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Levi Olmstead
Whether you’re a CIO at an enterprise, a manager-level executive at a mid-sized company, or just a product engineer for a software vendor, end-user behavior and UX is something you often think about, even if you don’t realize it.
And for good reason too: for instance, if your end-users are your customers, a broken UX increases the risk of customer churn; if they’re your employees or third-party partners, it’ll impact the speed and quality of their work.
That’s why end-user monitoring matters—it helps you keep tabs on how your end-users (whether they’re internal or external) are interacting with your software tools so you can fix any issues they’re facing and continuously improve their user experience.
This article will get into the core of end-user monitoring, explaining why it even matters, the different ways you can adopt it, and a handful of different EUM tools for different use cases.
End-user monitoring refers to observing and analyzing the interactions and experiences of individual application end-users who are the ultimate consumers or users of an app, software, website, or system. Its primary goal is to understand and improve end-user behavior and experience by tracking various metrics, behaviors, and performance indicators.
The single most important benefit of end-user experience monitoring is the ability to respond to contingencies quickly—whether it’s fixing an issue with your online store on Black Friday, simplifying your homepage, or creating a frictionless enterprise UX experience for digital processes in a CRM or HCM that enable employees.
At its core, end-user event monitoring empowers teams with invaluable insights into how your users behave, what they prefer, and the pain points they face, which makes it easier to chart a clear roadmap for optimizing digital platforms.
Here’s a list of the benefits end-user experience monitoring offers:
While the general concept is the same, your approach to end-user monitoring will be slightly different, depending on whether it’s your customers, employees, or partner UX that you’re trying to track and improve. The audience you’re trying to monitor their usage determines your approach and the tools that’ll best suit your use case.
Application performance monitoring (APM) refers to both the tactics and tools used to monitor and manage the performance and availability of software applications. It involves tracking various metrics related to an application’s performance, such as response times, resource usage, error rates, and overall user experience. APM aims to identify and resolve issues that could affect an application’s performance and ultimately impact user satisfaction.
APM tools collect data from different layers of an application’s infrastructure, including servers, databases, networks, and end-user devices. By analyzing this data, APM or observability solutions provide insights into the application’s behavior and performance bottlenecks. These insights help in proactively detecting and diagnosing issues, optimizing application performance, and ensuring that applications meet performance expectations.
Types of application performance issues you can monitor include:
Business activity monitoring (BAM) refers to the process of tracking key business processes in real-time to gain insights into the overall performance and health of an organization. It involves collecting, analyzing, and presenting data related to various business activities, which then empowers stakeholders to make informed decisions promptly.
BAM integrates data from multiple sources within an organization, such as enterprise applications, databases, sensors, and more, to provide a comprehensive view of ongoing activities. By monitoring these activities in real-time or near real-time, BAM helps detect bottlenecks and inefficiencies, which in turn allows companies to react swiftly, addressing issues before they escalate and optimizing processes for better performance and productivity.
Types of business activity analytics you can monitor include:
End-user behavior monitoring focuses on observing users’ engagement patterns with your digital properties (i.e., websites, applications, etc.). The goal is to find trends in their behavior that suggest how you might improve user experience, eliminate friction from the customer journey and user flows, or any issues that might be flying under the radar.
To better isolate issues or data points, end-user monitoring typically combines multiple channels: for instance, let’s say you observe that 92% of the prospects on your homepage exit within <20 seconds. Regardless of your industry, acquisition channel, etc., that’s a high churn rate.
So, you might want to observe what users encounter when they navigate to that landing page by watching several session replays, conducting some funnel analysis (i.e., how many of the 8% that don’t churn continue to checkout?), observing the heatmaps for the homepage to see where interactions are clustered, etc.
Combining these channels will help you cancel false positives and suspicions to discover the problem. Maybe it could be that your homepage often goes blank after loading. In that case, you’ll need to fix that and test again.
In other words, monitoring end-user behavior helps you improve your product experience. It also helps you personalize your website or product to suit users’ expectations.
Types of end-user behavior variables or metrics you can monitor include:
A digital adoption platform (DAP) like Whatfix guides users through applications, websites, and other technologies, helping end-users understand how specific features work, reduce friction areas, provide contextual guidance, and drive adoption. Whatfix acts a digital canvas layered over your product that annotates resources, offers help on-demand, and eliminates ambiguity with carefully crafted prompts, pointers, alerts, and snippets.
Whether you’re a startup, a mid-sized growth stage company, or an enterprise, Whatfix offers a product experience platform designed to help you:
Looking to transform your end-user monitoring so you can better delight your users? Request a demo to learn more.
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