interrupt failed page loads. Users can drill down for in-depth data on what may be responsible for a problem, and then quickly resolve it.
All e-commerce businesses need to monitor and manage their performance from the outside in, across every relevant Internet background and every possible connection, including dial-up. There’s a lot at risk: Revenue. Gamers. Brand. The business. What else is there?
David Flower
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