Performance is not horsepower alone

I’m always banging on about performance being fit-for-purpose rather than just outright speed. At AccessHQ, we’re uniquely positioned to show this to our customers rather than preaching from the performance pulpit. Our take at AccessHQ is systems exist to serve and benefit humans; and when I test performance of customer-facing designs, I maximise AccessHQ’s unique human quality-focused test capabilities to show (not tell) how system interfaces perform when pushed under load or to their stress point.

AccessHQ can show genuine customer client-side response times on ANY connected devices, browsers, remote locations, different network connections and conditions. We can show the true user experience – not just http packet response times – as customers would see, feel and interpret this under load conditions, and how this performance affects usability, usefulness and fitness for purpose. We can and have used UX heatmaps, eye-tracking, conformance to WCAG standards, error recovery and effects on accessibility for non-standard devices and users.

Most performance testing focuses on scalability of systems and infrastructure from an IT perspective. What’s the capacity? How much head room? How far can it be pushed before http packet response is affected, or servers come under strain.

Yes, at AccessHQ we do this, and have done so on truly global massive scales for hugely visible household names and products, but additionally and more importantly, we also measure customer experience when bad things happen and how poor experiences colour their perspective.

If your system scales well and has remaining capacity but your customers dislike how things on their device look, behave and respond under load – your IT performance may be great, but its perceived customer performance is terrible, and customers aren’t shy sharing that.

Forget IT performance – it’s customer performance and customer perception that really counts.

Shareholders, CEOs, department managers, government ministers and any kind of system-controlling bean counters are all at the whim of your customers’ perceptions. And regardless of what any functional testing or UAT tells you – anything and everything can go to hell in a handbasket under load in production – and often it’s not IT performance but customer perceptions where things come unstuck.

I’ve highlighted this to quite a few recent clients by showing them customer-device video evidence, UX and eye-tracking heatmaps, and all manner of usability and accessibility issues (all under load and evident only on customer devices, not server-side infrastructure responses). My clients have had to respond to these human quality issues so any poor customer perceptions didn’t bite them in very public ways.

AccessHQ remains unique in our ability to provide this human quality view on top of traditional IT infrastructure performance capability. I’m more than happy to show not tell on your next project.